2013 Dodge Dart SXT / RallyeIn the summer of 2012 Dodge reintroduced the Dart nameplate. As I’ve commented before I grew up in a Dodge family. One Polara wagon (I spent some time this week with my brother and he’s got me half convinced that it might have been a Coronet wagon) followed by a succession of Darts.
My wife’s reaction to the new Dart was that I wasn’t going to get to buy one. Therefore I was very surprised in July 2012 when we spotted one on a dealers lot in Bastrop, TX and she asked me if I wanted to stop and test drive it.
The Dart they had in Bastrop was a 2013 Dodge Dart SXT/Rallye with the normally aspirated 2.0 liter 4 cylinder and 6 speed manual transmission. That was not a good combination, the shift points were all wrong for the torque curve of that engine and the engine was underpowered.
In August I bought a 2012 Dodge Grand Caravan (last weeks chapter). In September I had the minivan in for a minor issue and while I was waiting for it I started chatting with one of the salesman. They had a Charcoal Gray 2013 Dart Limited with the 1.4 Liter Turbo and the 6 speed manual. It was a slow day for him and he convinced me to go for a drive despite the fact that I wasn’t in the market for a car. The 1.4 liter turbo is the engine that transmission was meant to be mated to.
By the spring of 2013 my kids were riding their bicycles to school, we no longer had child care and I no longer felt the need to own two minivans. They still had that Dart Limited on the lot and I made a reasonable offer that they didn’t accept.
I put feelers out through a couple of different buying services and got contacted by a dealer on the morning of April 1st. They had three Darts with the 1.4 Liter and manual transmission. I made an appointment to stop by that evening after dinner.
The car I was interested in was white with a red racing stripe running up the drivers side of the hood and over the drivers head. Unfortunately the hood was misaligned and it looked like it might have been involved in a slight fender bender.
The next car they showed us was black with darkly tinted windows and blinged out with chrome. At the time we had an AuPair who would be using this car during her off hours and there was no way that this would have been an appropriate car for her to drive.
The last car was red. I was surprised that my wife even let me look at it. She does not like red cars. She made me sell the red Toyota pickup (my chapter 10) I had when we got engaged. (This was after it dropped a thrust washer at approximately 187,000 miles. I would have replaced the engine, but I already understood “happy wife, happy life” and the wedding was still six months in our future when the engine died.)
This car was a Dart SXT/Rallye with the Aero package. It lacked the sunroof (that my wife wanted) and power seats of the aforementioned Dart Limited but it checked off on all of our other wants.
The salesman made a very aggressive offer. If the dealer I’d bought the Grand Caravan from had been even remotely close he’d have sold me a new car. However, given that this car was red I wasn’t quite there. The salesman said let me introduce you to my manager anyway.
I greeted the manager and said something along the line that Alan had made an aggressive offer, but given my wife’s feelings about red cars I’m not quite there. His response was “as far as I’m concerned it’s March 32nd and I can do better”. By this point it was after 8pm and my kids were getting tired. I ran my wife and kids home and was back at the dealer a little before 9.
When I got back to the dealer there were no other customers. The manager came back with a price that including tax, title, tags, a five year extended warranty and the first year of servicing had me out the door for less then the dealer invoice. He even came back with financing that beat the rate from my credit union by a full point.
A few months later NPR ran a piece on This American Life where they spent a month at a Jeep dealership as the dealership tried to make their monthly sales goal. Even before I understood the full implication of monthly and quarterly sales targets I was an end of month car shopper. The bottom line was that Mar 31st that year was a Sunday and the dealership was getting to count Apr 1st towards the first quarter goal and apparently they were one car short…
After we reached a deal I gave the dealership a brief scare. My kids still had a bunch of stuff in the van that I didn’t want to put in the new car and the kids wanted to say goodbye to the minivan. I suggested that they deliver it on paper (ie complete all the paperwork). I pointed out the only risk (which was all mine) was that something happened to the minivan before I returned in the morning and I had to come up with the amount they were giving me for it. They’d pulled my credit and knew I could.
When I brought the car by for its first oil change I found the manager, told him that I’d heard the piece on NPR and asked how low he could have gone. He replied that it just needed it to be a valid sale. During the last couple of years of COVID induced shortages that strategy wouldn’t have worked. I’m not sure if it’ll work now (or ever will work again).
My wife and I try to stagger our new car purchases five years apart. This time we didn’t. The Talon was living on borrowed time, the remaining 2001 minivan was showing its age and the deal on the Dart was too good to pass up. I prefer to buy a new car when I don’t need it. It’s usually harder to find a good deal when you need/want a car right now. We now had two new (or fairly new) vehicles in our driveway.
2013 Dart & 2012 Grand Caravan
The aero package included active grill shutters. These failed and were replaced twice under warranty. When they failed again just after the warranty ended I was able to repair them in less than a half hour after I found a solution on the Dodge Dart Forum (insert link). The bottom of the engine compartment was closed off and the top of the engine also was enclosed. The lower enclosure was susceptible to damage from parking blocks. When the Talon died and the Dart became my daily driver I replaced that panel. The aerodynamics were much more important on my over 30 mile mostly highway commute then on my wife’s roughly 7 mile commute.
A look under the hood
The only other significant issue the car had while still under warranty was an issue with the hydraulic clutch. I came back late one night, in September 2014, from an overseas trip, pushed in the clutch and turned the key to start. I was in a spot that sloped gently towards the parking block. I had moved the shift lever to neutral, but the car started to pull out of the spot when the starter engaged. The mechanic diagnosed it as a failed clutch master cylinder. Replacing that solved the problem (at least that’s what we thought). A year later (Aug 2015) the clutch was soft again. Posts on the forum suggested that there was an issue with moisture in the hydraulic fluid (which the clutch shared with the brake system). They flushed and refilled the system and the clutch was good again. By the time it got soft again (Aug 2016) there was a tech service bulletin on moisture permeating through the Teflon hose from the hydraulic fluid reservoir. The clutch master cylinder was also showing signs of degradation. They replaced both the reservoir hose and the clutch master cylinder. That didn’t really solve the issue. I may have mentioned in a previous post that I live in Houston. I’ve heard that you can’t spell Houston without humidity. After that I started having my mechanic (not at the dealership) check the fluid moisture content at every oil change and replace the hydraulic fluid when the moisture got too high.
With an old Dart – May 2015
One day in May 2015 I parked next to a classic Dart at work. If my memory is correct it was a 1965.
On Memorial Day in 2015 we had significant street flooding. When Harvey hit the water on our block was as deep as shown in the photo above before it started raining in our neighborhood. For Harvey the Dart was on the second floor of the parking structure at a friends office.
The summer of 2019 I took a road trip from Houston to the east coast. The first destination was the Boy Scouts Summit Bechtel Reserve in Beckley, WV to work on the Shooting Sports Staff for the World Jamboree. On my day off (near the midpoint of the Jamboree) I went into town to do laundry. On my way up the first hill the check engine light came on and it sounded like the engine wasn’t firing on all four cylinders. I pulled into an auto parts store and the scan code indicated a misfire on one cylinder (#2 IIRC). This car has independent ignition coils for each cylinder. While installing a new coil I bumped against the engine inlet coolant hose. This hose has a “tee” fitting and that disintegrated. The nearest Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep dealership was in Charleston, WV. The hose I needed was back ordered with no estimate for a delivery date. (When I sold the car nearly two years later the hose was still unavailable.) With the fittings and hoses available I created what I called “frankenhose”.
“Frankenhose”
A few days after the end of the Jamboree the Military Vehicle Preservation Association was holding their annual convention in York, PA. Since I was already on the east coast I took the extra week of vacation. (The days for both the Jamboree and the Convention were included in the leave request I’d submitted the previous fall.) On my way to York the engine developed an oil leak. By the time I got back to Houston I was loosing a quart every 200 miles. My mechanic ended up replacing all of the top end seals.
When COVID hit I stopped driving into the office. Over the next 15 months I drove the car eight times. All of these were trips to Austin and back. Mostly with weeks between them. The car didn’t like sitting. It developed problems. One was a failure of frankenhose which I rebuilt in some small town. Most significantly it started throwing a “Turbo Underboost” code. I could reliably reproduce this code at will. If I was in sixth gear at low RPMs (below 2200 IIRC) and stomped on the throttle it would throw the code. I could have lived with that but it also threw the code randomly and after several trips to 3 different mechanics and hours of research on the internet in April 2021 I decided that I was done troubleshooting and sold it with almost 100,000 miles.
Almost 100,000 miles
I really wanted to like these when they came out, then watched FCA totally fumble the launch with really unpopular/unpleasant powertrains. I am also a little surprised at the service issues and lack of parts support you experienced. True, you got almost 10 years and 100k out of it, but this is one of those cautionary tales that makes me think twice about investing in something from FCA. Then again, small cars sold by US nameplates have not exactly had the best rep over the last 25 years. Perhaps things are better under Stellantis? It is that kind of optimism that runs deep in the veins of every longtime Mopar fan. 🙂
Stellantis and PSA are in bed together Ive had 12 years of reliable PSA cars now on my 3rd in a row which appeared for sale 6 months before Id planned to replace my last one but its mine now good decision or bad i dont know, so far so good after 7,000 kms, Chrysler is unlikely to go backwards under new management, Ive seen exactly one new Dart somebody has imported one but the old one is fairly familiar as the older Valiants Kiwis loved so much.My current car is yet to do 100,000 old fashioned miles when a cambelt is due, Im going to do the major belt service early as a precaution, the previous owner has had a competent mechanic go over this car and the one fault present is covered by nearly $1000 worth of new belt service parts it came with
Not just “in bed together”, PSA and FCA are no more now, at least as any sort of distinct or independent entity; only the merged umbrella corporation Stellantis and its various marques and subdivisions remain.
Oh, that story started out so promising and yet ended so depressingly.
Your tale of how you bought it on March 32nd reminded me of the This American Life story just before you got to it in the narrative. That was one of the best TAL stories that I can recall…made better by the fact that I knew a bit about that particular dealer, having gotten stranded there on a road trip when the harmonic balancer on my Town & Country fell apart on the road. I guess it’s no surprise that all Dodge/Chrysler/Jeep dealers – and probably all car dealers – operate the same way.
Sorry your Dart seemingly disintegrated over the course of 100K miles. I would have been sorely disappointed with quality like that.
” NPR ran a piece on This American Life where they spent a month at a Jeep dealership as the dealership tried to make their monthly sales goal… ”
I remember that piece. Also, it’s not just car sales.
Near the end of my career in computers, I had evolved from programmer to analyst, to tech sales support, and finally to service storage sales.
Month end and quarter end sales deadlines were brutal times where we were all on the receiving end of management con call harangues about “bringing in numbers (revenue) from the next period into the current period… ” in order to make our numbers.
Very short term thinking.
Nothing in writing … no logic of how this might cripple the numbers for the next month or quarter … and no real details on what exactly management meant by “bring in”, and no mention if this was a valid accounting practice, or even legal.
I verbally pushed back a bit (ok, maybe more than a bit) on con calls that this did not make sense, and was – a few months later at the age of 65 in 2009 in the midst of a recession – right sized.
I could not have been happier.
Sad data about the quality of the Dart. One would think that a small, well put together and good available dealer service for an ICE car, could compete with the locally built “imports”. I just do not think USA name plates had their hearts in that part of the low-priced market at all.
And now, USA name plates are out of the market for small ICE cars.
Maybe they’ll do better with EVs.
These were good looking cars and apparently had an enviable ride/handling balance. Glad you were able to have your red car again.
That’s more problems than I would be happy about over 100,000 miles. Perhaps it is just my perception, but I remember seeing Darts regularly during their production years and now they’re quite rare.
From the dark years of FCA.
I was a bit apprehensive about buying my Promaster van from them in 2017, but so far it’s been 100% flawless. And unlike your Dart, it’s still in production at significant levels, so support is good.
I think you enjoyed your car?
Sergio Marchionne himself cut me a deal on a Dart I couldn’t refuse. I think in early 2016 he infamously stated that the Dart and Chrysler 200 were failures. I’d have to agree with him that the 200 was failed as a mid-size car, too cramped. But, the Dart is actually pretty good as a compact car.
New or used, Darts were suddenly welded to dealer lots. I was beginning a venture of rapidly buying four cars for three kids, and the wife – price was important.
There are always reasons to fret over FCA quality, but some research indicated the non-turbo 2.4 and automatic would be the most reliable and agreeable powertrain.
The SXT (non Rallye) was rental car trim. And, off rental cars were prolific in my area. The truly best deals were at the airport rental sales yard – $11K and 25K miles.
But, I wanted to wring out more dollars from the Dart deal. A few local dealers were stupidly stubborn on price, so I cast my net 300 miles on AutoTrader.
A Ford dealer three hours away in the very pleasant town of Sioux Falls, SD had just fire sale priced a 2015 SXT that they had acquired Thanksgiving 2016.
The turkey had been on the lot 6 months when we bought it May 2017. $9,277 before taxes, 39K miles.
We had test driven a few Darts, and I found them to be a fun and pleasant drive. My wife and I both drove large family vehicles, and we both were actually sort of excited to drive the Dart home, and traded shifts in it at a rest stop.
My daughter was thrilled with it. She had been driving our slowly dying 15 year old Dodge Durango. She loved that Durango during high school, and getting a new blue Dodge to replace her blue Dodge took the blues out of losing her first car love. The fact that it was built at Belvidere, IL was icing on the cake for her, she wanted a US built car.
The Dart is at about 90K, still with her in her third year of medical school, and hopefully will last until she can finally make some money. Happily, it has required only routine maintenance and tires. I think it’s had three recalls, a parking pawl or something like that, a couple of flashes on the engine for excessive oil consumption. It uses maybe a quart between changes. I still have a 3.0 Duratec Ford that has done the same for all its 146K, and it’s never been recalled. The recalls were done on maintenance trips to the dealer so there was no inconvenience.
Parts have been weird, a routine engine and cabin air filter change showed the filters were not in any of the local stores, and I didn’t want to pay dealer prices for disposables. I ended up purchasing them on the Internet. Thankfully that’s the most parts I’ve had to seek.
I bought a used 2015 dodge dart with salvaged title for. $4000 and 67,000 miles on it, no ac, no bells and whistles. all black inside and out, dark tinted windows. I run into a mountain bike one nite and shattered the lower front bumper, which I ordered online and put on myself, I’ve replaced the water pump, do all oil changes myself, do the plugs myself also, and whatever else needs to be done I do it myself. I have 150000 on the motor now, it’s been a few years that I’ve had the car, no other problems. I just wish it had AC. I live in sunny so cal , it’s hot all the time. it’s been a great car, I love it. best car I’ve ever owned except for my first 1973 datsun 240Z thanks patricia
When we’ve been negotiating for car prices, my wife has occasionally joked that the best negotiating tactic is the “my wife doesn’t like the color” line. I think she may be on to something with that.
Too bad to read about a new car that has such a short shelf life. Stories like this (they seem most prevalent with Chrysler, Subaru and VW… though sporadic on all three) are unacceptable in an era when most cars last well over 100,000 mi. relatively trouble-free. This is like taking a road trip back to 1980.
Oh, and I love the picture with your car next to the old Dart!
I had a listen to that American Life piece on the car dealership in NJ. Great piece, a real life documentary on tigers, deers, and how everyone is playing everyone. Mark me down as a 29th or 30th day of the month shopper from now on.
I’ve found that it helps to make contact a few days before (like maybe the 25th) so you’re in their mind as a likely prospect when they need to move just one more car at the end of the month.
I wondered about these too when they came out….I’m a confirmed hatchback owner, but there aren’t too many being sold (for that matter, not many cars offered anymore). My Mom almost got a Caliber, which it seems wasn’t well regarded, but it did come as a hatch.
Maybe I’ll have to buy used next time…which means I might end up with a red (or other color I don’t care for…I’m a 65 year old now, doesn’t seem to fit my age. My current car is also trying to tease me about my age, the bass on the radio is permanently on max, I can control the treble, but not the bass…it’s the OEM radio, so I’ve reluctantly kept it, even though it doesn’t suit my age, audio quality while driving is secondary to me now on a 23 year old car (I bought new originally), it’s one of the things I live with as one of the warts not big enough of a deal for me to address.
Didn’t know they offered the Dart with a manual…that’s what I drive, but my next car will need to be an automatic; no one else in my family can drive a manual and though it isn’t often an issue, as I get older I need a more generic car that others in my family can also drive.