No Bebop

Whither Pontiac? A memory in 18 months, that’s whither. At least in the new car marketplace. Given the fact that General Motors once held 59 percent of the American new car market and now it’s down around 21 percent, one might wonder how it is that more GM brands hadn’t bitten the dust before the recent economic unpleasantness and the gas price spike of 2008.

The answer, of course, is the franchise dealer arrangement that has been enshrined in the laws of all 50 states. When GM dumped Oldsmobile between 2001-04, it cost them in excess of $1 billion to compensate all the Olds dealers — even though there were only a tiny minority of dealers that sold only Oldsmobiles. The rest of them were multi-brand dealers, usually other GM brands, like Buick-Olds, Chevy-Olds, Olds-Cadillac, etc. With the dire situation surrounding GM and the general economy, the end of Pontiac will be something less than a whimper.

I’m with the auto buff mags/websites, in that Pontiac had a really good chance to remake itself as a poor man’s BMW, with the rear-wheel-drive G8 sports sedan and the Solstice sports car, which just added a T-top coupe to the lineup for 2009 along with the standard roadster. You eBay gamblers might want to grab one of those Solstice coupes and garage it for a couple of decades, as it will be pretty rare. GM says those two vehicles will vanish without a trace when it’s all over.

Unfortunately, the time for Pontiac to make that BMW-wannabe move was a decade ago. Over that time, all we got from them was the long-in-the-tooth Grand Prix, the tired Grand Am, the Cavalier clone called Sunfire, and the execrable Aztek. The idea was original — it was a forerunner of today’s hot segment, the crossover utility wagon, but it was so horrifyingly ugly it made everything in the showroom around it look worse.

And the recent history of Pontiac, GM and the rest of the Detroit Three, in which they abdicated the market for small and mid-sized cars by neglecting them in favor of pickups and truck-based SUVs, is the mirror image of all the misty-eyed reminiscences being published in the auto press this week of Catalina convertibles, Tempests turned to GTOs in the bowels of the Pontiac skunkworks, racy Firebirds and Trans Ams (screaming chicken decals on the hood and all), wide-track Bonnevilles, race-prepped Grand Prix coupes, and so on. Those vehicles were designed and sold by people who gave a damn about cars, not bean-counting executives whose ethic of making money trumped the making of interesting cars. “Making money” is what got us freeways full of tippy SUVs driven by housewives and teens with their cell phones glued to their ears, but when gas prices spiked it also started the U.S. auto industry’s death spiral.

It’s still not clear whether we’ll have GM or Chrysler in any form by the time this all shakes out, but if you consider the nostalgia pieces about Pontiac and the marked decline in its fortunes from that day to this one, it’s clear why Pontiac has to die, and, when you consider those nostalgia pieces were written by baby boomers, its end will barely be noticed by the general public. What Pontiac should have been selling all along is easily available elsewhere — the new Camaro and the Mustang or even the new Hyundai Genesis Coupe, the Nissan Maxima or Chrysler 300 sedans, the Mazda 3 and 6 and the Miata, the Toyota Venza come quickly to mind. They built excitement long after Pontiac gave up that tagline for itself. The only question left is how many of those more exciting vehicles will be rolling off U.S. assembly lines. If the answer is “not many,” that means there will be a lot fewer people earning the kind of money it takes to buy new cars — and that more and more of the best ones won’t even be sold in the U.S.

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