Last week, I got it into my head that I was going to trade the PT no matter what. So I hit the Chevrolet dealership as the HHR is going to be my next ride. It seemed that they really didn't want to sell me a car, but did advise that I get the PT fixed before trading as I will save several bucks on my monthly payments when I get a higher trade-in value. Fair comment.
While I was at the dealership, I checked out the HHR in the amethyst color. A lot lighter than the maroon / purple of my PT, but a very nice, metallic purple nonetheless. Oh yeh, nice ride.
The rep thought I should have had a 60k drive train warranty on the transmission and that I should call the dealership that I bought it from. I did - they said that it was a 36k warranty and I was only just out of it. In my frustration, I asked the girl what she suggested I should do as the car doesn't even have 40k miles on it and to have the transmission trash itself can't be right. She suggested I call Chrysler and gave me a toll free number.
Before I called Chrysler, I got on the 'net and did what I'm best at... researched the whole PT Cruiser, transmission thing. It tranpsires that it is a known problem on 2002 PT's. There are many, many cases of the planetary gear exploding and trashing the transmission. That is exactly what happened to mine.
Armed with this information, I called Chrysler and 90 mins later had spoken to two different people, been on hold longer than was talking but was left with the impression that they actually did want to help. I made it known that I was aware that it was a known problem on the PTs and it was highly documented on the Internet... With their willingness to listen and help, I was reassured and they were supposed to be calling me back the next day.
Not surprisingly, the call didn't come and I was so exhausted that I didn't call them. I came home from work, picked up Kurtis from the sitter, came home and went to bed. I haven't mentioned that through all of this I was also quite sick... some kind of virus. I had been sick most of the time since Thanksgiving and was already wiped out from intensive rehearsals and four Christmas concerts with the church, so from being sick with a flu like virus for that amount of time had left me wiped out. All this car business and Christmas on top of that was all a bit of a blur really.
Back to the plot... I called Chrysler the next day and another rep got on the case. Long story short - really, it is - they had negotiated with Ron Carter - the dealership that had the car and quoted the $3,700 - and got the price down to $2768, of which Chrysler were going to pay $1,000. We had to pay $1,768 which, is very good for a new transmission so we couldn't really grumble. Needless to say, we accepted their offer.
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