Plymouth Pronto
Car of the Day #270: 1998 Plymouth Pronto – PT it wasn’t made
Five months after showing the Pronto spyder at the North American International Auto Show in January 1998, Plymouth — along with its parent company, Chrysler, merged with Daimler.
Plymouth died, later, in 2001; it not only handed off its budget brand wares to both Dodge (Neon) and Chrysler (PT Cruiser), but managed to build literally one modern, enthusiast-minded car: the Pronto Spyder.
1997 Plymouth Pronto concept car • via Chrysler
Shown as part of a trio of cars that included the mainstream Pronto 5-door hatchback (1997) and Pronto Cruizer coupe (1998), only the latter would enter production, as the PT Cruiser.
PT is short, apparently, for Pronto. Now you know.
1998 Plymouth Pronto Cruizer concept car. • via Chrysler
Four years after the Pronto Spyder was shown, and one year after Plymouth was in the grave, Dodge showed the Razor coupe, another small sports car.
How perfect either would have seemed, alongside the similarly modest Mazda MX-5 Miata, and later, the Toyota MR-S, Pontiac Solstice, Saturn Sky, and Fiat 124 roadsters?
Instead, we got the Mercedes-Benz-adjacent Chrysler Crossfire — the easy way.
The toughest route, and least likely from the outset, was for Plymouth to engineer a plastic-bodied, mid-engined sports car.
We all know this. There’s no happy ending.
Tell that to a teenaged me, who was at this very NAIAS auto show, and watched it rotate. It was all too possible…
The Pronto is mentioned at the beginning, no need to skip ahead. • via Motorweek on YouTube
At the time, Chrysler was riding high; its engineering talent was top-notch, and it was capable of executing compelling cars across multiple segments. I know, because I grew up in these cars; my friends, family, and time in dealerships gave me seat time in just about every ’90s Pentastar product.
They weren’t half bad. I’d wager a sports car from that era of Plymouth — and its cheap ‘n’ cheerful switchgear — would’ve had a dynamic edge over the later style-obsessed and hopelessly impractical Solstice and Sky.
Another point in Plymouth’s favour: the car was plastic, with the body colour mixed into the panels. I can’t say for certain if this was a growth from the company’s CCV project, which used giant presses to form large composite panels. This technique was later used to make Wrangler hardtops.
