Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Farewell, Pontiac, you will be missed (but only a little)

MSD · 04-30-2009, 09:53 AM

For Pontiac, Quality Comes Too Late - Wheels Blog - NYTimes.com

Quote:

General Motors will phase out the Pontiac brand in 2010, said Fritz Henderson, president and chief executive of G.M., in a press conference this morning. I had heard that G.M. was giving up on Pontiac last week, at virtually the same time G.M.’s car delivery guys were taking away the test car I’d been driving for a week: a “liquid red” Pontiac G8 GXP. So in some small measure, the news, though anticipated, was personal. I felt as though I were losing my new best friend.

The G8 GXP is a terrific car. I’d rate it at or near the top of the list of 20-odd new vehicles that I’ve tested this year, and the less rascally G8 GT is high on the list as well. As Eddie Alterman wrote in his perceptive review of the G8s in The Times last December (before he moved on to become editor in chief of Car and Driver), these impressive new Pontiacs arrived at Detroit’s party as the floors were being swept and the last drunks were staggering out. “It’s too much, too late,” he wrote.

All too true, and, for those who recall when Pontiac was the life of that party, so sad.

Brian Williams, the anchor of “The NBC Nightly News,” remembers. His family’s first new car was a mint-green 1967 Pontiac Catalina. A couple of months ago, when G.M. began to hint that Pontiac would have a limited future (as a “sub brand” with a limited range of models), I was invited to appear on the Nightly News to reminisce about what Pontiac once meant.

It’s easy to understand why anyone born after the mid-1960s may not shed any tears when Pontiac is read its last rites. They’ve known the G.M. division mostly for its generic midsize cars like the 6000 and the Grand Prix, largely indistinguishable from Buicks, Chevys and Oldsmobiles; for its Firebirds that became increasingly alien-looking through the years; for its unimpressive Sunfires and Grand Ams and unremarkable latter-day Bonnevilles; for its half-hearted attempts to sell mummified minivans (TransSports, Montanas, Azteks) wrapped up in plastic lower-body cladding.

It was a different scene in the division’s glory days, which ran roughly from the late 1950s till the mid-1970s, a period that neatly coincided with my own obsession for the automobile. I recall marveling at my Uncle Charlie’s ’57 Super Chief hardtop, whose Indian-head ornaments (one atop each front fender) glowed when the headlights were on. I spent hours pretend-driving the yellow ’55 Chieftain Catalina that I ranked highly among the many cars that passed through my older brother’s hands before he graduated from high school.

But it was in the 1960s that Pontiac really got serious about building excitement, with the classy Grand Prix and the sporty 2+2 added to a line that included flashy Bonnevilles, perky Tempests, the jaunty LeMans. Headlights were stacked, grilles were split and the cars’ track (the distance between opposing wheels) was widened. The modern muscle car was born when John DeLorean wedged a 389-cubic-inch V-8 into the 1964 Tempest, creating the GTO. The brand had buzz, barely a decade after its image was so boring that Pontiacs were derided as “cars for librarians.”

Back to the present, and a car that is surely one of the best sedans Detroit has ever offered: For those who don’t track the comings and goings of car models the way Jimmy the Greek kept tabs on the arms of NFL quarterbacks, the GXP is the high-performance version of the G8, a largish (though not unwieldy) sedan that feels thoroughly American, in the best sense of that characterization. The $40,000 GXP combines a Corvette V-8 engine with a remarkably lithe suspension, impressive brakes, superlative steering and a classy, comfortable cabin. After testing it on closed tracks, credible auto writers have compared it favorably with the BMW M5, which costs about twice as much.

If Pontiac had offered cars this good 10 years ago, it wouldn’t be flat-lining now in the critical care unit. Of course, if G.M. had made a serious effort to build overengineered cars like the G8 20 years ago, there would be no talk of bankruptcy or slicing the company’s “good” assets from its mistakes.

But the G8 damns G.M.’s management on another level, for this excellent yet very American-feeling sedan actually started out half a world away. It is heavily based on the Holden Commodore, a product of G.M.’s Australian subsidiary, and thus joins a long list of well-designed, carefully engineered, highly competitive automobiles created by G.M. subsidiaries around the world. Until recently such products were largely denied to the American consumers who have been telling the company for decades – with their closed checkbooks and their mass defections to foreign brands – that they wanted Detroit to give them world-class cars.

Now a few of those cars are here. They are Pontiacs with Australian accents. And they are about to become orphans.

Typical of GM, they did too little, too late. The kids who grew up with Sunfires and Cavaliers as their first cars are buying Lexuses and BMWs because of the sour taste American cars left them with.

I may raise some eyebrows with this comment, but the beginning of the end for Pontiac was in 1963, when Chevy released the big block Chevrolet Corvette instead of the Pontiac Corvette. A flagship sports car that for some reason wasn't released with the badge of the company's performance division. It was all down there until the mid- to late-'80s, at which point they got their act together. They finally got their quality control issues sorted out, and pissed it away with brand dilution. The same car with 3 different sets of body panels is not seen as 3 different cars competing with the imports, it's all the same. With the G8 and Solstice, and even the G6, Pontiac had been turned around, but why would you buy a G8 instead of an Impala SS, or a solstice instead of the Sky? Maybe if they had brought cars that people actually wanted to the US ten years ago, this could have been avoided.