My 2001 PT Cruiser and 2005 Dodge Neon – Underdogs That Deserve A Second Look

2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser

Today’s post is about two cars my daughter and I owned at different times, a PT Cruiser and a Dodge Neon. Neither has a good reputation today; both deserve better.

I custom ordered a 2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser the week it was announced, before there were any available to test-drive. I liked that it was front-wheel drive, compact, and distinctive in appearance. Mine was painted Inferno Red, a beautiful metallic color, and it attracted many admiring glances. (This was before the PT Cruiser became the queen of airport rental car lots, and before it was driven only by elderly men in the left lane of highways, 10MPH below the speed limit.)

Inside my PT were comfortable seats upholstered with a good-quality gray fabric. The rear seat could be removed, turning the car into a mini-minivan that could carry a surprising amount, due to the high roof. The dashboard had panels that matched the exterior color, adding some Inferno Red brightness to the gray. I sometimes drove six hours in a day for my work, so I ordered for my PT a car stereo that included both a cassette tape and a CD drive, because I never knew which format I’d find for audiobooks in the local libraries. (Younger readers may look up definitions of “cassette tape” and “CD” if they like.)

The Cruiser’s 2.5L four-cylinder engine provided adequate performance and acceptable fuel economy. In later years Chrysler offered a turbocharged option, too.

The 5-speed manual transmission shifted easily, more so after I replaced the shift knob with an 8-ball I bought at a pool supply store and drilled a hole into. (The store sold both pool tables and swimming pools in different seasons.) By choosing a stickshift I was rewarded with a better driving experience and a significantly reduced turning diameter compared to automatic-equipped Cruisers: 36.5 feet versus 39.7 feet, although some of that nimbleness may have been due to the smaller tires on my car.

I sat up higher in my PT than I would have in a Neon or similar small car, and I had a good view of the road over the short, rounded hood and fenders. With its 1930s upright styling, the PT Cruiser was an inch shorter than a Chevy Vega, a foot taller, and seated four passengers in comfort, which the Vega could not.

Power window switches were on the floor between the front seats.

A PT Cruiser memory… My eldest daughter attended college 100 miles away. I went to collect her at the end of a semester, a 4-hour roundtrip. We were nearly home when a deer ran out in the road in front of us, a not-uncommon occurrence here in Northern New England. I managed to slow from 50MPH to a complete stop without hitting the beast, and it bounded off into the woods. “That was a near miss!” I said. Then a second deer ran into my car. Again, I was at a complete halt, not moving – the deer ran into me.

Now the deer was lying motionless in the middle of the road, whether stunned or dead I did not know. What to do? Drag it to the side of the road? Should I put it out of its misery with my tire iron? Do I even have a tire iron? What exactly is a tire iron anyway? While I was thinking these complicated thoughts, the deer got to its feet (or its hoofs), shook its head to gather its wits, and ran off into the woods after its friend.

Rear seats had handles and wheels to make their removal easier.

Another memory… My state has “first in the nation” primaries in presidential election years, and my daughters wanted to see as many candidates as possible from both parties. One year the wife of a former president hoped to return to the White House in the top job, and we learned she’d visit a local airport with her husband and their daughter. Three of us piled into the PT Cruiser and drove to the airport, which is a rather small one. We arrived late and the only parking space we could find was quite narrow, about six inches wider than my car, so I had my daughters get out before I parked. Of course I couldn’t open my door, therefore I had one daughter open the rear hatch for me. I crawled out between the front seats and over the back seat – I was more flexible then. I hoped for some congratulatory comments about my ingenuity; instead my daughters told me I’d left my headlights on. (This would have been useful information to know earlier.) I had to do my calisthenics again, twice.

I drove my PT Cruiser for ten years, until it was no longer economical to repair. Around the time I sold that little car, I bought a Dodge Neon for my daughter.

In 2010 the youngest of my three daughters was a recent college graduate trying to make a living in Boston. Her apartment was a stone’s throw from the 100-year-old Ford Motor Company factory in Cambridgeport, and she needed a car to commute to work, as her hours were incompatible with the MBTA’s late night schedule.

My daughter already had a car, her grandmother’s 1997 Legacy GT wagon. Unfortunately the only parking available to her was half of a small garage that required her to make a ninety-degree turn to go in or out from a narrow driveway while avoiding a brick wall. I tried this myself in daylight hours, and I could imagine how difficult it must have been after midnight when coming home from work.

After my daughter rejected a few more eccentric candidates, I found a low-mileage Dodge Neon for sale on Craigslist. Chrysler had built two million Neons from 1995-2005 to be sold by its Plymouth and Dodge dealers; our lipstick-red 2005 Neon SXT was built in the last model year. It was a four door compact sedan with a 2.0L 4-cylinder engine and a 4-speed automatic – a very ordinary car.

The instrument panel’s white-faced gauges were easy to read.

I’d bought a Ford Escort three decades earlier and thought it a most unremarkable appliance, one that didn’t compare well to imports from Europe and Japan. Now, many cars and many repairs later, I was older and wiser, and I was pleased to find basic transportation for my daughter. Her Neon wasn’t entirely basic – it had air conditioning and power windows, too. Power front windows, that is; backseat passengers had to crank their windows up and down by hand.

Was the Neon the very best small car one could buy new in 2005? Probably not; I’d have chosen for myself a Mazda 3 instead. However I was shopping for a used car in 2010, and I couldn’t find a low-mileage Mazda or Honda that didn’t cost 50% more than the little Dodge. Also my daughter preferred an automatic transmission, and that would have diminished the joy of driving a car like the Mazda.

The Neon was ten inches shorter than grandma’s old Subaru wagon, and that made all the difference, parking-wise. My daughter was happy with her car, for the first month at least. Then she went to a cabin in the hills of Vermont one Friday evening for a weekend with her friends. (Her friends had never been far from the city. They wanted to know, “How do people drive at night when there are no streetlights?”) On Saturday I got a phone call from my daughter that something was wrong with her car, an intermittent loss of power, so I drove to Dummerston, wherever that is, and swapped the old Subaru for the Dodge. On the way home I, too, experienced a brief power loss, just once.

I ran all the usual diagnostics and could find nothing wrong with the car. My OBD2 scanner showed no error codes. I drove for miles and miles and the problem did not recur, not even once. Eventually I returned the Neon to my daughter.

I’ve just confirmed with her now that the car did run well most of the time. The engine would stumble, briefly, but only every few weeks. This would have been a minor annoyance, except that her commute to work required her to merge onto Interstate 90 in Allston, and she really, really did not want her car to hesitate while she was merging onto the Mass Pike.

Just before she decided to take away my Father-Of-The-Year coffee mug, my daughter started a new job and found an apartment near enough that she no longer needed a car to get to work. She dropped off the Neon at a local garage and asked them to keep it until they could identify and fix whatever was wrong.

The Cambridge garage was owned by two brothers who had a program on public radio where people could call in and talk about cars. The garage mechanics ran all the tests I did and swapped out every part they could think of. Because intermittent problems are difficult to diagnose, the mechanics drove the car on their errands for at least a month, with my daughter’s permission. She often would see her lipstick-red Neon go by as she walked to work.

One day the chief mechanic called my daughter and asked her to collect her car. He gave her a list of all the repairs they’d attempted, and he wouldn’t take a dime, since they hadn’t found the problem. She argued that they were owed something for their time, but he wouldn’t accept any payment from her.

They’re smiling because I found the problem at last.

The Red Devil – its new name – sat in my driveway for quite a while as I tried to think of what to do with it. Finally I made a list of all the things that could possibly be wrong and compared my list with the list the garage had given my daughter. I noticed that the words “Throttle Position Sensor” were on my list but not theirs, so I bought a $50 TPS, installed it, and never had a problem again.

A year later I sold the Red Devil to my brother-in-law. I’d sold him my Jeep, which he’d driven for years before he hit a deer, and grandma’s Legacy wagon, which he didn’t have long before he hit another deer. I thought that the unlucky man would be safe with the Neon, as it was bright red; however it seems that white-tailed deer are color-blind.

 

Related CC reading:

Curbside Classic: 2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser – Retro-Grade Or Retro-Chic?

Curbside Classic: 2001 Plymouth Neon LX – Say “Hi” Turns To “Hello”

Curbside Classic: 1997 Plymouth Neon – Brightening Up The Compact Class