PT Cruisers on slow ride to scrap heap - dumped into rental fleets

[Egalitarian Thug]

41. They sucked much less while Mercedes owned Chrysler.

I used to drive rentals 99% of the time when I was embroiled in my career, so I got these oddballs fairly often. When they first came out I just hated getting them. They were noisy, vibrated like a tweaker at a caffeine convention, were horribly underpowered, took forever to heat up, and had the second most uncomfortable seats I've ever been subjected to (GM still holds the title as the chiropractors best friend).

Then in 2003 somebody screwed up and let my usually reserved Nissan go and all they had was a dark blue Cruiser. It was a whole new car. Suddenly, the tiny four-banger get get down the highway with the rest of the traffic and my kidneys stopped threatening to dig themselves out of my body through me back. The instrument cluster was suddenly visible and the controls were within reach. When I got the the gig, I actually popped the hood in the parking lot to see if I might have got a six-cylinder I didn't know existed, it wasn't, but that was when I saw the almost-a-peace sign stamped into the valve cover.

Of course after only a couple of years, Mercedes sold out to Cerberus and the quality fell off the scale within seconds, but for couple of years Chrysler products stopped sucking so much.