The Chrysler PT Cruiser GT Was the Best Version of the Worst Car

this is a

chrysler

pt

cruiser

and it is generally accepted that it is one of the

worst

cars of the modern era it is ugly with unfortunate retro styling that has not aged very well it is slow the interior is horrible it is unreliable and poorly built except for a ago A few years ago Chrysler offered the PT Cruiser with the manual transmission and turbocharged Dodge Neon SRT4 engine and that's it and today I'm going to review it. I borrowed this pt

cruiser

from a viewer here in san diego and I'm going to start by going over the basics of the PT Cruiser.

The PT first came out in 2001, right at the beginning of the retro design craze, and back then everyone wanted one, they sold them at sticker price at Chrysler dealerships, they were the new motoring trend. called the pt cruiser the car of the year but then the pt cruiser started becoming the token car that grandma drove which was hilariously unappealing and then the retro car design trend died out and yet

chrysler

kept going selling the pt cruiser all the way up to 2010 and by then no one was interested in it except rental car companies, it had gone from exciting to embarrassing in about a decade and now almost everyone calls it the loser pt, but even though everyone They hate the pt cruiser, there was one.

The cool

version

from 2003 to 2007 chrysler sold the pt cruiser with the turbocharged four cylinder engine from the dodge neon srt4 and they called it the pt cruiser gt if you have one of those you still have an ugly pt cruiser yes but you also have 230 horsepower , manual transmission and a lot of tuning potential, these gt cruisers as they are called are incredibly rare while i film this video there are 726 pt cruisers for sale on autotrader but only 10 are the gt model with manual transmission and today First of all let them I will show the so-called GT Cruiser, the

best

version

of the

worst

car.

First I'll take you on a tour of the PT GT and show you all of its cool quirks and features, then I'll show you take it out on the road and drive it and then I'll give it a dig score. Well I'll start with the quirks and features of the pt cruiser going in and that means we have to talk about the key. You can see this car has a key and a remote control and they are different colors, the remote control is black, the key is this beige brown color. You would have thought Chrysler could combine the two but they just didn't if you wanted that level of style you shouldn't have bought a pt cruiser and speaking of styling issues with this car I've always found it a little unusual that they have this rocker panel flared at the bottom of the door and is supposed to have a nice little style. element except that you have to make a little gap in the back door so that the back door can open into the front door, so you have this rocker panel and then there's a gap in it every time the doors close, which of course It seems really stupid but that's what they did anyway going up inside the pt cruiser you press this little button on the door handle another great decision since that button will never freeze during a cold winter you press that little button on the door handle the door and then you go up and you go up When you go up inside the pt cruiser, the first thing you notice is that the quality of the interior is not particularly good, there is cheap plastic on basically every surface that you can see, feel touch, look at everything, It has cheap, poor quality hard plastic to some varying degree, some is textured. part is gray part is black but everything is very cheap but this was a pretty cheap car so you expect some pretty cheap materials what you don't expect are the other obvious examples of the poor quality of the pt cruiser for example the center control console and the center console are found on many cars, it's one big flowing piece, in this car it's two pieces and you can put your whole hand through the space between them, which is a pretty big panel space, it would be better if you didn't out. there, but in fact it is and the following is another good example of the quite profitable development of pt cruisers.

I love how easily you can switch this thing from left-hand drive to right-hand drive in many cars, the interior is very asymmetrical. they are angled towards the driver, the passenger has his own area, not this thing on the left side, the driver's side, here in the United States you have the steering wheel and then the gauge cluster is on this little panel, but if you look at the Passenger side has exactly the same size and shape of the panel, just mirrored. Chrysler wanted to make it as easy and cheap as possible to build a left-hand drive version and a right-hand drive version without doing a lot of extra work and another good example of that comes with the window switches, almost all cars Moderns have their window switches on the door panels, so each passenger can have their own individual window switches and are therefore easily within reach, not the pt cruiser, but the window switches fronts on this car. on top of the center control console next to the air vents and that meant Chrysler didn't have to make individual window switches for the driver's door panel and the passenger's door panel and so Both, individual door panels for left and right hand drive vehicles. drive they could just put all the switches in the center regardless of where the steering wheel is positioned and be cheap so chrysler being chrysler especially 15 years ago they took the cheap route and talking about chrysler being chrysler in the pt era cruiser, come on talk about the climate control vents, if you want to move around the airflow and climate control vents, go to this little dial in the middle and then move it around, except if you look inside of the vents, you can see that it just moves this little piece of plastic. around and doesn't seem to direct the airflow.

I think the air just comes out of the inside of the dash and then it would hit that little plastic panel that you're moving and it wouldn't really have much of an effect on where the air is. This is the cheapest and most horrible way to do this I have ever seen and of course this is how Chrysler did it. I have the same complaint about the little dials that open and close the air vents instead of hiding them out of sight like virtually every other car. so you can barely tell they are there, you have these little circular warts on each climate vent and you can twist them and that will open and close the climate vents.

There had to have been a better way to do this, but I strongly suspect this was the cheapest way to do it, here's how it was done, said not everything was done as cheaply as possible, for example, take a look at the dashboard the door and specifically to the storage area at the base of the door panel, you can see the piece. Around that storage area there isn't just a boring ugly piece of plastic, it's a piece of plastic with holes in it which is the kind of innovation you can expect from chrysler pt cruiser door panel storage holes and Another piece of innovation from the Chrysler PT Cruiser.

Back to the center control stack near the bottom, you have two separate switches, one is to turn off the traction control and the other is for the rear wiper, but if you look closely you will also see a third switch which is for the defroster . on a pedestal, why isn't it even with the other two switches? I don't know, maybe the defroster is much more important to Chrysler and then moving up to the center control console we come to the radio head unit that Chrysler had now been using. This radio head unit for years when the PT Cruiser came out so it was pretty old by then but it worked fine so why change it?

Good evidence of that is that on the radio presets I had five, I actually had five AM presets and five. FM presets but that was it, there was nothing like FM1, FM2, FM3, all I could remember were 10 presets in total so I hope there were only five radio stations that you liked because that's all you were receiving and then another interesting feature of the PT Cruiser. When you're driving you want to shift into reverse, that's a pretty common thing, but in this car, when you shift into reverse, it beeps several times, it doesn't sound like a truck on the outside, but it beeps inside just to remind you that you're in reverse. setback, thanks, I appreciate it and when looking around this interior you may have noticed the boost gauge mounted on the top of the gauge cluster which is an aftermarket accessory.

Chrysler didn't put it there, this car has had one or two very small ones. modifications that don't really affect the driving experience. I only mention the boost gauge to mention that it is not a factory part. Now I also mention the boost gauge to point out another interesting element with the pt gt, which is the fact that it doesn't really remind you anywhere that this is the fast version, this car has like 70 more horsepower than the pt cruiser Entry level and I'm sure it cost a lot more when new but it doesn't say GT anywhere. new car would have GT embroidery on the seats, steering wheel, floor mats, but not here, they didn't even give you a boost gauge, the previous owner had to put one on the only reminder you have in this whole car. something different from a standard pt cruiser is on the gauge cluster it says 2.4l turbo that's it otherwise you sit here and think you have a normal pt cruiser which is not a good idea and then we move on forward.

To the back seat of the PT Cruiser where again this car is awash in Chrysler innovations and I want to revisit the window switches once again. chrysler didn't want to put them on the door panels because it would be too expensive so instead they put the window switches on the floor between the seats in the middle which is the worst location for them I could imagine because if you have a passenger in the middle, they're going to kick the window switches and the windows will roll down, but you also have to get to the floor every time you want to roll down the windows and if you stick something on the floor and it rolls, it will roll down the windows and it's really stupid but that's what they've done here and speaking of that area around the window switches and stupid things an honorable mention goes to the cup holder this is clearly a last minute cup holder it was supposed to be an area of storage and then at the end of the process someone must have said, wait a minute, we should have a cup. support for the back seat and so they like to mold a little bit of plastic into a cup shape, but it doesn't take up all of this storage area.

It looks really stupid but that's what they've done and then another nice touch on the back. the pt cruiser as you know the mark of a high quality car is if you can look through a hole in the back seats and into the cargo area and in this vehicle there is actually a pretty big hole in the rear seats, look through it and there's the cargo area, that's how you know quality was important to the company that created your vehicle. Another way to know that quality is important is if your vehicle has a random, unexplained hook on the inside of the B-pillar, and indeed on the PT Cruiser.

What does he do? Don't know. There's even one on the passenger side. Another hook there in case you've always wanted a hook inside you. You didn't have one. Well, the PT Cruiser does and speaking of that. hooks I should point out that the door latch inside the back door jamb has the letters u usa stamped on it, which makes you feel patriotic every time you open the back door, except for the fact that the pt cruiser was built in Mexico. We're supposed to forget about that, just look at the door latch and then you can wave the American flag and then another notable feature here is the seat backs.

If you look at the back of the front seats, you can see that they are different. On the driver's side you have a leather pocket and a little storage pocket on the passenger side you have this plastic backrest, so what is that? Well, the theory was that you were supposed to be able to fold the passenger seat completely and then use that plastic. seat back as a desk while parked, of course, this is the kind of brilliant innovation you can get from chrysler, a folding desk for the passenger seat, your car probably doesn't have it nor have you probably wanted it, and next we move on to On the exterior of the PT Cruiser, where getting the GT model meant some major stylistic improvements over the regular PT Cruiser, the most important thing was the bumper.

The regular pt cruiser had a black plastic bumper that wasn't painted, now I don't care about the look. Sometimes there are black plastic bumpers, but on this car it sticks out strangely from the rear, as if the designers forgot they had to includea bumper and they just put it on later. It looks very strange now, on the GT model the bumper was painted body color which helped neutralize that strange look of the rear bumper sticking out, so it actually helped another big styling upgrade from the gt cruiser on the roof. You can see this car has a rear wing and a pretty big one at that, because this car generates so much downforce that the rear end would lift at over 240 miles per hour on the track tested at Le Mans, so they had to put that wing on rear there to solve that problem and something else that Chrysler glued on the outside of this pt cruiser in the rear is this window cleaner often.

This is hidden inside the wiper mechanism or somewhere else, but not on this car, it's just stuck in the center of the rear window, that said, it's not all bad here, I actually and legitimately like a feature that It's the Chrysler logo. that runs across the back at that time the chrysler logo was like a set of wings and I like how they integrated the tailgate handle into the chrysler logo, you pull it, the tailgate opens right in the middle, it's a cool little touch, but anyway Open the tailgate and what you see is a pretty standard cargo area, nothing unusual or especially large, but it's a nice practical cargo area.

Now there was a real piece of innovation back here, a surprisingly useful element in the cargo area of ​​the pt cruiser and that was the cargo cover which was surprisingly flexible in what it could do, there is a diagram at the top of the cover that shows its many positions, one is the top which is where it is currently placed, the next was in the middle, I could stick the cargo cover in the middle of the cargo area and then it was a little lower which could help accommodate some cargo that you might place back here.

Then you could put it on the floor, which isn't really that useful because you already have a floor. Then you could put it vertically against the seats once again, it's really not that much. Helpful because you had the seats there, but the next one is my favorite. You could use it as a table. You can see the cargo cover opens to this position and then you put this little latch under the cover and then it can be used as a table. the rear of your pt cruiser which could actually be useful if you wanted to have a picnic or tailgate with your pt is a pretty cool feature and then we move on to the front of the pt cruiser nothing can hide the front appearance of this car. which always looked like this strange, smiling face with the eyes on the sides and then this little chin underneath, was never a good look and since we're talking about the appearance of this car, it's worth mentioning that I think one of the main reasons people hate them is the style.

There were plenty of retro cars in the late '90s and early '00s—the Volkswagen New Beetle, the Chevy HHR, the Mustang O5, the Thunderbird—but none are more hated than the PT Cruiser. fact that they all got really cheap but part of that was that it didn't look good and didn't really age well, this car looks a lot older than it actually is and not just because it has a retro design and finally since I'm in the front of this car, a couple of other interesting quirks and features up here, one is the metal antenna attached to the fender right there, most cars by 2004 had abandoned metal antennas, they were hiding the antennas like they do modern cars, but no.

The PT Cruiser had it sticking out so you could have good reception for your five presets and those are the quirks and features of the Chrysler PT Cruiser GT Now it's time to take it out on the road and see how well it drives driving the PT GT. I have had quite a bit of experience with pt cruisers. I worked over the summer at Enterprise Rent-a-car when these were going out of style. Chrysler had built too many and like everyone else our cars were pt cruisers so I drove a bunch of them and then also crushed one with a hummer so I'm into the pt cruiser scene you might be able to hear the last mod this car has, which is like a bleeder valve, you can hear it when you release the accelerator, so what do I think of the PT in general?

Well part of the hate for this car I think comes from, its styling is great, the poor quality is another, but it's also a terrible driving experience anyone who has been in one knows this car is a disaster to drive the things you hear and you feel when you drive the car is just terrible, it's too loud, the engine hums, you can hear everything in the cabin, wind noise on the road. noise, everything was very poorly made and anyone who has driven one hates it, although there are still some people who love theirs, so the big question of course is whether the powertrain really affects the driving experience and makes this a decent place. be and the response is surprisingly makes it feel fast.

I was surprised by this. I mean, I know it has a lot of power. srt4 engine. I've been to those. I know how fast they are, but I expected this to still suck. and it does, it's not a good car but it's better and most importantly it's faster and this engine feels like an old school turbo engine which I love which means you put the pedal to the metal and It's like not much, not much, not much and then it's wow! This car actually feels pretty fast, it's actually fun, fast and exciting to drive fast in a straight line, I'm very careful to mention that because it's still horrible to drive in the corners, the steering isn't good, it never was.

Well they didn't make any real improvements to this car to make it good, the steering is very bad, you are also in a tall car with a high profile and unlike modern ones you know high performance SUVs, where okay, this one car they really don't have it. I've been able to mitigate that very well and it feels like a tall car with a tall profile. When you throw it into the corners, the body rolls and the steering isn't very precise, it's not that good. I don't want to dwell on the direction. and the handling although it is not good but the acceleration is much better so there are pros and cons but don't go buy this thinking you are getting something like a great secret pt cruiser you still have the bad inside as i mentioned there is not much distinction. of a regular model and you still don't have as good handling or as good steering, but what you also have, and most importantly, is that you have a car that accelerates pretty well, which is fun, and that's the chrysler pt cruiser gt, this is still not a very good car, but it is better than the normal PT Cruiser and I think the idea is hilarious, a fast, exciting and powerful engine inside the worst car in the history of modern automobiles, according to enthusiasts , this car is a bit of an enigma, an enigma, and that's why I'm into this and now it's time to give the gt cruiser a doug score starting with the weekend categories and the design of the pt cruiser It's not tremendously ugly, but it's certainly not beautiful and gets a 3 out of 10.

The GT's acceleration is 0-60 in 6.2 seconds and it gets a 3 out of 10. Handling is surprisingly poor, it really feels like Chrysler modified acceleration and leave everything else the same and only gets a 3 out of 10. The fun factor is okay mainly because of the acceleration. and it gets a 4 out of 10. Finally, cool factor and this is a pt cruiser. It deserves the lowest possible score. The only thing that helps is the fact that this is a great pt cruiser and gets a 2 out of 10 for an overall weekend. score 15 out of 50. below are the daily categories and features, it doesn't have much and gets a 3 out of 10. comfort is average and gets a 5 out of 10. quality is mediocre, shitty interior and although these are Reasonably reliable, they don't deserve more than a 4 out of 10.

Practicality is decent given its size and cargo area and gets a 7 out of 10. Finally, they are a value and these aren't great cars so they deserve to be. cheap and they are, but given the performance for the money, it scores a reasonably good 6 out of 10 for an overall daily score of 25 out of 50. Add it up and Doug's score is 40 out of 100. I've never reviewed a pt competitor cruiser, but here it is up against other strange cars of its era where it scores decently. I wouldn't buy a pt cruiser gt, but it really is the

best

of the worst and I'm glad I had the chance to check it out. outside