The next time we saw the Cruiser was when a local dealership rented one in Florida and drove it to Dayton to place in its showroom. We weren't allowed to drive it or to even play the radio, but it looked great! Lots of creature comforts went into the inside of the vehicle, but the outside remained nicely free of the types of things that usually go into a car to change it from a prototype to a production model. The price also shocked us, rather than being expensive this thing was priced where we could afford it. Clyde would eventually cost us under $20k.

We talked about waiting to order the car so that it could be a college graduation present, but eventually lost our heads and ordered on April 28, 2000. We put a deposit down and agreed to pay MSRP when it came in. We were smitten. We eventually found a dealership 20 miles east of Dayton tht would allow us to test drive a PTCruiser they had. We went out there twice just to get a taste of the driving experience. Late last summer we even rented one for a weekend to make sure we were going to like living with it. We knew then that we would wait for its arrival, no matter how long the wait eventually lasted.

We started checking in regularly at a couple of Internet FORUM sites for the latest news on production of the cars. We'd been told to expect our car in 12 to 20 weeks. Little did we know this was not going to happen. After 24 weeks it was clear that our wait was less than halfway over at the dealership where we ordered. We'd learned a hard lesson about allocation. Chrysler was shipping more Cruisers to dealerships who sell larger volumes of the other vehicles in the Chrysler fleet. I saw online where someone who ordered 2 days before we did at a larger dealership in Columbus received their car in August of 2000, but it loked like I wasn't going to see ours until August of 2001. On November 10, 2000 I called the larger dealer and inquired about wait times. They told me that if I placed an order with them I would see it around April 10, 2001. This was only 5 months away! I agreed and a new wait began.

We made attempts to coax Chrysler to build our car a little quicker with efforts like this:

Nothing seemed to help, so we settled in for the wait. On March 28, 2001 we received THE CALL from our dealership. Our car had arrived that very morning and would we like to come pick it up?! Yuh! We headed East that afternoon at supra-legal speeds (aided by a tail-wind) and arrived to see Clyde still wrapped in its shipping materials. It had everything we ordered and nothing we didn't. The dealership didn't try to tack on any extras without asking us first, and even put locking wheel nuts on it for free to protect the wheels from theft! Next they delivered a large-scale diecast model to us while we spoke to the folks in Finance at the dealership.

After three hours Clyde was finally almost ready. It was time to return to Dayton so I could attend my first night of class for the Spring Quarter. That was a fun drive home as the boys sat in the back seat of the Cruiser and Chris tried to keep up with a giddy husband piloting Clyde towards home.

It's now two weeks later. Since his arrival Clyde has received a shift-knob transplant (see photo 10), a CD-changer, a rear step pad to protect the bumper when loading and unloading, and a home-made underseat drawer that fits the rails designed for a factory-option drawer. Clyde received a smack in the nose from a large rock on the commute to work, but that was corrected by a local body shop this past week. The body shop gave me a quote for some flames on the hood so Clyde is spending another week in the paint booth.

So was it worth it? Yes! Would I do this again? No way! I'll never wait 11 months for a vehicle ever again! We are very fortunate that the PTCruiser seems to be of exceptionally high quality. No major defects have been reported by any of the thousands of people who post to the Internet Forums dedicated to this wonderful car. We get funny looks from people and the occasional honk and wave. That will die down as more of these cars hit the streets. I've already seen three other black Cruisers while driving mine, but it'll be a while before it gets hard to find our car in a parking lot.