The Top 10 Reasons Why Pontiac is Being Killed Off

[ponchoman]

Re: The Top 10 Reasons Why Pontiac is Being Killed Off

The article is incredibly poorly constructed and the logic is frankly amazingly shallow.

Most of the items in the article really target "GM" and not "Pontiac". By that I mean, many of the issues he raises were actually issues across multiple brands - including surviving brands such as Chevy. A recent editorial by Jim Wangers where he actually names people personally responsible for the slow but inevitable death of Pontiac was recently published. He really hammers a whole bunch of people, and points out detailed root causes and where blame should be directed. Of course, this is all in addition to the general GM inefficiencies, cost problems, etc. I'm talking about why in comparison to Chevy, Buick, etc Pontiac was killed. If you know my current project, you know this is an even more painful cut to me.

How much freedom did Pontiac, or any other GM division, have to do stuff on their own? Pontiac's downfall was not just a Pontiac failure, but a GM failure. Sure some of the Pontiac stuff was terrible (Aztec comes to mind) but were such decisions totally Pontiac's fault or were they pushed into that kind of stuff by GM management (or mismanagement)?

If you read what Wangers wrote, you'll see it is shared blame between the Pontiac General Managerss and GM. To be clear, there is more than enough blame to go around.

[Matt Cramer]

Re: The Top 10 Reasons Why Pontiac is Being Killed Off

The article is incredibly poorly constructed and the logic is frankly amazingly shallow.

Most of the items in the article really target "GM" and not "Pontiac". By that I mean, many of the issues he raises were actually issues across multiple brands - including surviving brands such as Chevy. A recent editorial by Jim Wangers where he actually names people personally responsible for the slow but inevitable death of Pontiac was recently published. He really hammers a whole bunch of people, and points out detailed root causes and where blame should be directed. Of course, this is all in addition to the general GM inefficiencies, cost problems, etc. I'm talking about why in comparison to Chevy, Buick, etc Pontiac was killed. If you know my current project, you know this is an even more painful cut to me.

Pontiac got stuck with some of the worse of the badge engineering, though - along with Oldsmobile. This is kind of the way I see it for the other divisions:

Chevy - as GM's volume / value division this one kind of gets regarded as the default model, so platform mates often have been seen as badge engineered Chevies, rather than a Chevy being seen as a badge engineered ____.

Buick - Really been stuck with the same problem as Pontiac and Oldsmobile, but it's been saved by somehow becoming the Chinese automotive counterpart to David Hasselhoff.

Saturn - This one got hit with a different wave of stupid - a repeat of their mistakes but played back decades later. It started out as a complete, separate, designed from scratch setup in the '90s - and then they decided to turn it into another identical division. They killed its quasi-independent identity and pulled out a lot of its innovations that made it different.

Cadillac - Somehow this one division learned its lesson after the Cimarron debacle: They realized that if you're going to base a Cadillac off any other platform, it had better be changed enough that you would need to put the car on a lift to spot where they copied the parts from its platform mate. And even then they often changed the engines and other features.

Hummer - Well, at least it got a distinct identity, and they don't look like badge engineered versions of anything else even when they are. But it suffers from two problems, being the wrong product at the wrong time, and not quite taking the time to beef up everything for serious off roading. Dieselgeek noted that Geo Tracker owners sometimes make fun of the Hummers' problems off road...