Travesty in Detroit - PT Will Cruise No More

When a hallowed U.S. company sells out to private equity, some worry that buyout shops' relentless focus on the bottom-line will destroy a company's core culture and thus undermine its livelihood in the long-run. Cerberus Capital, the new owner of Chrysler, has to me confirmed these fears with its wrongheaded decision to nix the PT Cruiser. Evidently September sales of the PT declined 42 percent from a year ago, and Cerberus sees this as grounds for discontinuing the model.


Such short-sightedness! The PT may have momentarily fallen out favor as the public swoons over new models (such as Chrysler's own Dodge Caliber), but ultimately you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. The PT's brilliance of design and style is bound to once again captivate public consciousness. I think of the PT as Miles Davis; shifts in public taste dimmed Miles' popularity from time to time, but he always rebounded because the intrinsic beauty of his playing could adapt to any era. Similarly, had the PT been allowed to survive (undergoing the normal periodic upgrades of any vehicle line), newer models would have found their way back into the sunshine of popular demand.

The PT aesthetic will once again surge whether or not Chrysler is manufacturing new ones. It is irrepressible. Unfortunately for Cerberus, this resurgence will benefit only used-car dealers, Ebay sellers, and other owners of existing PTs. In an attempt to boost short-term profitability, Cerberus has ironically shut itself off from huge future income streams. What do you expect from a group who named their firm after Milton's "three-headed mutt with a serpent’s tail and a mane of snakes, assigned to prevent ghosts of the dead from leaving Hell."

Brief internet browsing has assured me of the existence of others who appreciate the PT's unique elegance. Some wise soul has launched a petition to dissuade Cerberus from its PT-killing folly and I urge readers to sign. I firmly believe that Cerberus' decision is borne of ignorance, ignorance of the legions of people such as myself who admire PT Cruisers without even driving them. Let's face it - a PT Cruiser on your block generates positive externalities. When James Traub describes Portland, Oregon as a "quality of life capital", my mind jumps to the rainbow of PTs crossing the Hawthorne Bridge. That's quality living!

If Cerberus could only devise some scheme to capture this surplus - say by soliciting donations from people who derive aesthetic value from a large quantity of PTs - maybe this income could compensate for the PT's (temporarily) flagging sales. The hard-headed among you may dismiss such a scheme as quixotic; has not the Radiohead free download experiment proven that many people will pay for goods of value without being coerced? I say the experiment is worth trying, and I hope some far-sighted employee at Chrysler will convince management of this.

Assuming Cerberus cannot be enlightened of their error, I say - Farewell, PT! Your genius was too much for this world to handle.