If you guys read enough Pontiac only magazines like High Performance Pontiac, Pontiac Enthusiast, and POCI's Smoke Signals, you would read the EXACT same things there as I'm saying here.

And I do believe there is an age component to it as well.

 

Believe me I'm not trying to argue with you. My point is that Pontiac the brand could have easily survived if its image (along with its lineup) hadn't been so badly bungled. They may not have been "true" Pontiacs in the hearts of die-hard Poncho guys like yourself, but that doesn't mean the brand couldn't have flourished and been a hit with a whole new generation of Pontiac enthusiasts.

The question is, why didn't that happen? That is why I say Pontiac did not die in 1978, it died when they completely botched their most important vehicles (GP, G6). And yes, underestimating the backlash they'd get for doing a modern-day non-retro rendition of a GTO did not help either.

 

Which in a way it has for many years.

I suppose there is an age component as well... the Pontiac motors hadn't been produced for several years before I was born. However, while you may have indeed lost some of the enthusiasts, the more mainstream buyers that made up the sales through the 80s and 90s probably did not really know or care. Attributing the death of Pontiac to the lack of a 400 or 425SD just isn't right. They hadn't made Pontiac motors for 30 years before the brand was shut down.

It might have helped their image if they had their own engines, but remember "It's image stupid." They could have certainly used the regular corporate engines and been successful, but it would have helped if they had their own induction packages or special exhaust. To some extent they did with "Ram Air." But by and large the main issue was that the cars were just copies of Chevrolet cars that were cheaper. And then when you toned the design down there really wasn't much reason to buy one over a Chevrolet for most people.

 

I'm not attributing Pontiac's death to simply that. Sure, for alot of people, a huge part of Pontiac's cache was lost after 1981, but it was years of incompetence which finally administered the coup de grace.

 

This right here is the answer to this thread!

And when did this happen, you ask? Well it all started with the demise of the Pontiac engine. It was all down hill from there.

 

Sure Pontiac could have survived. But in what capacity? And is survival alone really that good?
They'd still be gussied up Chevys. That's what killed Pontiac. And that was set into motion when the Pontiac engine was killed. It just took 30 years for the patient to finally die. And what a slow agonizing death it was. The Solstice, GTO, and G8 were just those last deep gasps just before death.
The death of the Pontiac engine was just an indicator (the first of many) of how GM was going to treat Pontiac. Like so many people before had said; why buy a Pontiac when it's no different from a Chevy and the Chevy is cheaper? Pontiac had NOTHING to differentiate them from Chevy other than a split grille and red lighting. This loss of differentiation began with the loss of the Pontiac engine. The bad bungling, like you mention, all started the minute the Pontiac engine died. It didn't start in the '90s or 2000s. It began long before that. But it's like the proverbial snowball rolling down the hill. GM lost touch of Pontiac's identity. And it all came home to roost in the late 2000s.


And even if Pontiac survived, not many real Pontiac enthusiasts would touch them.
It's like, what's the point? It's not a real Pontiac if it can't be a real Pontiac.

 

Are you people all high?

V8s in passenger cars were all but dead by the late 80s anyway. How many V8 pontiacs were made after the 1987 grand prix? The firebird, and that's it until the 04 GTO came around.

Let's not forget that oldsmobile *DID* get to keep it's engine family alive through the gbody run, and a fat lot of good all those 307s it did for it's image, they died quicker than pontiac. If you think pontiac was going to keep 400s in passenger cars through the 80s, well, you're high, the 301 was the future of the engine in that era.

And if you think it would have made sense to waste resources developing unique 4 and 6 cylinder engine families for every brand through the 80s and 90s, then you are really high. Hell, they had enough flavors as is, and they were all relatively inferior to their foreign competitors.

Wasn't the quad 4 an 'olds' engine? Again, fat lot of good that did for the brand, eh?

Or is the whole reason buick survived because of the 3.8 buick's success as all the other GM V6s turned to trash?

I dunno, i think you all sound like a bunch of cranky old men on a porch waving canes and whining about the good old days. With emmisions and relaibility targets what they were becoming in the 80s, i don't see how modernizing so many unique engines feeding a dying market segment is at all relevant. And as i said, GM did poorly enough with its 4 and 6 cylinders through the 90s that there is no way making more families was going to help anything at all.

 

 

I don't think anyone thinks that. The last 400 was built in '78 and sold in '79.

Like you say though, the future was going to rest with the 301 - both turbocharged and normally aspirated. An updated version of the turbo 301 was planned for the '82 Trans Am. That would have been pretty cool, I think.

 

I think there have been a lot of at least halfway interesting cases laid out for Pontiac's direction over the years here.

Well, that's my point. They COULDN'T just be gussied up Chevys anymore. They would have needed to offer things on their cars that Chevy didn't. If not different engines then at least more aggressive suspensions, tuning, wider variety of accessories, etc.

I don't count dropping Pontiac's engine as bungling, I count it as being an unfortunate necessity. Maybe that's where we differ. The real bungling has come rather recently IMO. In the 80's and 90's the Grand Am and Grand Prix were selling like crazy. Great cars? Maybe not. But it was hard to argue with the formula.

The kind of bungling I'm talking about is doing things like, building a turbocharged Cobalt SS for Chevy while giving Pontiac a warmed over "G5" with no such option. How does the "excitement" division not get use of the LNF in their sport compact? Dumb....

 

Getting back to Z284ever's post on Jim Wangers... which was staggering reading.

Would people please enlighten me as to why you would hire somebody with little to no product knowledge of a very common product?

If I interviewed a candidate for a job and they knew very little about something they've probably come across more than once in their lives... I'd cut the interview right there.

That article even mentions that after years in the job... that guy didn't even know what the letters GTO stood for. WTF?

 

No, these guys apprently do, and sound real serious about it...


Maybe, but it probably would have just been another unreliable, underpowered historical oddity like the original 301 TTA, and carbed 3.8L turbo buick. Could it have developed like the turbo buick? Maybe, but really would it have made sense to develop a complex EFI system for an engine that already had a very limited market that was only going to shrink. At least work on the buick 3.8 modernized the engine and made it the best of the GM V6s going forward. No way the pontiac V8 was going to rise into that position vs. the SBC which had the corvette and trucks on top of the better selling camaro fbody to look forward to past the gbody end of life.

 

That is pretty much complete lunacy. Perhaps they thought fresh perspective would somehow help, but JFC did they gamble wrong on that one.

btw, i pretty much agree that pontiac was dead when they missed the mark on the 04 grand prix and then squandered the GA name. Back in the 00s i had a few coworkers who had GTPs and they loved the SC'd power. By the time they needed replacements, everything had 240hp. A couple also had burned up trannies and / or leaks so they weren't very fond of the reliability end of things. They all drive imports now.

 

No one with at least an ounce of gray matter believed that the Pontiac 400 should have been built indefinately. I don't know where you got that from. I was using the example of the death of the 400 to mark the beginning of the end for Pontiac. I'm sorry if you don't want to believe it, but it really was.

What a more rational person thinks is that Pontiac should have gotten some unique versions of the existing GM powerplants out there at any given time. Versions the other divisions couldn't have. They didn't have to be huge V-8s, but they should have had the highest output for their class. Pontiac's image was built on performance and GM neutered them after the last 400 powered vehicle rolled off the assembly line.

Wasn't the 6000 STE supposed to have a unique version of the 2.8 V-6? Wasn't the Fiero supposed to have more modern engines than it did? Wasn't the G6 supposed to have some whiz-bang engine? What happened to allowing Pontiac to have these engines? Oh, that's right. GM decided it was cheaper to throw Chevette parts at the Fiero, or just change the grille and badges on a Chevy, charge more, and call it a Pontiac.


So I guess if a Pontiac fan's desire to see his/her favorite brand thrive the way it had for 25 years makes him/her high, I say, pass the bong.

 

But don't you see? That's just what they became when GM ended the Pontiac engine program. And not only did they take away the engine, they took away the driving dynamics as well. They BECAME the gussied up Chevys that you said they COULDN'T become.



Using your example as a pattern, let's go back even further. Remember the '86 Grand Prix 2+2? Of the 4 G-bodies at the time, the 2+2 had the least amount of power and the least amount of performance. WTF!!! The 2+2 should have been the BEST performing of the four. Pontiac was the PERFORMANCE division.
And why didn't they put the Turbo 301 in the Grand Prix in '80 and '81? And did they ever put the Turbo 3.8 in the '79 and '80 Sunbirds (you used to be able to get a V-8 in them up to '77 or '78)? Do you see where I'm coming from now? It started long before the '90s or 2000s.

GM gave up on Pontiac at the end of the '70s.