This disturbing vehicle caught my eye while strolling around a college campus this weekend. On the one hand, it had Mercedes wheelcovers and the badging of a very specific Mercedes racing sedan. On the other hand, it was clearly a crappy Dodge. There's something odd going on here.
Otherwise crappy cars designed to mimic more expensive vehicles is a common enough occurrence. There are your Fauxrarris, Fieroghinis, and Fauxgattis.
These are vehicles put together by posers who believe the only purpose of having an exotic car is to look exotic. Performance be damned.
We've never seen anyone pose as a Mercedes 190E 2.5 Turbo. The car itself is a sort of shibboleth. A rarer version of a rare car. In theory, knowledge of such a car demonstrates that this is someone who cares about performance, exotic look be damned.
Yet the same person who knows the car has gone through the trouble of turning a basic Dodge Spirit K-Car (not even the weirdly mental and totally forgotten Dodge Spirit R/T) into this extremely particular übersedan. They've swapped in very un-AMG-like faux chrome Mercedes wheel covers, attached 2.5 Turbo badging and a Mercedes emblem front-and-back.
There's even a Mercedes-Benz license plate frame!
It's like an oenophile pouring some Two-Buck Chuck into an empty bottle and calling it Chateau Petrus.
This is this the work of either serious aspirational thinking the part of the car owner or the manifestation of a troubled gearhead mind.