THE DODGE AVENGER: CHEAP AND WORTH EVERY PENNY

6/4/13

The big news on the May car sales front is that the cheap, and questionable, credit driven wave on which the car sales bubble has been riding (See my 5/23/13 piece THE CAR SALES BUBBLE:  “JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT AND THEN SIGN THAT LINE AND I’LL HAVE IT BROUGHT DOWN TO YOU IN A HOUR’S TIME”) seems to be losing steam.  While sales were up slightly, and still are running at a 15mm plus unit annual pace, the manufacturers have had to resort to price cuts, stair-step incentives for dealers, and even cheaper and looser credit to keep the customers coming through the doors.  What happened to all that pent-up demand?  As I said in my 4/25/13 piece, IMPORTED FROM DETROIT:   MARCHIONNE BETTER BE AS FAST AS A CHRYSLER 300 SRT8

All this talk of pent-up demand and the age of the fleet has some surface validity, but you can be sure that if money were not so cheap and readily available for vehicle financing, and payments thus so low, people would be able to satisfactorily, and perhaps happily, drive their old cars for many more miles, given how well cars are built nowadays.  In other words, if financing cars were not so cheap and readily available, so called pent-up demand would stay pent-up.

and that may be precisely what we are seeing. 

I was also taken by the details of the sales numbers.  Chrysler was one of the best performers of the month, with sales up 11% from last year to 166,596 units.  Especially strong was the Dodge brand, up 23%,  and, specifically, the Dodge Avenger, along with the Dodge Challenger, set a sales record in May.

The Dodge Challenger is another story, a niche car that aficionados seem to love but impresses yours truly as a fun example of what once made Detroit iron great but is probably way too large for a modern muscle car.   That’s what makes a market, however.

But the Dodge Avenger?  A sales record?

 As I’ve said on numerous occasions in the past, we can speak of cars nowadays as being lousy only in relative terms; there are no bad cars out there any more, at least not in this country.   But there are cars out there that are not nearly as good as their competitors, and the Dodge Avenger is certainly one of them.   The standard four cylinder engine is about as close to a piece of garbage as one can find out there…it is buzzy, loud, weak, and thirsty.  The optional new Chrysler Pentastar V-6 is better…it is quieter, more powerful, and gets just about the same gas mileage as the 4.  While the 4 cylinder is years behind its competition, the Pentastar is nearly competitive.  Aside from the engine, the Avenger’s yawn inducing handling is not at all counterbalanced by its only decent ride.  Despite a few upgrades this year, the car still feels cheap.   Reliability is, by today’s standards, bordering on abysmal.   Given the Avenger’s omnipresence in rental car fleets, is resale value is horrid.  The car is at the bottom of its category in Consumer Reports ratings.   Motor Trend, in its new car issue, follows the blurb on each new car with a pithy sentence or phrase that sums up its opinion.  For the Avenger, that sentence was a question:  “Avenging what, exactly?”

To sum it up, the Avenger is about as close as one can get to a bad car nowadays.  To its credit, Chrysler knows it has duds in the Avenger and in its corporate cousin, the Chrysler 200, which at least has a slightly nicer interior, marginally better ride and handling, and is a decent looking car.   Both will be replaced (or the Avenger will be dumped altogether and the new 200 will fill the mid-sized duties at Chrysler) by a Fiat or Alfa based midsizer soon, perhaps within a year.  If the Dodge Dart is any indication, the new car, or cars, will be a vast improvement, though not at the top of its class.  See my 1/31/13 piece, CHRYSLER’S PROBLEM:  IT’S (MOST OF) THE PRODUCT, STUPID!  

So why has the Avenger sold so well?  Is the American car buyer stupid?   No; perhaps the American car shopper is, indeed, merely careful with his or her money, because the Avenger is very inexpensive…outright cheap, really, and not only in the look of its interior.  Forget sticker price, by which the Avenger only looks a little less expensive than the competition.  Look the sale papers; Avengers can easily be bought new in the mid teens.  This is a midsized car, with decent equipment, in the mid teens, a price for which one has a difficult time buying better compacts from the Japanese marques or from Ford or GM.   If one is just looking for transportation that will not give one too many problems, and one insists on a new car, the Avenger is not a bad buy.   That is why the Avenger is selling so well; it doesn’t cost much money and it’s worth every penny.

On the other hand, the Chrysler 300, Chrysler’s best car (though one might get some arguments from Dodge Challenger aficionados) that is fully competitive with anything in its class and with many cars a class or two higher, is not selling well, despite its also being something of a bargain.  (See my 5/1/13 piece, CHRYSLER’S QUARTER:   HOW DO YOU SAY “POOR MOUTH” IN ITALIAN?) Go figure.