If its retro styling appeals, the Chrysler PT Cruiser is an amusing and practical alternative to all those boxy compact MPVs. The trouble is that with its 140bhp 2 litre engine it cannot match up to its image as a latter-day hot rod.

I have just been driving one in America that can: the PT Cruiser GT, which packs 215bhp from a turbocharged 2.4 litre engine. It is coming to Europe next year.

The boosted motor really makes a difference; even with automatic transmission, 0 to 60mph acceleration in 7.2sec is about 3sec quicker than the current PT Cruiser and puts it into a different performance class, in among the hot hatchbacks.

The same engine is used in the Chrysler California Cruiser, above, a concept car aired at the Paris motor show, which ends today. This predicts what the successor to the PT will be like when it appears in three years’ time.

Retro cars, by their very nature, are difficult to update, so Chrysler has wisely jumped a few years, replacing the 1940s hot rod theme with a pastiche of a 1960s “surf wagon”. Although it has only two side doors, the California Cruiser is squarer and more of a classic estate car than the PT. All of its seats fold down flat to make a bed — described as “a hotel room for two”.

Surf wagons of the Beach Boys era were “woodies”, decorated with wood, real or fake, on the outside. In the car business, aluminium is the new wood, so Chrysler has used satin silver cladding on the sides of the California Cruiser to give its new-old car a modern look.