Not much these days jolts the black lump of coal I call a heart to life. I glide through the automotive landscape surrounded by mediocrity and familiarity, all of it failing to pierce the bubble of cynicism and pretension which I present to the world. But on rare occasions something cracks the mask and the void in the middle of my chest experiences alien feelings of joy and warmth. It is impossible to maintain my façade of calculated indifference in the presence of a classic Fiat 500, or Ford Capri 2.8 injection, examples of both I encountered at the Practical Classics magazine show over the weekend. Not only was it an opportunity to get up close and personal with interesting vehicles (some of which I hope to be able to bring you here) without inclement weather messing up my hair, it was a chance for me to blow the hairspray budget for the month by buying my own bodyweight in old car literature, something else that pleases me a great deal.
This is not to wallow in nostalgia, something generally speaking I don’t have a lot of time for. Old car books and magazines are an invaluable record; not to regurgitate recent known history, because that’s tedious. What they give us is crucial insight to examine the past and understand the decisions that were made and what drove them, to learn lessons and better understand a car in its proper design context.
That’s what makes old books about car design so valuable and why I’m willing to pay for them. More than that though, when I’m writing about a car design it’s a total crapshoot whether I’ll find appropriate or useful images on a manufacturer’s media pages. Astoundingly only General Motors really takes its design history seriously enough to properly archive it, catalog it and then make that resource available to an extremely fortunate and incredibly grateful black-clad automotive gobshite on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Sketches That Became The Pontiac Aztek
Last week I wrote about how I would implement some small tweaks to the design of the Pontiac Aztek to help the production car more palatable. As I wrote the article I emailed my contact at the GM Design Heritage Archive to ask if they had anything relating to Aztek I could use. A couple of days later a contact sheet appeared in my inbox. Would any of these be of any use? Man alive, would they ever.
What I got back was so good I thought they deserved their own article in celebration. At the risk of turning temporarily turning the site into The Aztektopian, I am ever so slightly thrilled to be able to bring you these exclusive, never-before-publishedsketches of early Pontiac Aztek design proposals. These are all unseen sketches from the initial creative phase of the design process; getting the ideas down on paper. The creative brief can be as simple as wanting to see ideas for the next version of something already in production, but in the case of the Aztek, we know at the director of GM’s West Coast Advanced Concept Center asked his team of pencil wielders to think about taking a “Camaro and a Blazer and put them in a blender”.
The concept Aztek debuted in 1999, so given the time it takes to create a drivable concept model good enough to show in public these sketches would have been drawn around 1997. This first sketch is unsigned (always sign your sketches) so can’t be attributed to a particular person. Although interestingly it looks to be a three door, we can already see some of the themes that would make through to the original concept unscathed – the strakes, plastic cladding and bumpers in a distinct color, high indicators mounted on the corner of the hood, and a sort of structural frame enclosing the passenger cabin, made up by linking the A and C pillars together with the cant rail.
The mounting points molded in are a neat idea completely in line with a rugged lifestyle type vehicle. This one feels a bit busy and disjointed – the shapes are not totally harmonious with each other and there’s a small cheat going on where the rear windshield meets the taillights and the tailgate – the glass couldn’t actually form that shape. But that’s okay at this early stage where it’s about getting the ideas out rather than execution. Judging by the consistent color blocking and soft gradients this appears to have been done digitally. Sketching in Photoshop would have been a novelty back then because the available graphics tablets were the large touchpad and stylus variety. These were awkward to use because you had to keep your eyes on your monitor and not what your hands were doing, unlike today’s tablets that allow you draw directly onto the screen like traditional paper.
This second sketch is by Brigid O’Kane, the designer credited with what was known as Bear Claw – the original S/T truck based idea. This pale blue sketch is much softer and more organic feeling than the first. The wheel arches are a more traditional circular shape and the overall vibe is less hard and aggressive. The cladding is present and correct but much less blocky than the previous sketch. The lighting graphic is more traditional and the grill shape is almost biological. This almost feels like a crew cab pick up with glazed bed cover on it – that whole rear three quarter section reminds me of the Aztek’s Buick sister car – the Rendezvous. This is a pencil and marker sketch – using lighter tones to block in color and then darker ones to indicate the shapes and forms of the car.
This third sketch is much more developed and detailed – look at the amount of reflection in the light units and the amount of shading and highlighting going on. This is a lot closer to the concept we know so that suggests a main theme has been picked for further iteration and this is one of those sketches, again by Brigid O’Kane. The lower body cladding is more cohesive and prevalent – on the concept it wouldn’t surround the wheel arches or come so high up the front bumper.
But the split grill, aggressive Pontiac nostrils and large round lower lights are all here. The glazing, door handles and mirrors are now much more realistic propositions, there is an area on the front bumper for a license plate and the proportions in general are more reflective of a real car. I like the shape and position of the hood indicators on this sketch, but that corner would be hell to figure out how to stamp and integrate the shut lines for the hood and fender. The lower bumper is hollowed out to emphasize the stance and the central area, helping it look muscular without being bulky. The only part I’m not sold on is the twin horizontal lights, but even on pencil and marker sketches like this you can just draw a page of alternatives, cut them out and spray mount them over the top.
Finally these sketches have been seen before, but I’m including them here for completeness sakes. Judging by the amount of detail, this is a later sketch like the orange one above. Creating pencil, marker and pastel sketches like these is quite time intensive: this is probably a couple of days work. The more detail a sketch has, the longer it takes to do. You only do them after the initial ideation round of quick thumbnails when the chief designer has decided what he wants. I once did a front graphic Massimo really liked, and he asked me for another ten versions of it, which is the beauty of sketching digitally – it’s much quicker and more flexible, and you don’t leave the studio in the evening high as a kite on solvent fumes.
Again these are not new, but demonstrate how you can have different themes for the same car. The yellow sketch here looks like a further development of the light blue car from earlier. The one to the right is more premium, slicker look that’s not as rugged – there’s no contrasting cladding and it’s much smoother – note the lack of roof rails. The bottom sketch is a rear three quarter of view of the bigger yellow sketch above. You can see the rear bumper as we know and love it starting to appear, but it’s not so incongruous because it’s much better integrated into the rest of the cladding, rather than the slapped on item that made it onto the final car.
Bonus Image: Aztek Clay Model
Finally the last image is not a sketch at all, but a quarter scale clay model. In fact it’s not even that – it’s half a model standing on black felt up against a mirror. Once the initial rounds of sketches are done, the chief will usually a couple to go forward to the next stage, a physical model. Quarter or fifth scale models are used to help narrow things down to decide what will get scaled up to a full size clay. This isn’t always exactly how it happens – it’s very much dependent on the time and modeling resources available in the studio. If a chief designer is particularly impressed with a sketch he might order it to go straight to full size clay if time is short. But as we know the Aztek was a product of the GM Advanced Concept Studio, it’s possible they may not have had the equipment to make a full size clay – or knowing the way GM operated they had to get approval to proceed from Detroit based on the smaller model first. Whatever happened you can appreciate the amount of detail and standard of finish it’s possible for skilled clay modelers to achieve. They really are the unsung artisans and crafts people of the studio.
This model would have been painstakingly sculpted using hand tools, and then covered in a specialist plastic film. It’s like stuff customizers wrap cars in and can be painted to accurately resemble the in-house color palate as closely as possible. It comes in sheets that are cut to shape and then made pliable by first softening it up in a bath of warm water, before being applied and further coaxed onto the contours of the model with the aid of an industrial heat gun, similar to how I style my hair. In this photo the position of the wheels in the rear wheel arches doesn’t look ideal, but the wheels may not have been secured in place, so that alternatives could be swapped over. The shut lines on the model are created using Rinrei tape, a type of Japanese graphic tape available in a variety of widths made from rice paper. It can be curved to form bends and corners and won’t leave a residue on the model if it needs to be reapplied.
Design is a visual discipline: nearly all the design work carried out in the studio is conducted using the old fashioned eyeball. Physical and digital models, sketches and renders are all visual properties that designers can use to make judgements, solve problems and solicit feedback. It’s exceedingly rare, except in extremely controlled circumstances as part of a media blitz on launch, that outsiders get to see how a new car is actually designed. You normally never get to see the alternative proposals or the early sketches, because no one needs to know how the sausage is made, and the OEMs in general don’t want to show you.
When you do get to see sketches from inside the studio like these, it’s absolute gold. What takes place during the design and development of a car is often by necessity shrouded in secrecy; if the story is told at all it’s either done at the time or years after, when memories are clouded and sketches, photos and models are long lost. It’s to General Motors eternal credit they haven’t buried the story of the Aztek like an embarrassing relative never to be spoken about in polite circles. I just wish a few more car companies would follow their example regarding their own design history. It would make my job a bit easier, and a lot less expensive.
These exclusive never seen before images were kindly supplied to us by the GM Heritage Archive, who look after a priceless vault of information and make it available for media use. We would like to express our deepest thanks and appreciation for their tireless work in helping us out with these design deep dive articles.
- If Pontiac Had Built This Instead Of The Aztek It Could Have Saved The Brand
- Not Enough Driven Wheels: 1994 Jeep Cherokee vs 2003 Pontiac Aztek
- Chevy Citation or Pontiac Aztek: Which GM Five-Door Do You Love To Hate Less?
- I Drove A 20 Year-Old Chevy Avalanche That Someone Traded In To A Dealership. It Was Phenomenal
Wow, I can almost smell the Prismacolors, Bestine, and Chavant. Thanks for sharing, Adrian.
in the case of the Aztek, we know at the director of GM’s West Coast Advanced Concept Center asked his team of pencil wielders to think about taking a “Camaro and a Blazer and put them in a blender”.
See that’s where it all went wrong. It needed less Camaro more Trans Am, complete and topped with an unblended screaming chicken.
At what point do drive train engineering and budget hit the fan of design or is that integral from the beginning? In the case of the Aztec would that have been implied from the Blazer/Camaro inspiration and then that got mangled along the way?
In my experience, they should be done (and the best way to do it) is concurrently. However the Aztek was nearly thirty years ago, and at that time design was very much subservient in the GM hierarchy.
The wheels on the clay model make me wonder: have there ever been production wheels with only a single axis of symmetry, beyond the teddy bear wheels? (Neglecting the technical points of bolt patterns and valve stem accommodations of course.)
Peugeot and now Renault have started dicking around with this. I think they look shit.
Pardon me, but I see Isuzu Vehicross in all those sketches, how did they get it so wrong from the sketches to production?
There’s a lot more information in the original DGD piece I linked.
Because the General gonna General.
Thank you GM Heritage Archive for sharing these treasures with Adrian and us. They’re fantastic! Thank you Adrian for weaving a great story around them. I doubt it’s possible but I always dreamed of seeing the unshown sketches of the Chevy version of Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky.
GM did a shooting brake version of the Solstice/Sky, called the Nomad in 2004. Featuring a 53 style Corvette toothed grill and inset headlights much like the original Corvette’s, the rear half of the car does a nice homage to the Tri-Five Chevy Nomads. I loved it and was disappointed it did not make production. Here’s a link to the 2004 Nomad: https://www.supercars.net/blog/2004-chevrolet-nomad-concept/
But supposedly, someone at GM was semi-serious enough to contemplate a V6 powered, Kappa platformed 2 seater, called the Stingray. It was meant to be more upscale & expensive compared to the Pontiac and Saturn Kappa’s. I don’t believe a static display like the Nomad was ever built of the Stingray. Here’s the Motor Trend story that I remember back in the day: https://www.motortrend.com/vehicle-genres/chevrolet-kappa-sting-ray/
Thank you for this!
This article made me think how little we hear of women in the design studios.
They were definitely a boys club in the past. I wonder how balanced they have become now.
Harley Earl had his ‘damsels of design’ in the thirties and forties. These days, very generally speaking, there are more women in the color, materials and finish teams than the exterior and interior teams, which are mostly still a sausage party. There are more women beginning to break through in clay and digital modelling though.
It can swing the other direction. I’m in industrial/product design, not really transportation design, but I knew a few women that lacked the hard skills, knowledge, and critical thanking that make a designer great, yet they made it pretty far in their careers based on being attractive young women that are great at selling the concepts to the upper executives.
Me personally, I worked at a design consultancy and the women were valued more than the male designers, because a consultancy wants to appear to have a diverse group of people working on their products, especially since women perform the majority of shopping for most households and approve larger/expensive purchases like vehicles, etc.
If you have two designers with equal experience and portfolios, the women will get the offer first, because companies are actively trying to not make the design department a sausage party as Adrian mentioned.
Life is never fair for anyone; not complaining, just sharing my experience.
Yes a lot of this sounds familiar.
Brigid was my professor in college and it was poorly kept secret she worked on the Aztek design. When she would talk about it, it was usually about the frustration the whole design team faced knowing their unique concept was slowly being morphed into a joke in the hands of gm management.
This is the least surprising thing I’ve read all day.
Heartbreaking, yet oh so predictable
It’s amazing what a little rake does for the Aztek. I feel like they reused some of the basic concepts here for the CTS-V with the big haunches tapering to a lower, more aggressive front end.
So do we blame Brigid O’Kane for this monstrosity, the design chief, or the studio? Or a little bit of all of them?
Some concepts should stay concepts. Others should make production with only the required changes to meet legal and production requirements. The aztek is the first type.
Thanks for sharing these. Oh, to have been the metaphorical fly on the wall to see how it all went down.
Designers do as they are directed, mostly. If you haven’t read it, read my original Damn Good Design piece about the Aztek. There’s plenty of blame to go around but none of it should be directed at Brigid O’Kane.
I did read it (though admittedly I was looking more at the images), but I’ll refamiliarize myself with it.
These have been a fascinating couple of articles, but there’s surely a third to be written, about the process between decent looking concept to disappointing production model, the Aztek is again a good subject for this, so please keep the Aztekopian going for a bit longer.
How does the cycle (I assume) work between design, production engineering, cost engineering and budgeting work? How fraught does it get when a design is visibly becoming watered down, or as in this case, downright ruined, when engineering say a detail can’t be done, or it can, but is going to cost so much another detail has to be sacrificed etc.
As laymen, its easy to just feel disappointed and lose interest in a production model that is a weak facsimile of a great concept, but there’s clearly a huge amount of collaboration and compromise in this period that we never hear about.
I have covered it for Hagerty:
https://www.hagerty.com/media/opinion/vision-thing/vision-thing-concepts-are-the-boxes-not-the-blister-packs-of-car-design/
https://www.hagerty.com/media/opinion/vision-thing/vision-thing-getting-a-concept-made-or-not/
Awesome, thank you! I’ll read them now.
I imagine, depending on the outcome and also how you approach it, the transition between concept and production can be either really satisfying or really depressing as a designer.
Going by the sketches, Brigid O’Kane really can’t take the blame for it – the concepts she was putting forth didn’t have most of the Aztek’s problems – though personally the high-mounted turn signals never looked good – and a big part of why it sucked was the decision to move it over to the U-body and kill the proportions. The other big reason was the terrible choice in material for the cladding – most of the time it was fading on the lot.
Also, going by her website the Aztek was being developed around when she was leaving GM so she may have had pretty limited involvement in the final version.
Blame the bean counters and focus groups.
Instead of aggressive large wheels and tires to improve the proportions, instead things were watered down based on feedback from groups and savings from the bean counters. This resulted in a vehicle with tiny wheels and tires with a big chonky body, looking like a roller skate.
From what I remember the focus groups were roundly ignored. But you can’t blame them for the move to the U-body, or abysmal materials used in making the thing. That’s all on the accounting department trying to cut costs.
GM: The world’s best engineers dealing with the world’s worst accountants.
That’s really cool! I like how you constructed this article so we could see the refinement of the design as the process progressed. Well done! It also provides some much needed vindication for the designers involved in the Aztek. It’s not their fault, they had some cool ideas!
The GM Heritage Group really is awesome. I once convinced a professional organization that I am in to book the Heritage Collection for a meeting, mostly to be able to see the collection, since it’s only open for groups and events. I’m glad I did, because it was right as Covid was starting, and it closed soon after and then was in the process of moving and hasn’t re-opened yet. They have an amazing collection of significant vehicles and concepts, and even within their space they only had about 20% on display.
This is a fascinating glimpse into the design process. Thanks for sharing, which I assume you learned about in a 12-step program.
Do you want us all in rehab? Or do you want a website?
At the risk of appearing callous, I’ll take the website.
The Americans and Canadian could never keep pace with me. Lewin probably could being Australian.
Having imbibed in Britain and Australia, I’m inclined to agree.
Canadians devour our beer in packages of 24 pints, lovingly called two-fours. A holiday weekend occurring around May 24th is called the May two-four weekend, being the first drunk of the summer, hopefully celebrated outside
Hamish? are you of Scottish decent?
If there was ever a nation of people that can drink it’s the Scots. Och aye!
Sorry, Hamish was the name of our beloved Scottish Terrier. I picked up the name in a Robin Hood-like adventure book as a kid. Inverness, Scotland and the offshore islands are my favourite place on earth – and I try to drink Scots style when I’m there. I fail miserably..
Once in Dublin I tried to follow up an American friend of Irish ancestry. It was like the mother of all Argentine fails, so…
I’m headed there in about 7 weeks from SoCal. This time as well as the drinking, there will be a trip on the Falkirk wheel.
https://www.scottishcanals.co.uk/visit/canals/visit-the-forth-clyde-canal/attractions/the-falkirk-wheel.
I’ve been lucky enough to spend a week sailing up the Caledonian Canel a couple of times from Fort William to Inverness. It’s a beautiful place.
If there was ever a nation of people that can drink it’s the Scots.
Russia enters the chat…
*laughs in Moldovan*
Oh heck yes! Comrade, they have Vodka in their veins.
In Britain we call that Monday.
How about rehab first, then a website, which might be all the better for you all having spent time in rehab.
You don’t all have to go at once, so someone can keep putting out the quality content.
And thank you for the article it’s a great insight and good read.
OK that was good.
Definitely supports the idea they were designing the car before trying to drape it on the minivan bones.
Exploring 2-door and rear half door examples makes total sense in that late 90s timeframe. Most of the smaller SUV/crossovers had 2-door variants and there were a number of concepts with it, and even the original Honda HR-V that we didn’t get had a 2-door version. The half doors were trending on pickups (and soon Saturn coupes, then others in the 2000s), and on a number of concepts including Pontiac’s own Rageous and the Piranha. I think the Piranha was hinting at what became the Vibe but the second sketch seems to have a lot in common with it IMO.
I kind of wonder what the thought process was, obviously GM wasn’t going to approve developing a completely new platform for something like this, because that’s not how they work, but they also obviously didn’t expect it to use the U-body, so what platform did the designers have in mind originally?
The S/T trucks. GMT330 I think it is.
That might have looked better, but I don’t think it would have helped sales much, feels like this segment really did call for something FWD-based
we don’t really know how far the original Bear Claw idea got. My guess would be it made it at least as far as a full size clay, sized for the truck platform, and then the product committee decided it would be too expensive/not economical enough/didn’t handle.
Truck-based was still in as well and the car-based SUVs like the RAV4 and CR-V that were popping up were smaller than what even the Aztek sketches looked like. Certainly seems like they could have pivoted when realizing that car-based options were catching on, not only with the original Outback in ’96 but the Lexus RX shown as the SLV concept at Chicago in ’97. At that point GM didn’t have a 4WD/AWD capable car chassis in production, so not like they had something off the shelf to build off of, while Toyota/Honda still had 4WD versions of passenger cars globally. That gen of U-body van got AWD 4 years after their initial intro, the same time the Aztek debuted so more like they only got it as it was developed for the crossovers. But then, they had the F/AWD Theta platform in development almost concurrently since the Saturn VUE debuted for 2002, but probably that was decided to be small to have a 3-row option too as the Rendezvous had.
And maybe even simpler an explanation, it could have been decided that this would have been too close to the GMC Jimmy especially as they merged Pontiac and GMC together as a division in ’96.
I mean, in all honesty (especially in this world of incredibly normalized bizarre designs), I never felt the Aztek was ever that bad. And Christ is it versatile.
It was really the beancounters’ small wheels and dark gray cladding that did it in. Later ones with properly sized wheels and the body color cladding where night and day better. Not perfect, but it helps a lot.
The facelifted were an improvement for sure, but making the entire car matte plastic could have done a similar job. The schnozz and tall-body proportions did it no favors. I don’t mind the shape of the rear 3/4 of the car (minus the afterthought-looking rear bumper) but there’s various little tweaks that could/should have happened during development that could have made it much better overall.
The first sketch, of the Blazer/Camaro mashup, stylistically looks almost 30 years ahead of its time, when looking at the Genesis Magma.
So much so that alien feelings of joy and warmth were just bursting from your chest.
I’m just trying to figure out the bonus situation.
Vomiting feelings of acidic joy and warmth everywhere and laying eggs of joy and warmth that want to spread joy and warmth to everyone’s face.
The wheels on the clay model are cool as hell.
Yeah, I’d like to see more of those.
We have reached the tipping point where “Studying Ancient Azteks” now refers mostly to this vehicle. Apologies to the Aztec Empire. Perhaps if they had a poorer sense of aesthetics, we would still talk about them more.
“Now there’s an example of Ziggurat-by-committee! If only Itzcoatl’s original vision for that pyramid had come to fruition, they would still be around today!”
I can see a lot of Blazer in the designs, particularly in the C and D pillar, but I don’t really see a lot of Camaro. Maybe some Firebird in the hood nostrils.
And giving it some ground clearance really helps the whole design. Bigger wheels and knobby tires are a plus, too.
This site is so goddamn cool
Paging the Autopian promotional team. Put this on a shirt and quote Nsane In The MembraNe and make it next years member shirt. Please and thank you.
At times it must be hell to be a designer. You sketch up something cool like the orange design (that could have been what Honda CRV turned out to be) and by the time the bean counters are done you get to take credit for The Aztek.
I’m an architect, and one of the very first things I did on my own was a freestanding garage a mile from my house. During construction, all the best bits got cut down or cut out, and it still makes me sad any time I drive near it.
I was working at Milwaukee Tool for the first big redesign of the jobsite radio. “Sound quality” was the key component of the program, we had planned to do a 2.1 system with two 4″ full range drivers, and a large 6″ subwoofer in the bottom firing downwards.
Every idiot marketing person in the company wanted in on this project, because it ‘was cool’. Despite everyone’s insistence on sound quality being what we should focus on, what was the first thing to get cut? The subwoofer… you know.. which makes music sound powerful, especially at lower volumes.
Then they went after the usability, pushing the logo ever bigger and removing the easy to use with gloves on knobs, and demanding teeny tiny little press buttons because it was so much cheaper to produce.
In the end, the redesigned stereo was a giant piece of shit, because of bean counters. It sounded awful, and it was horrible to use because of how small the buttons were.
Guys, April 1st is Monday. Just one day, please, it would be AWESOME Everyone on the sight, groggily logging on at work just trying to caffeinate early in the morning, opens to a very subtly tweaked format for the site with only Aztek articles on the front page.
Can confirm, this would be AWESOME.
“ In fact it’s not even that – it’s half a model standing on black felt up against a mirror.”
I would imagine that if an Aztec looked at itself in a mirror, there would be a Medusa-like turning-to-stone effect.
And now I have the ELO song in my brain.
Pontiac would still exist if it wasn’t for GM leadership killing every good looking / fun idea in the name of cost cutting.
Off the top of my brain:
The Aztek concept was beautiful. The rim/tire proportions and design language are great. It had angles in the right places.
It is too bad it became the car that screamed “I give up…” which was epitomized in Breaking Bad.
The Vibe was available with AWD
I forgot about that! Hell, an ex of mine I had one…
It was one a great Toyota Corolla Wagon! 😀
My SIL still rocks a Vibe and it is a great wagon.
Interesting opinion. I have never met anyone who thought the Holden import was a problem for Pontiac. The people I knew who were aware they were Holden’s they always thought it was awesome we finally got some Aussie goodness. To everyone else it wasn’t a thing. Never heard it cast as a negative.
I should clarify, at the time there was some healthy skepticism about the G8 because it was built in Australia. it was the first 100% import Pontiac at the time as the Vibe was built at NUMMI. In 2008 for North America we primarily had cars built here, Japan, and Germany. It was an absolute outlier.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a17012187/2008-pontiac-g8-first-drive-review/
Time has proven that it was a solid platform that is desirable to this day.
Hell, I personally want to get my hands one of the last GTOs. Every modern day review of it points that it is a great car now that hearkens back to the late 60s and early 70s with the Gen1 and Gen2 LS. Apparently, it handles well in corners too.
Let us not forget passing on bringing the Monaro Ute over as the Pontiac GTO Sport Truck…
The rot started way before that. I recently picked up some 92/93/94 Chevrolet and Pontiac brochures, and the there is basically zero brand separation between them.
What are you talking about!?!?! A Pontiac badge looks nothing like a Chevrolet badge! Is that not enough for you?
/s
GM was such a mess with all of those brands. No company competed against itself as doggedly as they did. Pontiacs are slightly sporty Chevys. Buicks are more luxurious Oldsmobiles, which are slightly luxurious Pontiacs, but nobody better even THINK about trying to be as luxurious as Cadillac! Saturns are plastic Chevys that cannibalize cheap car sales from the rest of GM because the import fighter concept only works if you update your cars more than once a decade.
It pretty much starts this way in 1967 with the Chevy Camaro / Pontiac Firebird. they were identical except the nose and tail lights.
At least they had different motors that were specific to their division at the time. That ends in the late 1970s with the anemic 301 shoved into the Firebird and TA.
It became a problem in the 1970s, Pete Estes and John DeLorean were kicked upstairs to run Chevrolet in succession, Jim McDonald became GM of Pontiac in 1969, and was much more of a loyal company man than either of them, or Bunkie Knudsen, had been, more willing to toe the corporate line, not challenge upper management, and keep Pontiac in its assigned lane. Then, they spent basically the whole ’70s in reaction mode, struggling to stay ahead of safety, environmental, and fuel economy regulations while financial issues at GM meant the corporation couldn’t be as generous with development funding for unique sheet metal as they had been in the past
Yeah, GM really didn’t do itself any favors with as much overlap the brands had. Pontiac was “Driving Excitement” and had the “Wide Track” ads, and should have been their racing and performance division, including the corvette and firebird (no camaro). Chevy would have been the mass-market division (boring appliances, but effective), gmc would be trucks, oldsmobile would have been daring upscale niche vehicles in the best American way, saab would be daring avant garde vehicles in the finest European and Scandinavian traditions, Saturn would have been odd but fun economy cars (like what Scion started as), Buick would have been true entry level luxury (or kill it off, ideally) and Cadillac be Cadillac.
That said, they could/should just be chevy and Cadillac now.
Pontiac was a prime candidate for the Edsel/DeSoto treatment back in the 50’s/early 60’s before DeLorean came along.
The dustbuster van family was so hilariously identical.
Europe got the dustbuster twins with their proper names, followed with Pontiac Montana badged as Chevrolet Trans sport. And as a bonus, there was Chevrolet Alero, which had a bowtie in the front, but the orginal Pontiac steering wheel. Since these were not succesful, GM decided to badge already EXISTING DAEWOO cars as Chevrolets…
Pontiac would have been no better off selling more/better MT-equipped sedans or coupes. Pontiac died for many reasons, but the only real way to save them would have been to produce a line of very-well-reviewed CUVs with maybe a halo car based on the Camaro. Even this might have failed…
Pontiac was weighed down with decades of GM malaise, which was combined with an uninspired product line, so the best thing to do was kill the brand.
Whoa. Does this mean Autopian is legit? Or just Adrian? (Sorry, that probably just insulted Adrian. I will now play Siouxsie very loudly.)
I’m still waiting for my fedora with a press card stuck into the ribbon.
I speak for all of Autopia that would pay to see you wear a fedora.
It’d be a bitchin’ fedora, tho. No boring crap.
With a big brim.
and an elongated hole in the top so his mohican doesn’t get mussed.
It’d be a half fedora butted up against a mirror like the clay model, leaving a sliver of room for the hair.
It has to cover your entire noggin above the ears, though. It’s not a trilby.
Sentenced to 120 hours of listening to the Cure and 30 days of Robert Smith lipstick.
Brvtal
Cure listening is zero problem but the lipstick is a bit too much. Can’t smear it artfully with a beard.
Yes indeed, Adrian lives with snakes & lizards & other things that go bump in the night.
In my head Adrian lives in a closet playing Cradle of Filth like Richmond in the IT Crowd.
If you ever see me in a frock coat and poncey frilly shirt you have my express permission to punch me in the face.
Noted. Personally I strive to be a Moss but in appearance and disposition I’m much more of a Roy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5lBiyTwcR4
Yep, that track is on my Halloween Spooky Songs playlist 😉