Junkyard Find: 2004 Chrysler PT Cruiser GT Turbo
The quantity of Chrysler PT Cruiser s in the high-turnover self-service wrecking yards remained close to zero for the first decade after the car’s 2001 model year debut (while the Cruiser’s Neon cousins showed up in large quantities starting at about age five). For the first few years of our current decade, I’d see a sprinkling of discarded PT Cruisers… and then the floodgates burst in about 2014, with seemingly every U-Wrench-It yard in the country packed wall-to-wall with the things.
I have ignored them, but the minivan version of the SRT4 Neon seemed worth photographing.
Using the same running gear as the 2004 SRT4 Neon, the GT Turbo PT Cruiser packed an impressive 215-horsepower 2.4-liter turbocharged engine. Not many were sold, for obvious reasons.
I’m surprised some Neon “tuner” type (of which there are many in the San Francisco Bay Area) hadn’t yanked the engine and suspension goodies from this car for an easy bolt-in swap to a Plymouth Neon Expresso with rattle-can yellow spray-painted dash panels and “ILLEST” stickers on the quarter-panels. Perhaps that happened after I left this yard.
Yeah, it’s an automatic. Of course it’s an automatic (though a higher percentage of junkyard PT Cruisers have manual transmsissions than do junkyard Neons; perhaps the manual was $19 cheaper).
The special “2.4 Turbo” tachometer is cool-looking.
Speaking of the abundance of PT Cruisers in places like this, how about the one that was right next to the ’04 GT Turbo? I’m pretty sure this is a custom aftermarket paint job, but perhaps it’s a rare-but-not-so-valuable special edition.
The PT Cruiser Turbo was just the thing for those crazy youngsters and their flip phones.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I got to take a daylong test drive in a PT Cruiser GT. People forget, those things were FAST with the 2.4 turbo and manual transmission -- 0-60 in 6.something. The interior was also an upgrade from the standard PT, with model-specific perforated leather and a slightly nicer dash plastic. I remember having two quibbles with the car: the hilariously bad turning circle, made worse by the enormous wheels on the GT, and the massive cliff in ratios between first and second gear. First gear was all unintentinded wheelspin and instant redline, and second gear felt like third. Frustrating in traffic. That was on a first-year model though, I hear they revised it later (no idea if that's so).
I know two older ladies who bought these because of the looks. One still has hers, despite the awful paint and paper mache interior. She says the worst thing is that it's been mechanically quite reliable, so in her words, "they were perfectly capable of doing it right, but just didn't". The other got disgusted after a couple of years of interior bits turning to dust like a mummy in sunlight and bought a Scion XB, which has been awesome, and still looks great. She says the only thing she misses is the "cool retro styling" of the PT.