But when style-challenged marketing buffoons take over the car business from the engineers, racers and professionals on the shop floor, what happens is the motoring equivalent of sudden death.
When a division that used to make strikingly handsome hot rods like the 6.6 litre Trans Am is foisted with the heart and body of the singularly soulless and utterly unreliable Australian Holdens, then all you can do is brace for a consumer backlash. Pontiac fans took their hands off the wheel just long enough to tear their hair off.
While the 1970s Pontiacs bestowed bragging rights to their owners, the 1990s ones were Holden clones. The world car concept – one chassis, one engine, many models – was all right for peddling shuttles like the Saturns and Opels, but it just didn’t work for a quintessentially American hot rod. Ford did that with the legendary Jaguar and nearly killed it.
GM’s crime was tampering with Pontiac’s genetic code – the new jelly bean shaped cars were a world removed from the gravity-defying Firebirds. Where the Firebirds thundered, the new Holden-under-the-hood Pontiacs merely purred. The GM brass rooted for mass at the expense of class.
Also, bundling the Pontiac with Buick made those car dealerships as attractive to younger buyers as the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, if such a thing exists.
Blame it also on corporate sloth. Harley Davidson was rescued from the scrap heap when everyone thought the Hondas and Kawasakis had steamrolled the iconic motorcycle maker. There’s no reason to doubt why a similar rescue package won’t resuscitate Pontiac, especially when it has such a huge cult following. But in today’s corporate America, that’s more like a pipedream.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that Pontiac, named after an American Indian chief who led the Ottawa tribe against the English in the mid-1700s, is simply not being allowed to fight back.
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