Pontiac Media Relations told Autoblog that there were "well under 5,000" G8 GXPs would be produced. So you're probably pretty close.

Won't be as rare as the less than 800 Solstice coupes, though!

 

That just busted my bubble.....I was hoping to pick one up in a year or so at a reasonable price.

I wonder what how many G8 GTs were produced last year and this year?

 

Dear GM:

F#@$ You!

I've probably purchased my last new GM car (and yes our last four new cars have been GM's). We will be replacing our 04 SRX and 04 Colorado in the next year or two. I'll have a hard time buying from Government Motors again. I'm truly disgusted with GM!

 

don't think they're available here.

 

I respectfully disagree.

 

Didnt know you cared so much about the Vibe..

 

x2.

Guy, you're normally 100% spot on, and I love ya for that...but seriously??? As of late...

1) What was the GTO?
2) What was the Solstice?
3) What was the GXP series for the Bonneville and Grand Prix?
4) Saying Pontiac has been dead since before I was born (1980) is a joke, and you know it. We'd be ignoring...

a) TTAs
b) Turbo Grand Prixs, later s/c Grand Prixs that from '98-'03 outsold anything else in that segment.
c) F bodies from 1980-2002
d) All those Grand Am GTs people bought for YEARS...that for what they were, at the price they sold for, were respectable cars
e) Other performance-minded vehicles I'm forgetting at the moment (e.g. Fiero GTs, turbo Sunbirds, etc).

Guy, come on...not all those cars were phenomenal in retrospect, but for their day? Show some respect...seriously...

Say what you will, but my 14 second 1/4 mile, .86g skidpad turning Comp G is no avis rental, my friend. From now on, every time I light the tires, I'll be thinking about what Pontiac meant to me...and always will. I can't wait to wrestle my dad's '02 Formula away from him...I'll have it forever.

 

He didn't mention anything about performance. While all the cars you listed were nice cars they either didn't sell well or didn't make any money (Solstice). While it is sad the brand had to die it will allow the others to be better than ever! Time to focus on the future, not the past....

 

Just because Pontiac turned into the brand that lost its way doesn't mean it's history and heritage cease to exist. As a brand that marched it its own drum in its glory days, it deserves a better send off than a Vibe.

The new GM couldn't even figure out how to throw Pontiac a good funeral.

 

Bankrupt companies can't afford a funeral, they are trying to AVOID them! GM is all about "reinvention" not remembering the past...

The past is what got them where they are today....

 

The past of GM also got us some important things:

The V8
Starters
Interchangeable parts
The Corvette
The Camaro
Firebird
...

Just because GM's business model was horrible over the last twenty years doesnt give them a reason to forget about their past. Maybe if they looked back to guys like John Delorian, Alfred Sloan, Billy Durant, and Henry Leyland they'd see some guys who took some big swings -- sometimes they missed and sometimes they hit homeruns, but the stuff they did for America was pretty damn important and as auto enthusiasts I hope to hell the current leadership has some of their spirit.

 

The S/C Grand Prix's & Grand Am GT's were mainstream & sold well for years & I daresay GM made money off of every 1 of them. The Firebird sold reasonably well through the 80's & didn't start tanking until the 90's. Though in all fairness, it wasn't alone. Sales of ALL sport coupes (with the odd exception of Mustang) were on a yearly downward slide during that decade. Remember the Toyota Supra, Nissan 300 ZX & 240 SX, Maxda RX7, Mitsubishi 3000 GT & it's Dodge clone the Stealth, & the Honda Prelude? All victims of the truck/SUV trend of the 90's. In retrospect it's a wonder we even got a 4th gen at all. To the Japanese' credit, some of them only put their's to sleep for a few years while waiting for the market to shift

 

Jason,

Pontiac hasn't had the image that is being attributed to it for many, many years. Reading the post of a few guys here would give the impression that we were talking about Pontiac of the 60s or even the 70s. My point is that Pontiac isn't a performance brand because it's been squandered and mismanaged to the point where even Pontiac's own General Manager is completely clueless as to Pontiac's heritage. Even you can not argue with that.

Then there's a few points you brought up.

Pontiac did in fact lose their own engines in '82. Yes, you are correct that Pontiac had a full line of turbo cars in the late 1980s, including the oft forgotten Turbo Trans Am, and the even more forgotten turbo Grand Prixs and turbo Sunbirds. However, as I mentioned, there were Pontiac versions of other engines available in other GM cars (minus the turbos).

The fabled Turbo Trans Am was nothing more than a Buick Grand National engine with heads off of the run of the mill Bonneville 3800 that had a similar interal rebuild as the GNX. The supercharged Grand Prix 3800 was the same Buick engine found under the hood of Regals.

Firebirds from 1980-2002 were nothing more than Camaros with either Corvette-like or Batmobile-like looks, depending on the year and your point of view. The only people who wiould disagree with that are those who weren't around when Pontiac Trans Ams and Chevrolet Camaro Z28s of the 1970s had entirely different engines and personalities.

Grand Ams were THE car that made Pontiac a predominatly female brand.

Fiero was a nice car (once they figured out how to keep them from spontenaously combusting). The GTs were cool cars and decent performers in the end, but even in their day, there weren't exactly road blazers.

Solstice as I mentioned was a way to test GM's development system by Bob Lutz. Even if it was only sold that way to GM's board, it would have never seen the light of day otherwise.

I'm a huge fan of the GTO, and if you look back, I was defending the car while everyone was still whining that it didn't look like a 1960s creature. I dumped my membership at a GTO website when they stuck the new Mustang on their front page as their "Car of the Year" in protest to the GTO. However, that doesn't change the fact that the GTO is still a Holden Monaro, was basically rammed through GM's system from the moment Bob Lutz 1st saw it, and bruised a ton of egos in the process while creating a class of people at GM that resented Holden for a long time afterwards and turned quite a few people against Lutz early on. It was worth it, it was a extremely good car, but like the G8, it's somebody else's car that had a grille added to pass as a Pontiac.

I will give you the Bonneville GXP and the Grand Prix GXP.

But at the same time, you also have no choice but to give that at least 65% and up to 75% of Grand Prixs and even higher levels of Bonnevilles ended up as fleet and rental cars. Something you'd expect from Chevrolet, not a "Performance Division".

Feel free to disagree. However, you and other's here know that I'm a Pontiac fan in many regards. The only GM W-body car I'd reccomend to anyone was the GXP Grand Prix. My favorite car when I was a kid was Pontiac Trans Am (1970s era). I liked the Fiero. I though my in-law's 98 Grand Am was an intresting if underpowered little car. I actually went to buy a GTO cash-in-hand when it 1st came out (destroyed by dealer greed and a decision to buy and fix up yet another Thunderbird SC). I think the G8 sedan is the best 4 door on the market based on value, performance, and quality for the price.

But that doesn't change the fact that Pontiac's only undisputed and unique bright spots in so far as car lines the past 10 years was 2 Australian Holdens and a sports car.

The GXP line is traditional Pontiac performance, but it's a barely a drop in the bucket to the rest of Pontiac's sales and consumer knowledge, and therfore image.

I'd bet more people know about a Pontiac Vibe than a Pontiac Grand Prix GXP.

Back in the 70s, everyone and their grand mom knew what a Trans Am was.

In the 60s, not only did everyone know what a GTO was, there was actually a song about it.

Grand Prix was one of the country's best selling cars in the 1970s.

My mom even knew what a Bonneville was when I was a kid.

Those days regarding Pontiac are long gone.

Vibe being the last Pontiac is fitting given how far Pontiac as fallen over the past 20 and even 30 years.

 

The article says that G6 production is continuing for fleet sales. Maybe they'll run off some convertibles as commemorative editions.

 

There are more women in the world than men...and they are more likely to pay extra for something they find more stylish.....

The real thing that always seperated Pontiac was not performance, but style and image. Even back in the day you could buy a Chevelle, or Camaro that was as fast as anything Pontiac made. People bought Pontiac's because they were overstyled, and basically said, "Hey look at me!". As Scott told me once..the idea is that Pontiac's had to be more "expressive" than Chevy's. Think of it this way. Some people say a shoe is a shoe..and buy the cheapest, plainest one they can find. Others however will spend a little more money on Nikes, or I dunno Gucci pumps because it fits the style they want. If you go back through the 80's up till the late 90's GM was Pontiac's most focused brand. Everything (outside Montana and Aztek) looked like it could eat the wheels off the car next to it.

Trouble started happening when GM listened to the car mags and took away the expressive over the top styling. This was a huge failure, because around 2000 is when over the top really came into style, largely led by imports. I am talking WRX's, Civic's, Nissan's, Mazda's. Rather than competeing, Pontiac sterlized their styling, and when they did try and make something look aggressive, it just looked like ***. G6 with body kit, Grand Prix and Grand Prix GXP.

I remember working at Avis in the early 2000's, and the only Pontiac's that were plentiful in the fleet were 4 cylinder Grand Am's...and they were still in less quanity than the Lumina's, Malibus, and Century's (OMG how I hated Century's). I think I saw one Grand Prix the whole time I worked there. Yet by the time Grand Prix died 90% went to fleets.

To be more specific however, two cars spelled the end for Pontiac...the 2004 Grand Prix, and the 2005 Pontiac G6. They replaced cars capable of 300-400,000 units a year..and absolutly tanked.

The 2004+ Grand Prix was a styling disaster. It wanted to be aggressive, but it wanted to be clean also, and it just failed. I remember in 2003 the local Pontiac dealer was clearing out old body style GP's, and they had a GTP with $3K on the hood...and the car was still barely less than $30K. Within two years, you could get the equivelent Comp G in the new body style for $24K...that is how bad the car failed. Not only that, but it was also slower than the car it replaced. I was on ClubGP when the 2004 came out and there was a pretty strong revolt against it...owners of the old car just did not like it.

What's funny is that I thought the 04 would be much more palletable if they just put different grilles than the beaver tooth ones. They did that with the GXP and found a way to make them look uglier. It was like Pontiacs were being styled by someone who hated the brand. I did buy two of these cars because they are good cars....but I could 100% understand why someone who was not as wedded to Pontiac would trade their old body style Grand Prix in for an Altima or Mazda6 instead of one.

And the G6...that is the one that really screwed the pooch. I remember when I saw the concept, I thought it would be a great car. Then once it reached production, it was a watered down, emotionless jelly bean. Unlike the Grand Am, you could not really tell the uplevel model from a base one unless it had the rare, terrible body kit. One of the reasons the ****ty old Grand Am sold was because the GT looked like it could eat the wheels of a Mustang. Another failure of the G6 is the coupe. The old Grand Am sold a lot of coupes..however for some reason I can't remember the last time a saw a G6 Coupe. I can understand why since it is just a mismash of styling cues aped from other cars.

Combine that with Pontiac not getting a proper version of the Cobalt..and it is easy to understand why Pontiac is gone.