
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.

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.

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.

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.

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
Great story 🙂 I love the irony that Tom and Ray were ultimately stumped by Neon-related issues. She shoulda got a Dart(ra).
Over the years, I’ve known many folks who’ve taken their cars to Tom & Ray/Click & Clack/The Good News Garage, and all have been treated fairly and more than once experienced the “we’re keeping this until we can figure out the problem”. It’s too bad they didn’t get the TPS issue, but then again the Neon may have been a bit more technologically advanced relative to much of what rolled in and out there.
Your line about what has become of the reputation of PT Cruisers is right on target.
What a great story. Poor BIL!
When the wife and I moved into the mountains, two things were apparent: our 4 year old Ford C-max was terrible in snow while trying to come up our 19• angle driveway! And a whee bit of noise from the exhaust on the subsequent vehicles we would own can be a life saver. We bought an 04 Grand Marquis and the muffler was in bad shape. The local exhaust shop told me that, since there are 4 converters on that car, why not do away with the muffler? Perfect! It has just enough sound that the deer scatter! Now, our new Rogue can’t be made really noisy-the deer will congregate in front of that car!
On another note, my wife wanted a PT in the worst way. So on a trip to Florida, she rented one. That seemed to quench her thirst! She never said why, but never asked for one again!
I’d ordered a car with both a cassette and CD player in it in the ’90s for the same reason, had music on both formats and didn’t know for sure which would win out. Who’d have thought kids 25 years later would want their music on vinyl?
I’ve always liked, or at least respected the PT Cruiser for its space efficiency and retro looks, which were cool for about the first year it was on sale, until everyone who liked it bought one and sales dwindled and it became a rental-fleet queen. It follows my “unusual-looking car” sales trajectory – strong sales the first year or two, falls off a cliff after that once they’re a common sight. The AMC Pacer was like that. I was guessing the CyberTruck would be too, but it didn’t even get the first-year boost.
I still find the Neon rather bleak though. Too much cheap grey/black plastic in the interior, and questionable ergonomics though the second-gen improved things slightly, and IIRC finally axed the 3-speed automatic transmission (but not the rear crank windows).
The turning radius difference in the PT was all about the tire size. If you had a model with the larger tires spacers were installed in the steering rack to limit the travel, that reduced the steering angle to prevent tire rub at full lock and of course increased the turning radius. Ford used that same trick too on at least some Foxstangs.
My MIL had the turbo convertible version and she really began to hate its terrible turning radius when she moved into her condo that required a tight 90 degree turn to get into the garage. The longer Ranger she had at the time was much easier to get in and out of the garage as was the also much bigger Mustang Convertible that replaced the PT.
The PT Cruiser maybe had the biggest fall from grace of any car I can remember. It had all this buzz, everyone wanted one, waiting lists, etc. and then instantly became the butt of every joke within a year.
I know mechanics HATE them because of how hard they are to work on as a result of the tight hood space.
I owned one Dodge product and never went back. The quality has just always been bad, that’s why they are so cheap. Sort of shocked though “celebrity” mechanics couldn’t figure out a car repeatedly stalling out. Modern scan tools should have been able to pick that up pretty easy with basic data logging.
Such a great article and so much information .
I too have always loved little vehicles for their driveability and ease of parking it small spaces .
I have a friend who bought a PT Cruiser new and still has it, the ‘ultramatic’ slush box gave up and he’s still struggling to get it fixed a few years later .
Also nice to know that the Neon was in fact a good basic car .
I miss listening to “Click and Clack” on NPR Sunday morning as I’d be out back working on some auld crate, they were very good Mechanics indeed but I occasionally didn’t agree .
-Nate
I enjoyed this from start to finish – great post, thank you! I agree that both vehicles deserve to remembered more fondly than they seem to be. Your comparison with the Chevy Vega’s dimensions (not that the Vega was a paragon of packaging) shows just how well Chrysler had nailed the packaging of a small vehicle by this point.
I miss seeing inexpensive, cheerful, and innovative vehicles like the PT Cruiser out and about. They still occasionally turn my head.
And the Click & Clack reference! Outstanding! I had the chance to drive one second-generarion Dodge Neon just one time (it had belonged to my father’s first wife) and remember it to be a nice enough little Dodge that held a bunch of us and drove nicely for a small car.
Thanks for sharing your experience with these cars. Click and Clack! Would’ve been fun to meet them, they seemed to really march to their own drummers.
Neons were kind of cool when they launched; bug-eyed and spirited with fun 90s pastel-patterned cloth seats and a successful ad campaign. The second gen (yours) didn’t seem able to quite follow up on that. Not sure why. Chrysler/Dodge has really struggled to keep a viable sedan in the market.
Curious about how many miles you had on the PT at 10 years and what repairs were making it too expensive to keep. I think Chrysler really blew it with the PT. The first generation you had seemed well-executed. Very distinctive, a fairly nice interior, great packaging, only let down by a high curb weight and thirsty four-cylinder. Neat cars, and unique. The 2006 refresh, however, was a cheap-looking pastiche of the original–particularly the interior. I remember the year it was cancelled (2010?), remaining dealer inventory was being marked down by an eye-popping percentage.
They were tremendous fun (well, I suppose Ray still is) and were indeed as much fun in person as they seemed on the radio. At least I thought so having met them at public radio fund raisers when they were still a somewhat local natural resource. They used to do something associated with the fund raisers called “The Games of Ancient Grease”. It got to be a big enough thing in the late 1990s that I think it nearly collapsed under its own weight as there was only so much the boys could do in addition to holding down the garage, and the radio show as well as whatever else was going on at Dewey, Cheetem and Howe.
Truly unique personalities. And as Nate notes in an earlier comment, part of the fun of listening to them was disagreeing with their automotive various diagnoses.
https://www.cartalk.com/radio/show/2248-games-ancient-grease
I think I had my PT Cruiser for only about 120,000 miles, but they were New England miles which are hard on a car due to frost heaves and road salt. I blame a daughter’s boyfriend for the early demise of a clutch. I had problems with the cooling system, suspension, brakes, and I can’t remember what else. I’m not sure if the car was getting old and tired or if I was getting old and tired of the car.
Love the Click and Clack reference! I listened to them in high school and into the early 2000s before I could no longer find it. I had a printout of all the radio stations in my area that supposedly aired it, with times, but no go. Then I started reading the website.
My sister bought a 95 Neon that was a few years old. In short order it went through either 2 head gaskets and a transmission, or 2 transmissions and a head gasket. Either way the last time she just left it in dad’s driveway while she was still paying off the loan. After that it got hauled away for parts or scrap. Around the same time my buddy worked at the local GM / Chrysler dealership. He said they had to keep one of every Chrysler transmission on the shelf at all times, they failed so much. Not so with the GM.
So apparently they improved over the next decade. My grandma had a PT Cruiser for awhile and it seemed like a decent car, I drove it a few times. I think that was the last car she had before she couldn’t drive anymore.
I do recall the hype about these before they went to production. Then they came out, the hype seemed to die off quickly.
My Mother eventually got a Red PT Cruiser just like the subject car. (auto though). LONG after Hype.
They eventually just became old people’s cars.
By the way, that “shifter” looks more like a “Cue Ball” than an “8-Ball”.
I also had the CD cassette combo in my Saturn. Grandma just had an AM/FM set so I bought one of the Sanyo Single DIN units at Fry’s since I had more cassettes than CDs at the time. My son’s penchant for old GM stuff meant we had two other cars like that the Buick LeSabre and the 96 Suburban had factory CD/Cassette units. His Toyota HiAce should be dual as well, but we can’t find the CD changer that is supposed to be in there somewhere.
The PT Cruiser had a removable rear seat to make it a minivan for CAFE purposes, I’ve never been in one but understand the appeal to the elderly. As for the Neon they were pretty popular as cheap race cars but not very durable. I’d also go for a Mazda 3 instead. For really tight spots a standard Fiat 500 is awesome, as well as cute and fun in general. Avoid the Abarth since they use a different steering rack and have a huge turning circle.
A retired former builder of Neons, I’ve had 16 of them over the yrs, with an occasional brush with a PT. My first brush with a PT was at the Tech Center in Auburn Hills, MI. Originally, the PT going to be an outgrowth of the Neon, so the first mule was a grotesque marriage of a pseudo PT front clip on a Neon. Fast fwd a few yrs, my niece got a PT and loved it, right up to the point that the heater core failed. Like most newer cars, it was a dash removal and like $1200. A friend knew of a shortcut, to cut the dash feeder tube’s then slide the core out from under the dash, then use 2 small lengths of heater hose. Trouble was, it failed again….Paul fixed then it flunked again….probably a bad head gasket, so it went bye bye. FIL had the turbo 2DR convertible, that was fun..