Pontiac

» see pontiac.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

American cars were never ordinary on the roads I grew up on. Turkey protected its own assembly industry for decades with duties that made any imported car a luxury item, and when that wall came down through the customs union with Europe in 1996, what came through it was European. A Pontiac in Ankara would have been a curiosity owned by someone with a story attached to it. The brand belongs to a market with cheap fuel and no meaningful tax on engine displacement, and Turkey has never had either of those things.

Pontiac started in 1926 as the cheap companion to GM's Oakland division and did what companion brands occasionally do, which is eat the parent. Oakland was gone by 1932. Under Semon Knudsen and then John DeLorean in the late fifties and sixties, the division was given a specific job inside Alfred Sloan's ladder of brands: it was the one that went fast. The 1959 cars widened the track by five inches, which improved the handling and gave the marketing department the Wide-Track line it used for the next twenty years. In 1964 DeLorean's team put a 389 cubic inch engine into the intermediate Tempest and sold it as an option package called the GTO. That broke a corporate rule against big engines in mid-size cars, and it got past the rule by being an option box rather than a model. The muscle car market followed.

Pontiac built 910,977 cars in 1968, a division record, and spent the next four decades never getting near that again. The Firebird Trans Am became a film star through Smokey and the Bandit in 1977. The mid-engined Fiero of 1984 was the last genuinely unusual thing the division shipped, and its early cars had an engine fire problem that has followed the name ever since. After that Pontiac was mostly a badge on shared GM platforms, sold on plastic body cladding and a split grille, competing with Chevrolet for the same customer inside the same company.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ wide track ~

The 1959 Wide-Track change is worth explaining because it is the rare piece of car marketing that describes an actual engineering decision. Pontiac pushed the wheels further out under an unchanged body. That filled the wheel arches and gave the car a stance nothing else in the showroom had, and it genuinely reduced body roll.

What made it work commercially was that the phrase told a customer something true and checkable. Sloan's system depended on each GM division standing for one idea a buyer could hold in their head, and Pontiac's idea from 1959 onward was that it handled. The engine kept getting bigger on top of that, but the seating position and the track width were doing real work under the advertising.

Then the system stopped being maintained. By the 1980s GM was building Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles on Chevrolet platforms with the same doors pressed for all of them. A buyer walking a dealer row could no longer tell what any of the divisions was for. Both Oldsmobile and Pontiac died of that, fifteen years apart, and both deaths were decided in a corporate finance meeting rather than on a road.

~ the viability plan ~

GM had been pruning for years. Oldsmobile went in 2004. When the credit markets froze in late 2008 and the company went to Washington for money, its submission of 2 December 2008 put Pontiac's future on the table as a niche brand, which was the sort of half-measure that had satisfied a board in the past. The Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, working under the new administration, rejected the viability plan on 30 March 2009 as insufficiently serious and sent it back.

The second version killed Pontiac outright. GM announced it on 27 April 2009, five weeks before the Chapter 11 filing of 1 June, in the same package that put Saturn and Hummer up for disposal and closed a long list of plants. The last car, a 2010 model year G6 four-door in white, came off the Orion Township line on 4 January 2010. The brand itself had no hard death date, because what actually ends a car division is paperwork: the franchise agreements with the dealers ran to 31 October 2010, and after that nobody in the United States was licensed to sell a new one.

~ the last G6 ~

Plenty of them are still registered, and the GTO and the Trans Am have the kind of collector market that keeps a name alive long after the company stops paying for it. GM still owns the trademark and has not used it on a car since. The Orion Township plant that built the last G6 was retooled for small Chevrolets and then for electric vehicles, and it is still running.

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