If it is the 3rd best selling brand in GM's portfolio, why kill it?

2008 GM Vehicle Sales
Chevrolet 1,801,131
GMC 376,996
Pontiac 267,348
Saturn 188,004
Cadillac 161,159
Buick 137,197
Hummer 27,485
Saab 21,368
Total 2,980,688

 

Detroit News is reporting it on their homepage...

When they report something, I believe it...




I'm really depressed right now. Maybe I will have to talk my dad into selling me his 6k mile '02 Formula instead of his 7k mile '00 SS. I keep thinking back to the cool "Fuel for the Soul" ads they did in late '02 just after I bought my then-new Grand Am GT. Such a cool campaign...

 

How sad.
To end with a whimper instead of a bang.
I bleed Pontiac and always will. They can't take that away from me.
I will continue to cherish my Pontiacs and hopefully collect some more thru-out my life.

My hat is off to the Pontiac engineers, designers, and managers who have given us such passionate cars over all these years.

Pontiac is dead.
LONG LIVE PONTIAC!!!!

 

Pontiac has been a 'hand me down' division for as long as I can remember, selling variations of vehicles that were designed primarily for other divisions. It has been dead for years, now they are just making it official.

 

Once they remove fleet sales Pontacs numbers are not that pretty.

 

Because like I said on the previous page, most recent Pontiac sales have been unprofitable fleet sales. Retail sales of their volume car, the G6 are virtually nil.

Nonetheless, I don't see what would hurt to carry the Solstice and G8 through their current product cycles. It doesn't cost anything.

 

I hope the G8 and the Solstice or Sky live on as Chevys.

 

I suppose I'll give the old bird a little extra lovin' this weekend in memoriam of it's maker...

 

I also keep thinking back to how guion kept saying back in '04 when the G6 debuted that if the G6 didn't sell well, Pontiac might be toast.

How true that was. As they killed the turbo, AWD and other variants of the G6 before fruition, and gave us stupidly retarded looking models like the Street Edition, its clear to see where the G6 went really, really wrong...

 

RIP Pontiac. I think we all knew this was going to happen. Hopefully, Chevy, Cadillac, Buick and GMC will survive and thrive.

Maybe one day, in better times, Pontiac can be remade.

 

So are they completely gone...or is it just scaled back to a "niche-brand" for G8 and Solstice?

 

Very true. As soon as the G6 bombed and demand for the Grand Prix dried up, it became difficult to see how Pontiac was going to survive.

GM hasn't shown a Pontiac design concept in a long time, and there's really been nothing in the rumor pipeline. I think Pontiac was probably put on life-support internally at least a couple years ago.

 

It will be sad to see them stop making Pontiacs (assuming the unclear reports above come true). However I will still cherish and enjoy mine.

But there's another reason, aside from the uncertainty above, why I'm adopting a "wait and see" attitude about the whole thing. It seems to me, there's a third possibility for GM. Assuming they can't get any major cash for the name (quite possible due to issues with "transplanting brand names")... maybe they will just mothball the name and retain the rights to it? Then if they restructure and come out a lot stronger, they could re-introduce some new Pontiacs later, the way they are resurrecting the Camaro

 

I F%$^&*#$%*#^%# HATE YOU G.M. INSTEAD OF AN LSX SWAP INTO MY T/A I WILL BE SURE TO DROP A FORD ENGINE OUT OF SPITE.

 

Great

2 of GM's best cars are going to disappear? The G8 and Vibe.
The G8 just needed some marketing dollars to get sales going and the Vibe has consistently been a winner which happened to have best residual/resale values of ANY GM car.

However, I can see how the other models could go.

I wonder what is going through Bob Lutz's mind right now.