My Time with a PT Cruiser
Posted on Jun 03rd 2015
The PT Cruiser is an odd sort of bird, first conceived as a “retro” style vehicle, possibly to echo the old “Woody” wood-paneled van/truck thingamabob that once roamed the Pacific Coast Highway and still does from time to time as a favorite of surfers trying to look ultra cool. The strange thing is that the PT, standing for “Personal Transport,” was phased out in 2010, after only 10 years of production; making it a collectible now. Once scoffed at for being too cute as an attempt at nostalgia, the irony of the car is that being an antique knock-off, it did not have to evolve much over its decade-long dance with the road.
In fact, it changed very little; even though it had many different specialty models with slightly different set ups. Basically, however, the PT Cruiser was just a solid, practical, semi-compact fun little vehicle with 4 doors, a hatchback, and a 2.4 liter engine. Mine was very light and nimble. I use the word “mine” loosely, because I actually purchased it for my wife. It was her graduation present from the minivan when both the kids were old enough to get out of their child safety seats and stop making a mess. They loved the car too. It was a special edition, painted in a color called, “Inferno,” a metal flake mother one notch up from the regular red. It came with aftermarket chrome alloy spoke rims, with black trim to play off of the tan interior. It was a sweet little beast.
Honestly, I expected better gas mileage from the car. At a time when Toyota was beating up the market with its hybrids, and people were being beat over the head with fuel economy consciousness, the PT Cruiser was only getting between 18 and 24 miles to the gallon on the lead-free, even with the lightest foot behind the wheel. With very few bells and whistles except a fairly stout factory sound system, you just didn’t get the type of fuel efficiency feedback like you did in other cars at the time with more advanced electronics. The dashboard LED did display average mpg, however; which made it possible to at least know when you could be driving better.
The PT Cruiser, although designed to be sporty, was not a favorite among sports fans. It was just too vanilla in its acceleration and overall power. The throttle felt mushy, and the interior too cushy for it to be anything other than a family car. Many guys considered it to be too feminine, and termed it a “chick” car; which most ladies were happy to honor by hogging the car all to themselves. I actually found it to be all right to drive around in; and with the factory smoke tint windows, I didn’t feel like I was getting too many looks to give up my man card. No, I stood by my PT Cruiser, for one very simple reason: The handling.
Having driven just about every kind of car there is on the planet, short of a Formula 1 racer, I was thoroughly impressed with the cornering of the PT Cruiser. That is to say, you could take a turn at twenty miles per hour on average higher than any other car on the road. It was like riding inside a cat’s paw. I actually found myself accelerating through sharp corners to see if I could get any kind of squeal or skid from the tires. There was nothing: Never a chirp, a drift, a slide, or a glide. I might as well have been driving on duct tape. That is what kept me stuck to my PT Cruiser like glue. Given, it gave up a slight amount of its turning radius to achieve that level of handling. For example, you could not just whip it into a normal parking space between two cars. My Ford Windstar had tighter maneuverability than my PT Cruiser; but then again, I would have ended upside down in a ditch if I had tried some of the stuff in the minivan that I did in the cruiser.
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