Never Mind The Inventory, Here's The Dart GT
TTAC’s Alex Dykes didn’t fall in love with the Dodge Dart in his initial meeting, although he did refer to it as “class competitive”. In its first half-year on these shores, the Alfa-Dodge has struggled to keep inventory levels down despite great advertising.
Ten or twenty years ago, Chrysler might have let this state of affairs continue for a year or two before adjusting the product mix and/or changing the marketing approach, but in the lean-and-mean era they don’t play that game. The Dart GT is meant to restart the model’s momentum, and it does it the old-fashioned way: with high content and reasonably aggressive pricing.
The GT is powered by the big motor in the Dart lineup — the 2.4L, 184-horsepower “Tigershark” — and it’s pretty well-loaded with everything from leather to the 8.4-inch touchscreen in the center console. It appears that the suspension tuning and components are brought over from the R/T, although the press release doesn’t explicitly state that fact. HIDs and a Garmin nav appear on the option list. Price for the manual-transmission variant is $20,995.
If you didn’t fancy the Dart before, this won’t change your mind, but if you were waiting for a little more visual aggression at a reasonable price, this might do the trick. We’ll see it in Detroit.
More by Jack Baruth
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The interior plastics and their texture really looks nasty. It's too much of a pebbled look, and seems like it'd be really hard and rough feeling.
The GT still isn't available until Q2-2013, very frustrating. I test drove a 1.4 6MT and a 2.0 6AT. The 2.0 automatic was far more pleasant to drive, but it needed more torque. I'm hoping the 2.4 is the answer. The turbo 1.4 is quite gutless and terrible to drive in city traffic, and the stick was poorly positioned for me. I found interior build quality to be iffy. But the exterior is beautiful.