Quote:
Originally Posted by Expunge
Actually GM was directed by the idiots in the Obama administration to kill Olds, Pontiac, Hummer, Saturn, and Buick as part of the bailout. Only when GM showed the government morons sales of the Buick brand in China was Buick allowed to continue.
Was a shame too because Pontiac had just introduced a bunch of new models. To this day, the Pontiac Grand Am IMO was one of the most comfortable sporty 4 door cars to drive. And the Hummer HX GM showed off at an auto show looked awesome.
And one could only imagine a Pontiac Trans Am on the Camaro platform..
Damn shame..
|
Olds died 2005, years before the collapse and bankruptcy. GMC also had to fight for its existence, and presumably so did Chevy and Cadillac. Thats what tends to happen when an entire business gets evaluated for restructuring. Every component is looked at & needs to be justified or else it gets axed. If you're just going to keep all the dead weight, you're not actually restructuring things.
Pontiac, as a whole, was pretty pointless. There wasn't anything that it did that couldn't be accomplished by a Chevy. Everything was practical twin to a Chevy, except the G8 and Solstice. One was literally a rebadged Holden and the other (I'm 99% sure) was inspired by the C1 Corvette. It wouldn't have been hard to have made both a Chevy had Pontiac not existed.
GMC survived because a) appreciably better profit margins than equivalent Chevy's and b) relatively few cross-shoppers between the two brands. GM stood to lose a ton of money by getting rid of GMC. Neither of those things were true for Pontiac. Saturn probably had a better business case than Pontiac did as I'm reasonably sure (~80%) that those buyers were largely either loyal to the Saturn brand or conquests from the likes of Toyota and Honda. Few considered buying a Chevrolet or Buick.
A new Firebird would only have ever existed in the imagination as there were no plans to build one off the Zeta platform. It was determined that it would have cannibalized too many of its sales from Camaro to be worth developing. Selling 80k Camaros per year is better than selling 55k Camaros + 35k Firebirds because you don't have to pay for extra tooling or development costs for the 2nd model.
I like my Grand Am. But in an alternate universe, had GM kept the Beretta around for another generation I would have bought that without any hesitation.