Question: What's the Most Ridiculous Use of "GT" Badging?

by Murilee Martin

July 11th, 2012 3:16 AM

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?

#AdventuresInMarketing #Gt #PontiacVibeGT #Question #VibeGT

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2 of 73 comments

Slow kills on Jul 12, 2012

I am so glad that nobody nominated the Opel GT.

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DannyZRC on Jul 12, 2012

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

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