Americans Miss Pontiac More Than Any Other Defunct Car Brand
Like all industries, the automotive world has seen tons of change over the last several decades, and an unfortunate side effect of the evolutionary process has been the closure of several once-popular car brands. Here in the U.S., car nerds mourn the loss of brands like Saab, but it might be surprising to learn the brands that enthusiasts in other countries pine over.
Saab. It’s Saab. People in Japan, the U.K., India, France, and Korea all said Saab, according to a recent study by Hippo Leasing. People in the U.S. miss Pontiac the most, perhaps due to the frequency of Smokey and the Bandit reruns, but the American brand is also missed in Italy, Canada, and Brazil. Germans really miss Trabant.
Americans didn’t forget about Saab, ranking it second, followed by Oldsmobile in third. Our friends in the U.K. rated Pontiac second and Holden third. Interestingly, people in Japan also miss Pontiac, and Edsel earned the number three spot – even though it's a brand that has been defunct since the late 1950s. Hippo Leasing also polled Reddit users on their most-missed car brands, where Pontiac also took the top spot. Saab and AMC came in second and third, respectively.
It's unlikely that brands like Pontiac will make a comeback, but automakers often find ways to revive historic nameplates, especially as they transition to electrification. It’s also quite likely that one or more of the younger automotive startups will go out of business or be absorbed into a legacy automaker, so we could be complaining about the loss of a company like Lucid or Rivian in the future.
[Image: Aimur Kytt/Shutterstock.com]
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Chris grew up in, under, and around cars, but took the long way around to becoming an automotive writer. After a career in technology consulting and a trip through business school, Chris began writing about the automotive industry as a way to reconnect with his passion and get behind the wheel of a new car every week. He focuses on taking complex industry stories and making them digestible by any reader. Just don’t expect him to stay away from high-mileage Porsches.
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From about fall 1975 on, you'd have to twist your mind like a pretzel to differentiate Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and Oldsmobile. Same chassis, same engines mostly, same transmisions. The big difference was in selecting bushings for the suspension, and my butt found that Chevrolet did best there. Now, they weren't as stuffed full of sound deadeners as the more expensive GMs, but that isn't my point -- Chev's had better bushing choices.
The pictures above of a '55 to '57 or so Chev and Buick show GM had lready standardized styling and windshields and roofs. '58 was where the differnces were blurred, but it was right back on track for '59. And never changed therafter. But underneath, in the '50s all GM big cars had different frames, engines and transmissions -- lousy transmissions except for the original four-speed Hydramatic. Dynaflow? Absolute crap. Chevrolet Turbo 400 something or other for '58? Absolute crap. Buick had the weird pivoting ball on the transmission rear suspension by torque tube, Chevy featured leafs until '58 as did Oldsmobile until the early '60s. GM had over 50% market share and could afford to let its divisions make their own frames, engines and transmissions. And pretend they were different companies.
But the rot set in during the middle early '60s when GM made its Torqueflite copy, the Turbo Hydramatic 3-speed transmission. They standardized on that pretty quickly, except for the unbearably cheap and slow Powerglide two speed for Chevs. Even Rolls Royce had to change from the original four-speed GM Hydramatic non torque converter automatic, and buy the 3 speed slushbox Turbo (wowee!) Hydramatic for its new '65 Roller.
Then as emissions compliance really hit ten years later, all the big block dumb iron V8s each division had were canned and replaced by Chevy small blocks and some Olds 303 near-enough clone. Except for Cadillac, which produced a series of complete clunker engines. And GM's market share declined with each passing year.
So if people pine for Pontiac, they pine for the advertising aura rather than the reality of GM clone cars. Hoo Flung Dung became GM's marketing man, as GM twisted and turned for several decades making, importing (or flogging second-rate Japanese and Korean garbage cars) trying to sell more and more trashy vehicles so as to regain its former market dominance. Dung flung feces at the wall to see what stuck. Not much, and by 2008, GM went bust. It was then bailed out for free by governments buying its worthless shares for billions, 80% US and 20% Canadian. Canada was forced into imperial obeisance to pay twice as much per capita for GM than Americans -- yet GM Canada never declared bankruptcy! It was a straight Obama tax on Canada -- thanks so much. For that we got one seat on the GM Board, and whoever it was never uttered a single word except "Yes, please" when offered coffee at meetings. We got our money's worth out of bailing out GM here in Canada all right. And guess what -- what I've written here is all in the TTAC archives -- they did the best job out there covering the GM and Chrysler bailouts and subsequent horse manure wheeler-dealering. For years. So no snark, please -- read the archives and clear your minds of US dogma and general nonsense.
And these days, what is GM? A pathetic, paranoid outfit that cannot slug it out on a global scale with other automakers in world markets. It hides in the US/Canada and China, as what? Number 6 automaker? If that. Pine for Pontiacs all you like. It makes not the slightest difference. And the world missing Saab is just the Rest of the World ignoring the reality of corporate crap in the same benighted way as Americans missing Pontiac, In my opinion. Dreams and opinions are not facts, or Pontiac would be still selling out there, competing with Subaru for world supremacy in plastic bodyside cladding. Yessir, that's advanced tech, that is. GM is a complete wuss for a US corporation these days.
Pontiac could have had a much brighter future in the US than Buick, simply due to the bandwidth of its portfolio and more youthful image. The maxim; "you can sell an Old man a young mans car, but you can't sell a Young man and old mans car" comes immediately to mind. Pontiac was a victim of GM's "make it cheaper" mantra, particularly in their interiors. They were typically dramatically styled, but filled with cheap plastics and cloths that made some look cartoonish. Reliance on GM's mainstream powertrains didn't help; pushrod V6's, 4 speed automatics, front-wheel drive were all mainstays of the GM catalog regardless of the brand on the hood. The Bonneville GXP with the Northstar was promising, but was at the end of it's life cycle and was saddles with the 4-speed box and no AWD availability. 6000STE was an interesting concept based on the most nondescript model ever, the 6000. I bought one anyway, it had a lot of promise but was very rough around the edges and burdened by the basic A-body architecture. The GM of today would likely do a better job with Pontiac, but that ship has sailed.