With Chrysler’s Super Bowl advertisement putting the company squarely in the spotlight, we were interested to see what they were going to roll out at the Chicago Auto Show. There have been rumors circling for a couple months that Chrysler was going to roll out some sort of “manly” mini-van. We hoped they wouldn’t, but they did. Proudly, in fact. The Caravan R/T is the type of dumb ass package we had hoped the domestic companies had moved on from, and it seems like two out of three have, but Chrysler obviously hasn’t.
There’s no change to the power plant, some horrible 1990s Pontiac-esque body cladding is added, the interior has black leather seats (GREAT for when your kids spill juice and snacks), and a set of dated before they were produced wheels find themselves on all four corners. At least they forgave us the indecency of a “sport” suspension.
Mini-vans are actually handy vehicles. We use them to haul all our crap when we do live streaming broadcasts of cover a big event where we need lots of equipment. They are NOT and will never be worthy of the R/T badge or designation. Can’t you just see the sleeze-bag salesman who is going to try and seduce Joe family guy on the lot into buying this “hot rod”. It makes us want to gag on our own tongue.
Was there a focus group where some dude said that he’d gladly eschew his Honda Odyssey if he could pilot a van with some body cladding, bad wheels, and leater seats in it? Hey, maybe it has the manu-matic transmission! Oh wait, it would still suck then, too.
So, the poll question. Has Chrysler forced the R/T badge to jump the shark with this addition? The Dodge Journey was a pretty horrible car/truck/thing to hang the R/T insignia on, but this seems downright blasphemous to us.
I think muscle cars snobs (I mean, aficionados) have to face the music and admit that R/T to you no longer means the same thing as R/T to Dodge. R/T is a trim level – The top rung of the ladder, and nothing more than that. SE, SXT, R/T. (with SRT still reserved for bigger engines). It doesn’t designate a particular sized engine, the presence of a Hemi, nor rear-wheel drive (maybe all-wheel drive though).
Even my old plain brown paper bag version of Grand Caravan (not even worthy of the “SE” designation) had the Manu-Matic. Now I drive that “pretty horrible R/T truck/car/thing” (and coincidentally, that’s what WE call it too), but we’re proud of it. It’s not horrible at all.