2001 Chrysler Voyager
Late fall of 2004 I was called for Jury Duty at the Montgomery County, PA County Courthouse in Norristown, PA. On our lunch break the first day I took a walk and saw a 2001 Voyager in the same Patriot Blue of my 2001 Town & Country (Chapter 13) sitting on a used car lot. In Dec 2004 I traded the Intrepid in and drove home with the Voyager.
We now owned two blue Chrysler Minivans. We were real creative with names. We called them Big Mini and Little Mini. The Voyager was shorter than the Town & Country. Otherwise externally (except for badging) they looked the same. Unlike the Town & Country that had a lot of features, the Voyager was fairly basic. It had the same engine and transmission along with the power windows and power door locks and cruise control. It did not have the power sliding doors nor the power liftgate (which did not prove to be as great an issue as I thought it would be). Besides being shorter than the Town & Country the Voyager did not have anti-lock brakes. The day I picked the Voyager up it was raining. I slid through two stop signs on my way home. Having two similar vehicles I could see the performance difference of antilock brakes.
Issues with this vehicle were similar to those with the Town & Country. I replaced a window regulator, dealt with a transmission issue and chased some electrical issues. None of these dissuaded me from buying Chrysler products. In Aug 2012 after nearly eight years of ownership I traded the Voyager in on a 2012 Dodge Grand Caravan.
Peak Chrysler minivan. My company car was one of these for a few years. It was an AWD model that was great in adverse conditions. Drove the darn thing 1/4 million miles without trouble. I would have kept it longer, but the fleet manager insisted it had to go. I wish I would have bought it. Some of these in our fleet were known to go 400k without trouble. These didn’t have stow-and-go seating. While the seats were a pain to remove, they were more comfortable than the foldable seats. Absolutely the most comfortable vehicles ever for long road trips.
The engineering trade off for the space necessary for Sto-n-Go was the elimination of AWD, sadly.
While these vehicles serve a definite purpose, as stated in other posts, I am sad to see that so much emphasis on them has caused the loss of what many of us treasure , traditional full size sedans. Even the station wagons are long gone.
A recent peruse of CL in my area turned up a 4th gen Grand Caravan showing something like 66k on the odo. It clearly belonged to someone’s grandpa and was pristine. The asking figure in the mid $8k range doused my enthusiasm, but I will admit that I thought about it for a minute or two.
The minivan has become the thankless tool of vehicles. It may not be what you want to drive or be seen in, but it’s probably exactly what you need.
No doubt somehow related to the CC effect, shortly after reading your post this morning, I found myself driving by my town’s soccer fields. Saturday mornings are when all of the town’s youth soccer league teams (for the really little kids) gather for practice, and the parking spills over, out of the lot, onto the main road going by. I noticed out of the maybe 80 vehicles there, just ONE chrysler-product minivan and TWO Toyota vans. Just about everything else was nearly any brand of cross-over you could imagine…mostly Subaru, GM, and a mix of Audi/BMW/VW products. Curiously, I saw more station wagons (several VWs and a few Audis) than I did minivans. I guess this just shows what families drive now…and it’s generally not minivans.
18 – 20 years ago, when I would have been parking in that lot for Saturday morning youth soccer, it would have been wall to wall minivans. And mostly Chrysler vans at that.
This era Chrysler van, in a near exact same shade of blue, was a very common sight as Bell Canada service vans at the time. With contrasting yellow gold graphics. I did find the previous generation vans, more attractive.
When I was working for Chrysler these were new. They are actually quite good cars in most respects. There are some trouble areas:
-Window regulators fail early.
-All the front end stuff is as cheap as they could make it. Struts fail early and must be modified to do an alignment
-The brakes are not adequate for our hilly environment. We routinely did front brakes and rotors at 20,000 km or less. Fortunately, the parts are as cheap as dirt.
-The A604 was pretty reliable by this time but if you load the van to the gills and go up big hills a lot, they will blow up. The real killer was putting the wrong fluid in it.
-Every AWD van we sold came back for a transmission before the warranty was up. The 604 couldn’t handle the extra load.
As long as the transmission doesn’t fail early these are good vans at a very good price when new.
I havent seen a Chrysler minivan in ages, they were fairly common probably used imports however they have vanished from the roads, maybe theres a mechanical gremlin that takes them all out.