Question: What's the Most Ridiculous Use of "GT" Badging?
A Grand Touring car is— or used to be— a big, fast, luxurious machine made for long drives to high-roller destinations. Once automobile manufacturers figured out that they could stamp out GT badges just as cheaply as Brougham emblems, we started seeing some truly silly GTs on the street. Say, the Hyundai Excel GT. Or the Plymouth Scamp GT, which wasn’t even a car. Even with those examples to choose from, my vote for the most absurd GT has to go to the Pontiac Vibe GT. Do you think a decadent, Quaaludes-and- Chartreuse-addled Italian countess would have driven a grubby little badge-engineered Toyota econobox to Monaco at an average clip of 115 MPH?
Though, on second thought, the Scamp GT may have the Vibe GT beat for Least Appropriate Use of GT Badging. What do you think?
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I am so glad that nobody nominated the Opel GT.
As others have pointed out, the Vibe GT started out as a manual only 8200RPM thing, which is fairly racy as far as modern powertrains go. They kept the model names, but when they went to the 2nd gen of the Vibe/Matrix they replaced the 1.8 with a 2.4, and lost the 6 speed, and even sold them as automatics. So not only did they ruin the vibe's good looks, but they shitcanned the fun and fizzy powertrain. We have an '03 Vibe GT, and it's awesome, so shut up. :p