I rented a 2004 Chrysler 300 for a month and put a few thousand miles on the car in the process. The miles were highway and city, in no traffic to stop and go, so I was able to get a good appreciation of the car while I had it. The car had a little more then two thousand miles on the odometer when I picked it up.
The first thing that I noticed was the amount of room in the car. It can seat five comfortably, and the trunk is large enough for a months worth of luggage. I always seemed to be picked to be the “driver” when the other vehicle that we had could not carry everyone just because of the available space in the car.
The next thing that I noticed when I got into the car was the appearance and layout from the driver's perspective. I would have to say that the first impression is that this is a serious rival to Cadillac, Lincoln, and the plethora of European and Japanese luxury cars on the market now. Even in the modest trim available from the rental agency, I was impressed. The dash has a luxury feel, and the clock is a quartz movement with hands, not the typical digital timepiece found on most cars. I would say that Chrysler went a long way to make this feel like something that should be one step above its price range.
The real test came when I got the car on the road. Since it was equipped with the smaller engine, acceleration seemed sluggish, and the engineering fix seemed to be to have the transmission downshift as soon as the accelerator was stepped on with any force. This helped while passing, but it did not help much when starting from a stop. I was impressed with the car’s ability to move from sixty to eighty, which was helpful in highway driving.
Another problem that I found was in breaking. It seemed to take forever to get the car to stop from sixty miles per hour. There were a few times when I honestly felt that I would hit the car in front of me when I found a red light while driving at the posted speed of sixty-five miles per hour. I am used to driving a smaller, sports tuned car, so someone used to driving larger cars might not find this a problem, but for someone moving from a lighter car to the 300, this is something to keep in mind.
The air conditioning seemed to take quite a while to cool the car, and there seemed to be very limited airflow to the back seat. Granted, most of the driving was done in Atlanta and coastal Georgia in June, but I would still expect to have the car cool more quickly then it did. There were air vents for the back seat passengers, but the flow was very light, and the passengers were usually asking for more air when the front seat passengers were cool.
When I first saw the car, I was not overly impressed with the 㣂’s “chopped top” design. To me it was something reminiscent of Al Capone. Eventually, the styling grew on me, and I could see when Chrysler was going with it, and how it fit into a product line including the PT Cruiser and the Prowler. It looks like Chrysler is trying to put some kind of a retro look into everything that they are making. In order to establish the retro feel in the 300, they had to shorten the height of the windshield and increase its slope. While from a styling aspect it is viable, from the driver’s perspective, it limits the viewing area, and makes it particularly difficult to see the road with the sun visors down.
If I were looking for a luxury car, I would defiantly put the Chrysler 300 on the short list. For a car starting at $23,500 it feels like something in the $40,000 price range. I would move up to the 300C with the Hemi engine, anti-lock performance disk brakes, and the automatic air conditioning with dual zone control. These options should solve most of the trouble areas that I found with the car. With the additional options that come standard on the C model, it should be a $33,000 car that feels like a $50,000 car, and why spend $50,000 when you can have the same luxury for $33,000?
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