PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

After ten years on the market, the PT Cruiser is biting the dust. No tears shed here. When it came out in 2000, the car sold fast and furiously. Why? Who knows? It was something different. It was retro. It looked like a 1940s gangster car, but was kinda cute and you could fold up the back seats in clever ways to get more space. It was a wagon for people who didn’t want a wagon, an SUV for people who hated to drive something big and mean, a compact car that still seemed big enough to get the job done.

It was, above all, a novelty car: something different that was built to be....something different. Not necessarily better, just different. The car was slow as a result of being under powered, but people who bought it, especially in the early days, were suckered into the deal before they ever arrived in the showroom. They wanted it, so they bought it and, having done so, most convinced themselves they had made a good decision. I looked at the PT Cruiser when its sales were on the upswing and decided, ah, yeah, I ain’t gonna go for it. Others, however, loved it.

The Los Angeles Times reports that people kept right on buying it, long after its moment in the spotlight had passed. It was one of the very few smaller cars designed and made in America to be hugely successful. That’s something. Now, sales are down, way down. The same Times article reports sales of about 5,500 cars this year. The last PT Cruiser will roll off the line and into history this week.

It would be easy to say people bought the PT because they were dumb. Go ahead, if you want to. I think, instead, it shows the appetite of the American buyer for choice in a market that gives them very little. In going smaller, people were following a good idea, even if in doing so they were not getting the best car. It showed that not everyone wanted to buy a big, intimidating SUV and ride the bumper of the car in front of them for the fun of it. It showed, once again, that the idea of practical has a very lasting and broad appeal.

Subaru has made an entire, successful car company in America out of practical, tough,     non-sexy cars. Chrysler might have done the same if they had sniffed out the reasons behind the success of the PT. But noooo, who would want to build a good car company in Detroit when you can mess around with selling the company three times and take it into bankruptcy instead?

Cars in America have to be made to live, and die, on freeways (unless a pure city car catches on). That means they need power to get out of the way of big trucks and scoot from the growling bumpers of SUVs that seem to want to eat small cars alive. The PT Cruiser could do none of that. At its base, it wasn’t anything particularly radical. It offered more space inside, a retro look outside and engine that hoped it could, rather than knew it could. Grunt, grunt, puff.

The PT kicked off the retro trend and Chevrolet, among others, probably wishes it hadn’t. Chevy came out with the HHR, a little truck-car-wagon that is still around but sells like cold french fries. They also made a god awful sports car thing that seated only two people and cost two arms and one leg (I can’t even remember the name). That sold slower than cat chow at the Westminster Dog Show.  Ford also put out the retro T-Bird and pulled it back, quickly. Instant, quirky collector’s item

There are more retro cars in our future. The Fiat 500, a design spin on the Fiat’s of the post WW II era, might be headed this way now that Fiat controls Chrysler. Of course, we have the Mini, an over priced little bug that people buy, probably, just because they have the money and they want to be different (fun to drive, too, I hear).

In time, we will learn it is not enough just to be different. We need cars that are different and better. How better? All the way around, top to bottom. Good, strong, fast, economical, nice styling, reasonably safe and, oh yeah, fun. The PT had one or two of those nailed.

Doug Terry, 7.6.10

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