By the year 2000, the Chrysler Pronto Cruiser was shoveled over, and the PT Cruiser as we know it turned out. The car started very successfully, people were standing in line waiting for their cars. Brian Nesbitt, by the way, seemed to suspect something, and therefore fled to General Motors as soon as car sales began (where he created the equally dubious Chevrolet HHR, but this is a completely different story).
Pretty soon, everything went the way it went: the PT Cruiser turned out to be extremely unreliable, slow, and there was nothing in it at all except the appearance, and no one liked it except those who bought the car initially. Therefore, after the first year of production, sales quickly and decisively began to trend towards zero. Chrysler began to save its car: in 2003, a turbocharged GT model appeared, in 2005 a convertible appeared (a two-door, by the way, and it looked many times better than the original model with its frankly lame roof), in 2006 the PT Cruiser received a small facelift and a whole package of electronics, and then… then Chrysler stopped trying to resuscitate the corpse, and in 2010 the last PT Cruiser rolled off the assembly line. At that time, no one at Chrysler cared so much about the car that an official press release was not even prepared for such an event.
But in 2002, everything seemed so great that Chrysler even started planning the second generation PT Cruiser. The only prototype of the 2.0 model was named the Chrysler California Cruiser and, frankly, looked much better than the 1.0 model, but… That’s why they’re prototypes. Obviously, if the California Cruiser had reached the assembly line, there wouldn’t have been much left of it either, and who knows what kind of freak it would have turned into.
But it’s worth noting that the roof shape in the California Cruiser has been fixed (it was only worth making it a little lower and adjusting the rear pillar, we lost such a car!), and the engine was originally turbocharged. The problems did not go unnoticed and the designers were clearly on the right track to solve them. It is quite possible that Chrysler should have simply abandoned the PT Cruiser and started production of a new car, rather than fighting for an initially dubious project. Who, if not them, could have abandoned the model after only one year of production? But it turned out that it did.
Sources: https://www.allcarindex.com/auto-car-model/United-States-Chrysler-California-Cruiser / (July 11th, 2011), https://www.caranddriver.com/news/chrysler-california-cruiser-auto-shows
