Dee-Troit Wheels

When the curtain was lifted Sunday at the annual auto show in in Detroit, the gap between hard drives and hard-drivin’ had narrowed. In fact, Ford designer J Mays even said flat out that Ford’s concept vehicles - which looked more like pods than rigs - were inspired by Apple’s egg-shaped, fruity colored iMac computer. “We’re operating in a world where you measure power in gigabytes and pipeline bursts, not horsepower,” said Mays, whose cars feature a video projection screen in the dash where the gauges and other controls should be. Voice controls operate everything from the radio to Internet access.

But Chrysler (cue the fossil rock soundtrack) muscled out some ideas rooted in the hard-drivin’ category, including a futuristic Jeep Varsity shown above, that were all bulging sheet metal and throaty “Hemi” engines - a 5.7 liter V8 with 353 horsepower.