Pondering Pontiac

Does anyone remember Pontiac? Not the brand that went out with a silent wheeze back in 2010. By then, Pontiac hand’t been selling Pontiacs for at least 22 years. 1988 being the last year a genuinely Pontiac model – the Fiero – was available. It came standard with the last Pontiac engine – the Iron Duke, which was a 2.5 liter four cylinder engine related to the last Pontiac V8 engine, the 4.9 liter 301.

When Pontiac stopped installing Pontiac engines in Pontiac-badged cars, “Pontiac” became a badge-engineered brand that resold re-skinned Chevys. Buicks and Oldsmobile were reduced to the same.

It worked for awhile in that the residue of brand loyalty many people had for those divisions of GM kept them coming back for what they thought were Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles and Buicks. But after awhile, it stopped working – especially insofar as attracting new buyers.

Because what would be the attraction?

A thing – an important thing – that GM lost sight of (or was just dismissive of) is that people generally buy a car because it is not the same as another car. They also want to get what they believe they are buying.

Whoever originally bought my 1976 Trans-Am when it was new wanted a Pontiac. He did not want a Chevy. Not that there is anything wrong with Chevys; nor with the Camaro – which is closely related to the Firebird/Trans-Am. The important thing is that a Camaro is not a Firebird – and the reverse. They each have their own distinct identity.

My Trans-Am is defined by the Pontiac V8 that’s under its hood – just as the same-year Camaro’s is defined by the Chevy V8 under its hood. Each engine has its pros and cons. The Pontiac V8’s pros include superior low-end torque; the Chevy small-block V8 likes to rev. The power curves are different and they respond differently to tuning. A Pontiac V8’s compression ratio can be changed (up or down) by swapping cylinder heads – rather than pistons. Chevy small blocks are much more compact than Pontiac V8s, which are all “big blocks” in that every displacement engine – from the 326 to the 455 – is the same size externally.

One of the big draws, when my ’76 TA was new, was that you could order it with a 455, which is 7.5 liters in today-speak. The biggest-displacement engine that was available in any Camaro in 1976 – and all the way through to 1981 – was a 350 cubic inch (5.7 liter) V8. While Pontiac dropped the 455 after 1976, the Trans-Am (and Firebird Formula) were still available with 400 cubic inch (6.6 liter) Pontiac V8s all the way through 1979.

1980 was the first year the Trans-Am came with nothing larger than a 301 V8, but it was still a Pontiac V8 and that made the Trans-Am (and Firebird Formulas so equipped) Pontiacs every bit as much as the ones that came before.

This engine coulda been a contender – but was never given the chance. It was the first mass-market turbocharged V8 when it replaced the 400 V8 as the Trans-Am’s highest-performance V8 in 1980. It touted 200 horsepower and 345 ft.-lbs. of torque. These were very good numbers for 1980. As a reference point, the same-year Z28 Camaro’s 5.7 liter, 350 cubic inch V8 touted just 190 horsepower. But the 301 Pontiac was gimped by three things that had little to do with the engine, itself.

The first was that – unlike the Camaro Z28’s 350 – the Firebird’s 301 turbo was paired only with an automatic transmission. And that transmission piped the power to a rear axle with a 3.08 ring and pinion, which was great for highway cruising but terrible for acceleration. The ’79 TA with the 400 (and four speed manual) had a 3.23 rear axle ratio.

The other thing was that the turbo ginned up not much boost and even that much depended on everything working just right, which it often didn’t. The engine was also still carbureted – which wasn’t the engine’s fault. Carbs and turbos aren’t the ticket. But fuel injection would have eliminated that problem – as Buick proved a few years later with its 3.8 liter turbo’d V6 that became one of the strongest American-made engines of the ’80s. It was so good that Pontiac used this engine to power the 1989 Trans-Am 20th Anniversary editions, which were the quickest and fastest stock production Trans-Ams since the 1973-1974 SD-455 Trans-Ams and Formulas equipped with the SD-455 engine (these latter were the only Formulas that came with the Trans-Am’s shaker hood scoop).

One wonders what might have been had Pontiac been given the time to develop the 301 turbo engine. That had been the plan, by the way. It is why the brand-new (back in 1982) Trans-Am retained the off-center turbo-bulge hood scoop that debuted in 1980, when the first Turbo Trans Am became available. The ’82 Trans-Am was supposed to have been powered by the 301 Turbo. it would have continued to be a Pontiac, in other words. But – as almost everyone knows – when the all-new ’82 Firebirds came out, they had the exact same Chevy-sourced engines under their hoods as the ’82 Camaros.

With the exception – briefly – of the standard 2.5 liter Iron Duke four, which was standard in both cars for a couple of years. But the Trans-Am got the same 5.0 liter, 305 cubic inch V8 as the Camaro Z28 and so became a “Pontiac” in name only. It was a good looking car and it did sell well, for a time. But as time passed, it became common knowledge that if you bought a Trans-Am, you were mostly buying a badge. You were driving a Chevy. Again, not that there is anything wrong with Chevy.

But why did this happen? Why would GM gut Pontiac?

It wasn’t actually GM that did it. The government did. By the early ’80s, it had become too onerous – too expensive – to “certify” all the different, brand-specific engines in the GM family. Each had to be separately approved for sale – by the government. You can imagine the cost.

That’s why the Pontiac V8 was euthanized – along with the Oldsmobile V8 (the last of them, a 5.0 liter 307, carried on into the mid-1980s in the Cutlass and other large Oldsmobiles but it, too, got the needle for the sake of compliance).

Put another way, what the government did – rather, the effect of what the government decreed – was to homogenize the offerings available to us. GM stopped offering Pontiacs – and Oldsmobiles – because by the mid-1980s/early ’90s they were just re-selling the same cars sold by Chevy. Might as well consolidate. By the early 2000s, it was time to end the overlap.

This hasn’t been good for Chevy, either, by the way.

All of GM today – Chevy and Buick and GMC and Cadillac – collectively has a smaller market share today than Chevy by itself had in 1970.

We’re all the poorer for it.

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