Pontiac has been treated like the redheaded step child, of the General for some time now. No wonders why because the engineers and designers over at Pontiac can do things so much better. We barely ever get to see the ideas that come out of Pontiac as most are out rightly rejected by the General.

I wouldn’t stop to give a lending hand to Mr. Lutz. If I saw him broke down on the side of the road. However, even I wouldn’t say all of Pontiac’s woes are the result of his faults. It begin long ago when the scumbags of Chevorlet begin to rise through the ranks. When they crossed that thresehold into the General Motors management they only sought to Cheverlotlize everything.

Frederic Donner’s infamous “no more racing” memo. He might have been a great beancounter but he didn’t know diddle about Marketing or Cars in general. It’s a long chain of people like him that have ruined General Motors over the years.

“quasimondo” You must not know much about Pontiac? I’d rather be driving a rusted out Pontiac than whatever it is your driving.

“whatdoiknow1″ The Fiero was at best an OK car…
I think your missing the point. The General wouldn’t invest in Pontiac’s idea as it should have. Have you seen what the Fiero guys can do with a modest budget? It cost a lot more for an individual to upgrade something than what a factory could do on the spot with an assmebly line approach. Some of those Fiero guys have built some awsome machines both in power and handling… Again GM failing to invest in a good product idea, that’s what hurt the Fiero, not Pontiac designers or engineers…

“KnightRT” I think some of you need to step out of the “car guy” box and see the industry for how everyone else sees it… Brand loyalty? Whatever.
I beg to differ greatly with your view. As Harely Earl said “I can sell a young man’s car to an old man but I can’t never sell an old man’s car to a young man”. Meaning if you build something stylish, sporty, dependable and affordable both the young and old alike will want to buy it. If you build only old man styling then you’ve killed off all young buyers and your future… Now this may come as a shock to you but brand loyality still exsist today. There are overwhellming numbers of people who will not own anything else but a BMW, Ford, Chevy, and yes even a Pontiac…

I’d rather drive a 10 year old Pontiac than be given a brand new BMW for free.

BMW is a sporty brand whose flagships are sold with 4-doors (M3, M5).

I think you meant to say, “BMW is a sporty brand whose flagships are sold with 4 doors (M3, M5).”

HTH!

Note the conspicuous lack of hyphens.

HTH!

My comment about BMW wasn’t negative regarding either BMW or Pontiac/GM. BMW isn’t trading on “better” relative to its primary competitors, it is trading on “different” and distinctiveness. Arguably BMWs are worse than many other cars in a conventional sense. They’re less reliable than many. Their interior space utilization and comfort isn’t best. Their current generation styling is bitterly controversial. And the vaunted “feel” of a BMW is being steadily diluted, acccording to many of its maven customers.

And yet, BMWs still do feel distinct, and the brand is a convincing draw for a range of people who have no real understanding of the product. When you see a BMW driver pulled over on I-80 heading into the Sierras in snow installing mandatory chains on only the *front* wheels of his car, you know you’re looking at a brand and image buyer. Same when you’re at a gas station in Boston and see a 3 series with snows on only the front wheels in January. Brand pulls all sorts of people in.

My point was that Pontiac should build their own idea of a compelling car, not BMW’s or anyone else’s.

You’re right, the here and now of product is the biggest driver. Pontiac slunk through the ’50s with a dowdy image and a conscious decision to make it a youth-oriented brand in the 1960s succeeded because the strategy was backed by product changes. The brand can be taken any direction GM wants, but it must be *a* direction, not many. However, Pontiac has a successful past to reference. It shouldn’t be constrained by that past but inspired by it. The G8 is a hedge. Bring on a real vision for Pontiac and build a compelling value.

Phil

The negativity here is stifling.

I think some of you need to step out of the “car guy” box and see the industry for how everyone else sees it. The only reason BMW is on top is that they’re the best. It’s a thin line to walk, a damn thin line. The perch is hugely precarious, as BMW found out when they screwed with the 3-series steering in 2001.

Brand loyalty? Whatever. It’s about buying the best vehicle at the best value. GM has half the market share they had just 25 years. Half. If that plunge tells you anything at all, it’s that people behave rationally. Better car for less money? Fine, we’ll buy that.

The converse is that any brand can be anything, brand identity be damned. It doesn’t matter a whit what Pontiac was in 1969 or 1979 or 1989 or even five years ago. You’re not buying nostalgia, you’re buying a vehicle. If Pontiac came out with a car genuinely better than a BMW for less money, you’d better believe people would jump ship. Or Toyota, or Hyundai. The strength of a “brand” rises and falls in exact proportion to the strength of its product.

Lutz gets it, but some of you seem to think the company is doomed to fail because past products sucked. None of that matters. It’s all about the now, more than ever before.

Jim Wangers’ book, Glory Days: When Horsepower and Passion Ruled Detroit, covers the development of the original Firebird.

Pontiac was not originally included in the F-car program. Pontiac did want to produce the Banshee. When that idea was shot down by management, Pontiac was told to make a Pontiac out of the Camaro. It had a very short lead time to do this, but the car did not debut until early 1967. Argentla’s account is accurate.

Interestingly, Oldsmobile wanted in on the F-car program, but was told “no” by the 14th floor. As a substitute, the corporation looked the other way while it violated the engine-size limit in the F-85/Cutlass to create the Hurst Olds (which actually had the big engine installed at the Olds’ factory, not at the aftermarket shop, as was told in the “official” story).

Captive imports typically have the longevity of a fruit fly, which crushes resale value. Obtaining competent repairs and sourcing parts is near impossible.

I’ll stipulate that this is largely true, with one reservation: captive imports that are simultaneously sold by their manufacturer (such as the Geo/Chevy Tracker and the Suzuki Sidekick/Vitara) are relatively immune to this effect. After all, I’m reasonably sure that a Suzuki dealer could service a Tracker with little difficulty.

That being said, I think that captive imports are generally a bad idea. After all, why should a customer remain loyal to a brand when that brand is willing to slap its name on someone else’s vehicle and call it good?

I read your article in the link you listed and while it’s a nice writeup it’s not an official history of the car. You don’t list any sources for your article concerning timeframes and when Pontiac was told to “make a car of the Camaro”. Now you do mention De Lorean’s book, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors. If the account about the creation of the Firebird came from him, well then, that’s from the horses mouth, do to speak.

I do know that the Firebird like the Chevrolet Camaro introduction coincided with the release of the Mercury Cougar, which shared its platform with another well-known pony car, the Mustang. Since I always thought the Pontiac was more sophisticated looking than the Chevy I wondered if it had been developed to compete with the Cougar while the Camaro went up against the Mustang. Interestingly the Cougar was also the target for Dodge using the new E body for a car of it’s own (Challenger) when it came time for the Plymouth Barracuda to be redesigned.

However, this dual dealer network over at GM (not to mention assorted other things like Saturn and Saab) makes it hard to give everybody truely unique products. It’s only profitable if Pontiac/Buick/GMC is mostly a slightly (very slightly) upscale version of Chevy, a Chevy Part Deux of sorts. Likewise, anything important you would want to give to Chevy at a minimum, since Chevy’s sales alone account for about 60% of GM’s domestic sales. Cadillac (which is important and deservedly gets unique product) is about 5% of GM’s sales. So, that leaves only 35% for Buick/Pontiac/GMC/Hummer/Saab/Saturn combined. Obviously, a whole lot of that stuff will be rebadged Chevys, or odd imported things like rebadged Holdens or Opels.

Proof of his fizzled con-artistry, I submit, may be found in the laughable Delorean. Why wouldn’t everyone want an ugly, unreliable, $low, $tainle$$ $teel pile built in Ireland?

Pontiac should never try to “live up” to this fraud’s dreams.

Until the scabs of rust began to show. Until I had to replace the motor mounts. Regularly. And then that computer problem, Grrrrrr!

About the only thing that worked correctly over the whole time I had it where the T-Tops!

That was one car that I suppose I’m not sad I had. But I now realize that EVERYTHING about that car should have been easier and less expensive than it was. So I would never buy another one.

The Fiero was simply outclassesd one year after introduction by the Toyota MR2. A lighter, faster and better handling car. It was also light years ahead of the Fiero in terms of build quality and fit and finish.

The Fiero was the classic victim of GMs piss-poor culture. Once GM realized it had a car with true potential GM had to hamper it as not to perform better than a Firebird or Corvette. GM had an excellent engine to install in the Fiero back than, the H.O Quad4 that with an output of 180hp back in the late 1980s! Too bad they killed the car before it could have become a really serious player.

It was sad watching Pontiacs go down the tubes. Also sad to be laughed at because I own a Fiero.

Truth is, the Fiero was full of compromises, the Solstice is full of compromises, the G is full of compromises. Sure isn’t conducive of being called the “excitement division”.

Pontiac should not try to build BMWs. Cadillacs shouldn’t be BMWs either, but they should have the performance metrics in certain models, and the tech & luxury cred. GM will be better off when it lets Pontiac build Pontiacs.

Forget the aimless years. No, make that decades. And forget about the other eras when Pontiacs were a little premium but dull. “Wide Track,” and all that was a response to making previously pedestrian Pontiacs relevant to a volcanic youth culture during a time of generational change. It was during an era of brand resurgence powered by engineered marketing and engineering, that Pontiacs became dramatic in a way that has led us to measure only loss since. Such was the nature of Bill Mitchell’s cars and John DeLorean’s foresight in building them.

The Pontiacs of that resurgent shift to youth culture were hot cars, variously vivid, fierce, confident and relaxed. They had street presence, refinement for their price, with more than a little unruliness intentionally left in the can. Pontiacs were somewhat more developed hot cars for young-thinking people, with a brand hinge in the 4-door sedan that skewed unruliness toward refinement and pugnacious presence to visual elegance as you moved up the line. A Firebird, GTO, Catalina and Bonneville looked and felt of the same lineage as the mix of Pontiac traits gently dialed the drama rheostat inverse to price. You expected to be noticed.

G8 is a promising car on paper, sufficiently modern visually to appeal to upmarket self-perceivers, and almost certainly will prove a punchy performance value. GM’s advance marketing for the car infuses it with the aura of appropriate emotion. But I don’t expect the G8 to induce the same emotional urgency. It’s not dramatic enough.

Pontiac style ranged from vivid to serene. The defining Pontiacs represented a visual continuum with anchor points that allowed street toughs and beach boy rodders their cred and fun while pulling single males and young-thinking Dads under the brand parasol for some muscled-up elegance that kept the kid inside them tamed. The engineering has to be competitive, but GM can’t sell a badged engine and call it a car. A Pontiac has to feed imagination and induce that urgency to be had.

Phil

(I recently wrote about the birth of the Firebird here.)

Pontiac in the sixties had a performance image, which is definitely not the same thing as having all the cars in their line-up being performance models. It was mostly a clever marketing campaign built around the publicity effect of the GTO; the Super Duty models died in ‘63 after Frederic Donner’s infamous “no more racing” memo. You could still get some powerful engines in most Pontiacs, not just the GTO (don’t forget the equivalent Catalina 2+2), and the mid-60’s Ponchos had arguably the best styling of their A- and B-body relatives. By the late 60’s they had the Firebird and the G-body Grand Prix, which was basically a long-nose GTO. But, other than some clever marketing gimmicks, that was about it.

The thing is, it worked. Pontiac sales for ‘69 were over 900,000, #3 in the industry. It wasn’t a matter of doing anything radically different, just of putting the right pieces and the right marketing cues in the right places. In the 70’s, after De Lorean was moved to Chevy, they immediately fell on hard times — they tried to expand both up-market and down-market at the same time, their image became hazy, and their quality sank. In the early part of the decade they had the SD455 and a few things like that, but by the end of it their bread-and-butter product was mostly indistinguishable from Chevy’s.

The Fiero was, as another poster mentioned, a repetition of the Banshee problem. It was initially developed as a cheap sports car to compete with the likes of the Fiat X1/9. The corporation didn’t bite. Instead of giving up, the division pitched it as a cheap commuter car, leading the resulting car (until close to the end of its life) to be hopelessly compromised such that it was neither a good economy car nor much of a sportster.

The Camaro debuted in the fall of 1966 (the normal introduction time for the next year’s models in those days).

The Firebird didn’t debut until early 1967, or about six months after the Camaro.
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True, but the delay was a planned market introduction. the two cars were developed side by side. It wasn’t like they intro’d the Camaro in the fall of ‘66 and then slapped themselves in the forehead and said “hey, we should make a Pontiace version too!”

As far as I can tell Pontiacs idea of a performance car in the 70s and 80s was a fake sportcars instrament panel full of blank gauges and a column shifter.

Toyota has more of a performanc heritage than Pontiac!

For $10,000 more, I get . . . .. a cheap plastic . . bodykit? and a batmobile spoiler? and a few extra horsepower? and some gaudy rims?

oh forget it.

The Pontiac Grand Am did extremely well for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, GM let the basic design languish for WAY too long. As a result they thought the name had a negative connotation to it and shelved it. Quite a dumb move since the Grand Am was a strong selling compact for most of it’s life.

Grand Am’s tend to do very well in the 7+ year old used car market due to it’s uniqueness for that time. The exhaust growl, the upscale options in a compact, and it’s practicality were unique for their time. Unfortunately the Civic, 3, Focus, and Elantra came to the fore and more or less made the Grand Am a remnant of a bygone era.

Exactly. You buy a BMW because it’s engineered, assembled and tuned to be driven on the Autobahn (even though you’ll be driving this vehicle over here at 65mph on crappy highways and interstates).

You buy Caddie’s “professional grade” sports sedans because of marketing hype and posture. You definately don’t buy them for the history of driving these vehicle at their limits for years on end.

Well maybe that’s not fair; I’m sure there are 10 or 20 Caddies on the Autobahn at any one moment. That’s a nice sample size…

The Camaro debuted in the fall of 1966 (the normal introduction time for the next year’s models in those days).

The Firebird didn’t debut until early 1967, or about six months after the Camaro.