Pontiac, The Red Headed Stepchild Of GM

I have always had mixed feelings about the cars that Pontiac produced. I love everything about the old Pontiac muscle cars. I don’t entirely dislike the 2004-06 GTO, and 2008-09 G8. For the most part, the 2004-06 GTO, and 2008-09 G8 are attractive cars, but I think that the front end was poorly designed. The rest of the cars made throughout the 1980’s and onward were ugly. When I was growing up, my mom owned an early 1990’s Pontiac Sunbird Convertible. We loved the fact that it was a convertible, but that was about it. The car was a pile of junk and sat in a parking spot for the majority of the time that we owned it. Pontiac has always had a bad rap when it comes to reliability. The Pontiac Vibe wagon was the only Pontiac that was deemed reliable by “Consumer Magazine”. The majority of Pontiac cars are driven by “bros” and/or “rednecks”.

In 1963 GM placed a ban on Pontiac’s involvement in automobile racing. Once the ban was in place, Pontiac engineers (Russell Gee, Bill Collins, and chief engineer John DeLorian) decided to focus their attention on street performance instead. In 1963 they produced the world’s first “muscle car”, which revolutionized the car industry and created the “muscle car era”. In 1964, Pontiac pitted their GTO against the Ferrari GTO in a performance challenge, and Pontiac won (37 years later, Pontiac admitted to cheating by placing a bigger engine into the GTO before the tests). After Pontiac “won” the challenge against Ferrari, the battle was publicized in every magazine/newspaper. Pontiac estimated selling 5,000 GTO’s in the year of 1964, but they ended up selling 32,450.

Pontiac was the first car manufacturer to produce a “street legal race car”, which created the “muscle car era”(an era that marketed to the “speed-minded youth”) [wikipedia.com]. The Pontiac GTO dominated car sales in 1964, and many other carmakers wanted in. Car manufacturers hurried to build their own GTO equivalent cars, and Ford was one of the first to be successful in accomplishing this. In 1964, the first Ford Mustang was produced and in 1965, the Mustang was deemed Fords most successful launch since the Ford Model A.

I can’t help but wonder if Pontiac would have made it as long as they did if they hadn’t come out with the GTO. It's possible that the GTO may not have survived if they hadn’t cheated when it was pitted against Ferrari’s GTO. Even more important, without the GTO we may have never had the “muscle car era”. Cars today would be completely different, because the car industry wouldn’t have had the inspiration from the GTO and car manufacturers wouldn’t have shifted focus to building performance vehicles. We might all be driving around renewable energy vehicles, and gas powered vehicles would have been a thing of the past.

Its crazy to think that something as simple as cheating on a performance test could impact everything we know about cars today. I love the “muscle car era” and most vehicles that were inspired by the “muscle car era”. I would be lying if I said that Pontiac’s deceitful practices at the time were a bad thing. I can understand why a consumer back then would have been very angry, they were cheated and coaxed into buying a car that was marketed around a lie. Some would say, that eventually their deceitful practices caught up with them, and as a result, in 2010 GM shut them down.

Jalopnik.com

[Photos from google images]

[Research from: History.com, Wikipedia.com]