Technology Vs. Muscle Automakers Square Off At Tokyo Trade Show

The Japanese showed off superclean cars. Their U.S. rivals flashed marketing slogans like “distinctly American muscle car.”

The messages being presented at the Tokyo Motor Show, previewed to media Wednesday, couldn’t be more different. The contrast was so stark it brought to mind an old auto industry nightmare: Americans having to play catch-up with the Japanese.

Throughout the show, opening to the public Saturday, the themes of Japanese car makers were of technological substance: fuel economy, near-zero tailpipe emissions. The Americans were pushing sizzle and style.

At the Chrysler Corp. booth, where smiling women in hot pants lounged on fake brown boulders, the limelight was on the Viper high-performance sports car.

At the nearby Toyota Motor Corp. booth, the main attraction amid cascading bubbly water was the Prius gasoline-electric hybrid. Toyota says the Prius, which hits Japanese showrooms in December, gets 66 miles to the gallon.

At $90,000, the Viper costs five times as much as the Prius and gets less than a fifth of the mileage at about 12 miles a gallon.

Executives from Detroit’s Big Three automakers visiting Tokyo played down the lack of technological advances on display at their booths. Plenty of engineers were working on the latest technology back home, they said.

Though U.S. automakers are being pressured to meet increasingly tough U.S. emissions standards, the drawback on electric cars has been high cost, range limitations and inconvenience.

“People have to want to buy fuel-efficient vehicles,” Chrysler Vice President Robert Liberatore said. “We will go wherever customers go.”

But analyst Joseph Phillippi at Lehman Brothers said U.S. automakers were too preoccupied with making huge cars like minivans, trucks and sport-utility vehicles - the sectors that turn the biggest profits.

“I think the U.S. automakers run the risk of once again falling behind technically,” Phillippi said in a telephone interview from New York.