In Search of… the Pontiac G8

Less than sixty days ago, I wrote about my brother’s seemingly quixotic quest to purchase a year-old Pontiac G8 at something less than sticker price. Time after time, he’d been placed on endless hold, denied test drives, and generally treated with the type of courtesy normally reserved for guest stars of “To Catch a Predator.” After more than ninety days of intermittent searching, the best price we’d been able to find was a sorta-invoice deal from a dealer in Texas, more than a thousand miles away. Did I mention his trade-in? It was a 63k-mile Mazda RX-8 which was on its second rotary engine thanks to an autocross motor implosion and which also featured a fascinating array of scratches, rocker-panel dents, and impact-wrench-installed suspension upgrades.

To be honest, I was pleased he hadn’t found a value-priced Poncho. Just a few more months of intransigent mouth-breathing GM dealers and I’d be able to bait-and-switch him into a Taurus SHO, which is clearly a better car to anyone but the most ardent Crocodile Dundee fan. But just as it is always darkest right before the dawn, sometimes the best deals don’t appear until you’ve given up hope.

In our Midwest-wide search for a vaguely sane dealer, we’d skipped exactly one Pontiac store. The dealer around the corner from my brother’s house is a small, relatively forthright shop, run by that rarest of creatures: an actively involved dealer principal. You could walk right in and ask for the owner by name. And this owner didn’t want any part of the G8. He didn’t stock ’em, didn’t trade for ’em, didn’t have any interest in adding the Aussie transplant to his inventory. GMC and Chevy trucks were this guy’s stock in trade, and this guy wasn’t rash or stupid enough to waste his time with high-priced Pontiac sedans.

Even the most headstrong dealer has to deal with his manufacturer rep, however, and that’s how this truck-focused store came to have one loaded, white 2009 G8 sitting on its lot. My brother saw it on that lot on the way home from work, called the guy, and worked out an invoice-minus-part-of-holdback deal on the phone. The only problem: they didn’t like the trade. Two relatively bloodless back-and-forths later, the deal was done and a “White Hot” G8 found itself in the garage where the RX-8 used to sit. It was that easy.

It’s a happy ending but not quite a Cinderella story for GM. The 2009 G8 now has three grand of money in the trunk plus discount financing, all of which conspired to put a $34K Pontiac on the road for a net financed/subsidized total of under $29K. Any dealer in the Midwest could have done this deal two months ago for $32K, cycled some inventory, cleared their floorplan, and taken a finance spiff from a local bank instead of having to push GMAC’s paper.