Dodge Caliber: riding on good intentions

Upon arrival at the Thrifty counter on our recent trip to Maine, the clerk tried to stick us with a PT Cruiser. I’ve had two in the past six months (Toronto and Arizona), and that was two too many. The only other vehicle she was willing to offer without an upgrade charge was a Dodge Caliber. So with a swipe of the Visa and two misinformed efforts to sell me insurance I didn’t need, I was off in a black New York-plated 2007 Caliber, with visible scratches on every exterior surface, 7400 miles on the odometer, drink stains on every seat and the floorboard, and an orange paintball ground into the driver’s seat. Clearly, I wouldn’t worry about brushing beach sand off my feet on this trip. (On the upside, the cost was 40% of a comparable rental at Hertz.)

The CVT automatic was strange at first: after the initial kick on pressure applied to the gas pedal, I only heard a constant medium-pitch roar from the engine and felt little push. I joked about hamster power until I noticed that I wasn’t having any trouble keeping up with traffic pulling out of tollbooths. I’d call the power and transmission subjectively OK — a little better than H’s Corolla, and qualitatively different enough from my manual diesel Jetta that I can’t make a meaningful comparison. The seats were reasonably comfortable, and spacewise, it was fine until you tried to sit in the back — no worse than my Jetta, but for the apparent physical size, I’d have expected better. No problems on front legroom or headroom for this 6’4” driver. The cargo area, with a pull-out cover, was fine for two medium-sized suitcases and my trusty laptop bag.

But the handling… better than the PT is about all I can give it. The PT was notorious for its huge turning circle; at least it seems like they fixed that. But for someone used to VW precision and Toyota confidence, the steering was awfully truck-like — which would be fine if it weren’t a compact hatchback.

Most puzzling to me was the heavily-advertised “Chill Zone” bottle cooler in the glove compartment. It looked fine, until you tried to store a bottle any larger than 500ml; the 700ml bottles of water that seemed standard in Maine grocery stores were too tall to allow the compartment to close. And then there were the controls. According to this review, the way to make it work is to pull some sort of lever outside the compartment to redirect the air conditioning. That was, to put it mildly, far from obvious in a rental car with a shrink-wrapped owner’s manual. But even given that, there’s a temperature rangein which you might want a drink kept cool without turning the A/C on for the entire car (and the bargain-basement parts-bin vents were hardly capable of closing the flow off). That range, for me, runs at least between sixty and eighty degrees — conveniently, exactly the range of Maine at the end of May. Why not have an on-off switch in the chilling compartment? The answer, of course, is the cost of a few extra diodes and a motorized vent, but why do this if you can’t do it right?

The killer, though, was visibility. The rear-view mirror was joke enough, but that’s survivable. Worse were the teardrop-shaped side-view mirrors. The little pointy end might have been nice-looking on a designer’s CAD screen, but the corners of the mirrors that they cut off are necessary to see the lane next to you. Worst of all was the C/D-pillar. That area that the teardrop mirrors cut off should have been visible through a quick back glance, adjacent as it was to the standard blind spot. Not so much in this. On I-95, my Northern Virginia-developed anticipation mostly covered me. On city streets approaching the airport when returning the car, lane changes were signal-and-pray.

It’s a shame, because I wanted to like this car — I’m fond of hatchbacks on principle, the bottle cooler is a good idea, and the available 120V electrical outlet on higher trimlines is a godsend to those of us who travel with enough electronics to support the IT infrastructure of many small countries. But it falls just short in so many areas, and the visibility was deadly. Would I take it over a PT again? Absolutely. But anything else? Not unless I had a long drive requiring good legroom, in a low-congestion area where the blind spots wouldn’t be as dangerous. And that’s too bad.