Good Riddance, PT Cruiser Car Rentals

Everyone knows the sinking feeling of arriving at a Hertz or an Avis or an Enterprise, only to learn that all the premium cars are taken. Inevitably you’re stuck with a plum-colored PT Cruiser, those odd little Chryslers that for the past decade have populated rental car outlets across the country. “They’re just so awful,” says Stephanie Springer, a former research associate at a large biotech company in Boston. Springer and her colleagues once visited Los Angeles and were issued a whole fleet of PT Cruisers. “We ended up carpooling because the people who had PT Cruisers refused to use them,” she says. They briefly considered the possibility that the office administrator who’d booked their itineraries despised them. “I mean, think of The Office. Michael Scott [the hapless boss played by Steve Carell] was driving a PT Cruiser forever,” she says.

Marketed as a playful, sporty wagon, the PT Cruiser was a top seller for Chrysler when released in 2000. The company went on to sell more than 1.4 million of them during the Cruiser’s 10-year production run. The car owed much of its success to its retro-kitsch design—those distinctive flared fenders, that tapering hood. But eventually the novelty wore off. “At first, customers liked it because it was so interesting-looking, but Chrysler was never able to keep the sales momentum going with the mainstream buyer,” says Maryann Keller, an industry expert who serves on the board of Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group. So, like many surplus cars, hundreds of thousands of unsold Cruisers got dumped into rental fleets and became the albatross of the business traveler.