Chrysler 300C Convertible - ASC Helios - First Drive & Road Te

It was a pure O.C. moment: "Is that, like, a Rolls-Royce?" yelled the woman in the red Mustang convertible as we cruised side by side through Huntington Beach in the sparkling So-Cal winter sunshine.

"No, it's a Chrysler."

"A what?"

"Chrysler."

"It's beautiful."

Memo Dieter Zetsche: You simply cannot afford not to, like, do this car.There's a lot about the ASC Helios that screams no-brainer. The Chrysler 300C is not merely the hottest sedan in American right now, but the perfect raw material for the first four-door convertible since the 1967 Lincoln Continental: linear, muscular, confident, with a smooth Hemi under the hood and a nicely balanced rear-drive chassis. The technology behind it is simple and effective and backed by ASC's 21 years' experience engineering and building convertibles for such automakers as Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and GM. And ASC boss Paul Wilbur says if he's given the green light, a production version of the Helios could be sitting in Chrysler showrooms in 18 months to two years, priced between $45,000 and $50,000.

Dieter, just do it.

We collect the Helios from ASC's new California design studio in Huntington Beach. It's a quiet, anonymous building in an industrial park full of quiet, anonymous buildings. You'd never guess the previous tenant was Porsche, that this is the building where the original Carrera GT show car--driven by Walter Rohrl at 120 mph for the 2002 Paris Show promotional video--was designed and built.

Wilbur is understandably nervous about cutting us loose in his newest baby. The Helios was put together in nine months last year, and, as usual, finished just in time to make its world debut at the Detroit show in January. Apart from a handful of miles this morning, the car hasn't turned a wheel since it rolled into ASC's Southgate studio outside Detroit as a regular Satin Jade green 300C sedan. The odometer shows just 161 miles.

With a press of a button, the five-foot, eight-inch mid-green, fully lined, glass windowed soft-top folds back into an 18-inch-long storage well. The complex articulation and careful packaging required to perform this feat account for one of the seven patents ASC has pending to cover technologies developed during the Helios program. Others cover the unique cross-car beams that support the B-pillars and enable the Helios to pass side-impact crash tests and the double-skin center tunnel that provides longitudinal stiffness. The compact roof storage well not only ensures minimal loss of trunk capacity, but, more important, reduces the amount of tearup and rework required at the rear of the car during the conversion process.