Junkyard Find: 2000 Dodge Intrepid R/T
With the ’01 Saturn L200 yesterday and the ’01 Pontiac Aztek the day before that, we’re having a 21st Century Junkyard Find week. I’ll continue that with today’s find: Dodge’s high-performance version of the second-gen Dodge Intrepid: The Intrepid R/T.
You got the 242-horsepower 3.5 liter V6 in this car, which was pretty decent for a front-wheel-drive family sedan.
The LH platform had been around for quite a while at this point, so the novelty of the cool-looking-at-first “cab-forward” design had long since worn off by 2000.
I often suggest that 24 Hours of LeMons teams run a Chrysler LH, but so far only one has shown up (and it threw a rod 100 yards into the race).
Roomy. Well-equipped. Cheap.
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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It was a beautiful car and handled well. Felt like much smaller vehicle. Interior was huge. But used ones had interior worn out, door panels falling out, it simply did not instill much confidence in quality. And Dodge's reputation rivaled one of Mitsubishi - they were related companies anyway. Mitsubishi also made good looking cars at some point, like Galant and Pajero. It is interesting - Dodge partnered with Mitsu, Ford with Mazda (actually it owned it) and GM with Toyota - do you notice similarities between partners?
If you see an LH (particularly 1st-gen, but the 2nd-gen suffered from this as well) car on a hot day driving with the windows up, congratulate the owner on the epic amount of money they surely spent getting the AC working again. Those things were subject to a bewildering array of HVAC issues, most of which resulted in the vents blowing fetid air at you when what you most needed (and asked the HVAC for) was a 41-degree Blue Norther. Evaporators, selector and blend door servos, control heads... you name it, it'd crap out on you just as you pulled on to Galveston Island for the July 4 weekend. Even when I was in Detroit, most LH cars drove around in the summer with the windows down. Here in Houston, I've seen improvised swamp coolers deployed.