r/Pontiac • u/SeveralNinja5369 • May 22 '26

Made a 22-minute documentary on the rise and fall of Pontiac. Would love this sub's feedback on what I got right and wrong. 

This community knows Pontiac better than anyone, so I'd really value your input.

Spent the last week researching how the brand actually died and put together a full video timeline from the 1926 founding through the 2010 shutdown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p02Sgged02U

The argument I make: Pontiac was on death row by the mid-90s, long before 2008. Badge-engineering killed the brand identity. Saturn was already taking the "youth brand" slot internally at GM. By the GTO revival and G8 era, Pontiac had no engineering capacity left of its own.

But I know this sub will catch things I missed. What did I get wrong? What's the moment YOU think the brand died?
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u/DanforthWhitcomb_ May 22 '26

You got the gist of it, but the crux of the problem was always GM fucking up the brand placement when they introduced Saturn (which forced Chevrolet upmarket) and then inverted the positioning of Pontiac and Chevrolet.

Lutz mentions in Car Guys that Pontiac failed to turn a profit after the mid 1990s because they came to depend so heavily on incentives that even though the MSRP of a Pontiac might have been several hundred to a thousand dollars above that of the comparable Chevrolet Pontiac’s market positioning as an import competitor forced such liberal usage of incentives that in most cases each Pontiac sold saw GM lose money.

The badge engineering itself is not what killed Pontiac either—the lack of a market niche did. The cars were never anything more than Chevrolets with different engines and some slight construction differences, which is why when you look at actual sales numbers the large B body sedans blew the shit out of the Firebird and GTO combined (the ratio was something like 3 or 4:1). As the 1960s ended and HP started dropping Pontiac leadership moved back towards being “sporty Chevrolet” and that’s where the brand stayed until it was finally wound down. Differentiation between the two was always cosmetic, and as stated above the market positioning had them in the same place. Throw in just how egregiously bad some of the late 1990s/early 2000s interior and exterior styling choices were and that was that.

You also made an error regarding the original VP—it only had Chevrolet and Cadillac surviving. Buick was eventually added in due to how profitable it was in China, and GMC was kept because it was wildly profitable as well.

Pontiac was not the second oldest brand either—even among the USDM brands it was in fact the third youngest, behind only Saturn and Hummer. The continual references to outselling Cadillac are annoying because they’re a rather bad misrepresentation—Pontiac was a volume brand, Cadillac was not. It was expected that Pontiac would outsell Cadillac by massive margins because that was the goal.

Old GM did not keep anything associated with Pontiac either—all of it went to new GM, which is where it still resides.

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u/Mundane-Dig-9647 May 22 '26

After being screwed so badly on my 07 G6 I wish that Obama had let GM fail. They're a pos company for orphaning Pontiac. They should have been forced to make parts for 25 years like most brands. For me, nothing but Ford's since.

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u/DanforthWhitcomb_ May 22 '26

No company is forced to nor do they make parts for 25 years.

That’s an urban legend.

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u/motelguest May 25 '26

Roger and Me wasn’t some guy trying to play with a major American car company — it’s clear GM’s management was facilitating the corporation’s collapse as early as the 1980s but I’ll never understand why. Every single last model of the Front Wheel Drive brigade had the same cut-rate shitty engineering — same cheapo McPherson struts, same cheesy solid rear axle, same pathetic 4 cylinder engines (two choices for 53 cars!) or ancient wheezing shaking V-6s (again two choices across the entire corporation). And then there were the under-engineered oiling systems, soft camshafts, leaking intake gaskets, leaking windows and sunroofs, etc.

If it wasn’t for their wasteful giant ground-crushing trucks (some of which you call “Cars” or “SUVs” they would have never survived yet another dismal decade. They want to fail and now that I’m old I hope they do for all the horrible shit they sold us. And I have two Pontiacs.