1999 Intrepid
When my wife and I got married in 1996 she owned a Subaru Legacy. While it was a part of my life for 5 years it was never “my” car and I’m not doing a write-up on it. I don’t recall any issues with it and I even considered a Subaru when my Toyota Pickup died.
When our twins were born in October 2001 we realized that we couldn’t fit three car seats in the back of her Subaru (nor could we fit them in the back of my 2 + 2 Talon). It was time to look for a car with more hip room in the back. I’d considered an Intrepid back in 1996 but decided back then it was too much of a family car at that point in my life. It was time for a family car and we were replacing the Legacy not my Talon.
Comcast had recently installed the infrastructure for cable internet in our neighborhood. I’d been pestering them enough that I got access (for free) for three months as a beta tester before they formally rolled out general availability. I was noodling around on the internet a few days before Thanksgiving and found a dealership down in Springfield, VA (the south side of DC an exit or two south of the Capital Beltway) that had a likely candidate at a good price. I e-mailed their internet sales associate, got some more detailed photo’s and reached a tentative deal. After reviewing the photos I called and made an appointment to come see the car (and buy it) on Nov 23rd (aka Black Friday).
In late 2001 I knew a couple of people who’d bought a car locally after finding it on the internet, but I didn’t know anyone who’d purchased an out of town car. A quick look at Google says that both CarMax & AutoNation existed but they didn’t have the nationwide reach that they now have. If you were shopping for a new car there were regional networks that your local dealer could access to swap for a car that had the features / color that you wanted, but used car sales were still very much a local affair.
My brother and his wife live just outside of Charlottesville, VA. They’d come to Baltimore for Thanksgiving and I caught a ride with them down to Springfield. If the car hadn’t met my expectations I would have taken the DC Metro to Union Station and either MARC or Amtrak up to Baltimore.
Like the Subaru this was essentially my wife’s week day car. We had an AuPair. She drove the Town & Country during the week (for child transport) and drove the Intrepid on evenings and weekends. I continued to drive my Talon. The photo above is one of several where the Intrepid was in the background of my TMI ’30 on the hard just before I donated it to a charity. The only other photo I have of the Intrepid is a poorly lit traffic camera photo. The AuPair ran a light about 40 minutes away from the house less then 30 minutes after she left.
Post 9/11 the Baltimore Washington airspace was shut down for several months and Detour Dave started doing his traffic reports from the studio. Traffic camera’s had gotten good enough in the Baltimore region that the station decided to not put him back in the air when the airspace reopened. The traffic watch operator in DC wrangled a waiver to operate in the Washington DC TFR and I started flying for him in April 2002. I wasn’t getting paid much, basically just enough to cover the expense of driving the Talon down to Hyde Field in Clinton, MD plus I was getting flight time that I wasn’t paying for.
One of the features that had me in interested in the Intrepid back in 1996 was Chryslers new Autostick transmission. This was a driver-interactive automatic transmission that offered gear-shifting capability. As a new technology in 1996 I was wary of its reliability. By the time I was looking at the used 1999 Intrepid I trusted it. It seemed to me that it offered the ability to upshift early and keep the engine RPM’s low (a technique that can improve gas mileage). It also offered the ability to delay an upshift to keep the engine in the sweat spot of the torque band a little bit longer. For all that potential in three years of ownership I only used Autostick mode a few times. The electronically controlled transmission actually did a fairly good job of shifting for economy and by this stage of my life my foot had gotten lighter.
While we were still in Baltimore my experience with the Intrepid was very much like that others have reported during the first few years of ownership of a Chrysler vehicle. Basically trouble free. Top off the windshield washer fluid and put air in the tires. After we moved to the Philadelphia area in July 2003 I replaced the battery, the tires and the air conditioning compressor within a handful of months. By Dec 2004 it was time to turn the twins car seats around and it became difficult to get all three kids in and out of the car. At that point it was time for a second minivan.
I remember being very pleasantly surprised, Chrysler did an outstanding job improving upon the nice styling of the first gen LH cars, with the 1998 redesigns. Great looking cars.
…and, for the first time on a US-market LH car: real, working headlamps!
Where have all of the Cab-Forward Chryslers gone! It is hard to believe that they are antiques now! I rented a 1995 (I believe) for a 300 mile round trip because my car’s a/c was not working. I remember it being a pleasant car to drive, although the purple rear view mirror, as I recall, was hard to set and had mind of it’s how. I don’t remember the details, but only that it was not normal.
Nice COAL entry. Good read!
I owned a 1993 Chrysler LHS. Well, actually, I LEASED an LHS. It was my favorite car, ever. I never had a single mechanical problem with. I regretted having to give it up when the three year lease was through, but we needed something with 4WD for winter trips to our cabin in WV. I wonder if the reliability would have ended had I kept the car longer.ds
Great story about growing family and the cars that follow. Title reminded me of 3 or 4 (I’ve lost track) whirlwind car purchases I made in the mid-1990’s in the early days of eBay Motors. All turned out to be winners, all were bought sight-unseen…after all, there were pictures on line!
For some reason, I have a thing for FWD-based longitude-engined cars that have the engine slung on out past the front axle. I currently own such a car. Kind of. It’s really AWD-based, but the default axle would be FWD if it weren’t AWD.
The Chrysler LH cars are an interesting bit of history, and they represent engineering that was inherited when Chrysler acquired AMC and its relationship with Renault.
Your 1999 Intrepid is, of course, part of the second generation of LH cars. I once read some Mopar lore that Chrysler was working on a third generation of the LH platform, and this time it would support RWD and AWD (so, not unlike Audi’s Quattro setup and the current MLB platform that enables it). However, with the Daimler “Merger of Equals,” Mercedes-Benz came along, scrapped that program, and basically commanded that Chrysler build a traditional longitude-RWD platform that could leverage some Mercedes-Benz components. And that became the modern LX platform (Charger, Magnum, 300, Challenger), which is only just now reaching EOL.
But then, I’ve heard other people claim that LX is a heavily modified version of LH—still with Mercedes-Benz components swapped in—which might be true.
I still drive my 1995 Dodge Intrepid on a semi-daily basis. It shares duty with a PT Cruiser that has Autostick. My experience is the same… I mostly ignore Autostick and let the 41TE automatic do its own thing. It downshifts when stopping a bit sooner than the 42LE in the Intrepid, and I understand that continuing tweaking of the basic transmission, originally the Ultradrive, took place in the intervening years.
With modern car seats and such, having three kids is tough in anything without three rows.
It’s interesting that you barely used the Autostick – our Kia Sedona came with a “Sportmatic” shifter, and I use it all the time. At first, I doubted I’d use it much, but as I became accustomed to it, I began using it more often (though I use it mostly for downshifting and for mountain driving, very rarely for upshifting).
I’m glad the Internet purchase, and the car in general, worked out for you. I’ve known that scenario to go both ways for people buying a used car online.
My experiences with a bought new 1995 LH Eagle Vision TSi (basically the same as a 3.5 Intrepid) is documented in my COAL series (*).
Long LH story short:
The good: Attractive, quick, roomy, and nicely suspended family sedan
The Bad: Poor quality interior and exterior assembly, failed transmission, failed A/C, weak headlights. Even the CD player quit. The 3.5 also required a timing belt service whereas the 3.3 did not. Also, multiple public recalls for engine fuel injection issues and even one “silent recall”.
Traded the LH Vision in on a 2002 5-Speed PT Cruiser which turned out to be one of my favorite cars ever.
Looks like we got a bad one while others had more luck.
However, compared to our 5-speed 2001 Passat V6, the Vision was much easier to live with than the VW. After the Vision we bought another Chrysler, but I will never buy another VW.
(*) https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-1995-eagle-vision-tsi-all-the-fun-and-build-quality-of-a-1957-chrysler-without-the-benefit-of-torqueflite/
I didn’t think about the AMC/Renault influence, but in reflection the LH cars did share some design elements with the Eclipse/Talon and had an Eagle version (the Vision that RLPlaut wrote about). The Baby Cherokee that RL wanted is also a product of that AMC/Renault alliance.
What’s a TMI ’30 and what does “on the hard” mean?
Hah! I love how you put this.
See my post BOAL (Boats Of A Lifetime): I Was Born In The Sight Of Water a TMI 30 is a a 30 ft sloop rig sailboat made by Texas Marine International in the late 80’s / early 90’s. “On the hard” means out of the water
Autostick sounds like the manual mode my current cars transmission features its an Aisin Warner 6 speed the trans program overides the manual feature and will not allow the engine to lug at low rpms Ive tried it having just changed from a manual TDI car but its easier to just let the trans do its thing, it holds gears when going downhill downshifts in cruise mode when needed far better than i can as it knows the engine parameters better.
Thanks for the latest chapter!
You make a good case for how you used the Autostick transmission. Having found these, or something like it, on very nearly every automatic transmission car I’ve driven for the past 10 years, I really have to wonder just how often anyone uses it. Perhaps this is a feature/mode that essentially costs nothing to implement, but I’d think that if the feature were to truly cost more to implement than a non-autostick (type) of transmission, most manufacturers would forego it. It just doesn’t seem that useful to me. But maybe I’m missing something.
I use it every day in our toyotas. Not as some way of being a suburban dad wannabe racer, but to lock out the top gears around town and keep the transmission from busily shifting in and out of the highest ratios. Shifting the lever into autostick mode limits the 5 and 6 speed transmissions to 4th gear. It’ll automatcally run though 1-4 as normal but wont shift to 5th and 6th. If you find yourself on a 50mph road, just tap up to allow the trans to access the top gears.