After hearing about the death of Pontiac and drawing a heavy breath, I, like lots of us car guys took a few minutes to think about my experiences with the fabled and now doomed brand.
My thoughts wandered to my experiences of growing up, cruising in the 1964 GTO that my dad restored when I was a little guy. It’s a four-speed, single-four-barrel 389 (obviously) hardtop with a vinyl roof. Living on a dead end street, I remember dad heading off to the gas station or some such places, stopping to talk to a neighbor, and then the sound of the motor winding up, the clutch dumping and the redline bias-plies smoking off down the road.
I remember chasing down a guy in a Datsun who thought he was hot poop on the highway coming home from Nick’s in Natick, Massachusetts, a formerly epic cruise spot that was featured in Hot Rod magazine back in the 1980s. The best was when my dad looked over at my mom and said, “Moves pretty good from 70 to 100.” She was not pleased, and my sister and I had eyes the size of pie plates. We even cruised out to a big Pontiac convention in the western part of the state and I was convinced that dad’s car was going to win best in show, despite the fact that this was a national deal and I was blissfully unaware that concourse judged muscle cars don’t actually drive to the show.
All this stuff combined in my head to bring me to the shocking revelation that a 1964 Pontiac GTO is the one car I’d love to have above all else. Dad still has his, but Lord willing, he’ll be messing with it for decades to come.
It was a bit of a revelation as whenever anyone’s asked my about what my favorite car is, or what car I would own, if I could only have one, I’ve always cheesed out and gone with the old, “there are so many” type answer. Hell, it’s not true and why I never realized that is something I’ve not been able to figure out. Maybe it’s because I thought it was took easy a pick. We car guys like to pride ourselves on being individuals, stepping outside of the known paths and boundaries, so picking a model you grew up riding around in, just seemed like I was taking the easy way out. Either way, I was oddly unaware of how much that model meant to me.
That being said, I’m not crying in my beer that Pontiac is going the way of Olds, Plymouth, Studebaker, and countless other makes before it. I’m obviously saddened and frustrated by the fact that there will be thousands of people out on their backsides when the production lines finally shut down, apparently sometime in late 2009 or early 2010.
The most common argument is one along the lines of “Pontiac was a lifestyle brand”. This is completely correct. It “was” a lifestyle brand. A freewheeling, kind of luxury, kind of in your face, totally swinging, overpowered lifestyle for the car guy looking to show he had a few bucks but also like to burn tires. That marketplace is still there, but now they are buying Lancer Evolutions, Subaru WRXs, Cobalt SS’s, and on and on. The guys who were in the Pontiac “lifestyle” are now most likely living in a community by a gold course spending more time in a golf kart than their Mercedes CLK 320 convertible. They made it, went from the guy who was on his way up, to the guy who was actually there. Problem is, when he got to the top, he looked at the crap GM was producing at the time and went elsewhere, probably into a German or Japanese up market offering and never looked back.
Pontiac has a great legacy, and has contributed a lot to the time honored history of GM, but it’s day in the sun is over and rather than being reduced to a “niche” brand, it’s far less painful to see it put down with dignity than slowly hollowed out like a tree being eaten by termites. Then again, they did make the Aztek, so the dignity thing may be fleeting.
My favorite Pontiac hasn’t been made in 45 years. Now some kid can say the same thing about a Solstice GXP in 2054.
