Before last week I thought the Chrysler minivans looked pretty good. Then I participated in a craftsmanship review and boy did my thoughts change. The interior is absolutely horrible. The surfaces and materials produce the coldest, most unfriendly interior for a vehicle made for the family.

I thought the exterior looked good, but then the stork brought a new brother to town. It came from the mother known as Volkswagen and they called him Routan.

When you render a bad sketch in design school they call it polishing a turd. In corporate America our ethics training says we should not say turd…..don’t put turds on the streets and we will have nothing to worry about.

Anyway the Routan is here and VW worked some magic on this brick and came out with a well refined front face and a more interesting rear end. If only they could have reworked everything in between.

The Chrysler interior, just like all their interiors are in pretty bad shape. Hard plastic with knife edge parting lines and no overall theme to unite the interior pieces together make this interior look like ten designers each had their own piece to work on. All while never talking to each other during development.

The Routan looks quite a bit better, at least from the one picture released, but what about the rest of the interior. How many piece was VW able to swap out for their own?

Seeing the two IP’s together really shows that VW put more money into the details. More sophisticated surfacing, variety of materials and non baby yak colors make this IP much more inviting. No longer is there a block of plastic splitting the interior in half.

Pricing is said to start under $25 g’s which means it will be a no brainer to buy this over the Chrysler choices. I hope Chrysler didn’t nip themselves in the butt by giving VW the opportunity to make them look bad.

This is a good way for VW to introduce themselves into the market. I only hope that the next round they will invest more of their parts and design into the total package.