My first review will feature a car previously featured on AutoFug – the Dodge Caliber. Will a car deemed fugly have a fugly personality? In this case, the answer is yes. In short, my experience with the Caliber did not leave me with a surplus of happy thoughts. Why? The answer is varied.
The LookFirst off, I don’t think the car is all that attractive. While the looks have grown on me a bit, it’s still a bit boring and cartoonish in its proportions. Its exterior features are exaggerated and make what is actually quite a large car for its class look smaller when seen from a distance. Its fender flares are comically inflated, and an unfortunate side effect of this was that the rear door of the car I drove was peppered with rock nicks from where the front wheels picked up road debris and kicked it off the protruding flares for the rear wheel wells. After a few years of ownership I’m sure it’ll turn an attractive shade of rust.
The Interior
I would also recommend that claustrophobic people avoid this car. It’s an odd car – they’re trying for an SUV feel with a higher stance, yet a sport’s car feel with narrow windows fit for a tank. There’s tons of headroom, but you feel constricted as the roof curves down on the edges toward the narrow door openings. I'd smacked my head into this a couple times getting out, not being used to how small the door openings are. Adding to the confined feelings are huge A-pillars and the tiny rear window (whose top edge sits way too low to maintain a sleeker profile).
Because of the lack of visibility, I found it very hard to judge distances in this car – something that should not be hard in a car this size. For such a large (compact) car, you don’t get a feeling of spaciousness either. Well – you do in a way, but it’s a feeling of compromised spaciousness. The windshield seems miles away feels like wasted space, and contributes to the aforementioned blind spots and makes it difficult to place the front of the car. The windshield itself was steeply raked and bugged my eyes, either due to imperfects in the glass enhanced by it's rake and distance from my eyes, or from reflections from the expanse of dash sitting underneath. The effect reminds me a bit of a minivan but with worse visibility. In fact I found myself referring to the Caliber as a chop-top minivan to most of the people I talked to.
Its larger size does give it the advantage of a bit more width than some cars in its class – you aren’t forced to rub elbows with your passengers.
Focusing on materials and design, the inside of the car was abysmal. I found the dash layout a bit boring, plain and truck-like, but the main offense with the industrial grade plastics used. Most plastics were as soft as concrete. And this is from a person whose dialer driver is a Hyundai (whose car is from before the time when Hyundai kicked it up a notch in their interior quality). Using the dash while driving seems relatively easy - things are easy to reach and straight forward. Well, except for a few key areas. The most noticeable is the turn signal that you have to slam into place - I often had to do it twice until it stays on. And if it doesn't cancel itself, clicking it off feels (and sounds) like you're breaking it. Another slight annoyance is the placement of the vents. On cold mornings, I like to aim the vents nearest me to point at my hands on the cold steering wheel to warm them. However, the Caliber's aren't positioned to do so. The leftmost vent is knee level and doesn't aim up that high, and the right hand one is centered in the car too far to do much good. Also strange is that the E-brake lever is next to the passenger seat, which doesn't exactly fall at hand. NOTE: I drove and wrote this review about a year ago, and Chrysler has since revised the dash layout, so I’m sure they fixed a bunch of these quibbles.
The Drive
The car doesn't seem to drive too bad, but there are a few issues. It seems to corner relatively flat, but it bobs up and down when you hit any roughness. Hit a bump on a corner and it upsets the car so much you feel as if you're going to go off the road, likely a product of it’s SUV-ish ride height. Power is mediocre – enough to keep up with traffic. The auto transmission seemed relatively good at downshifting as I never experienced a time that I felt it was in the wrong gear, waiting for a gear change to keep up. Except when at speed on the highway... Although it gets up to speed fine, the auto seems to shift a bit early at cruising speeds (presumably because it’s in a higher gear for increased mileage rather than power). Dipping into the gas at all causes the auto to downshift, if only for a couple seconds, leading to a jerky driving style that isn’t good for maintaining a speed amongst other traffic. Not to mention the fact that the car always feels to be hesitating before it does anything.
Also strange is the gas and brake petal placement. The brake feels as if it sits further out than the gas, and the petals seem to behave the opposite of each other, exaggerating the effect. Put you foot on the gas, and you have to press pretty far (lots of travel) to get a response, but there isn't much resistance. Push your foot on the brake, and there's a ton of resistance and the petal travel seems restricted. It makes it hard to judge how aggressively to brake. I found myself braking too late or too hard a lot.
Final impressions:
There isn't really all that much I liked about this car - things that would make me desire this car more than others. Well – the stereo was pretty good and it had a full size spare. But for all that was good (or in most cases mediocre), there was something equally bad about the design to counter it. I have a feeling this car was ruled by form before function. Which is strange to me, given that the form isn't all that satisfying. And in a car like this - which is usually used as day to day transport - shouldn't function before form be the norm anyway?
