GM sells the Pontiac brand in 2009

Jim Waldron a Pontiac dealer and a group of investors offered to buy the Pontiac brand from GM back in 2009. GM said Pontiac wasn’t for sale and later on terminated the brand. On the other hand GM was willing to sell some of it’s other brands like Saturn, Hummer and Saab.

If GM sold Pontiac in 2009 to Waldron or any other interested buyer (maybe some foreign brand), what kind of alternate timeline could we see for this brand? What kind of model lineup could we expect? Does Pontiac return to its muscle car roots?
 
Big problem that there was very little left of Pontiac by 2009 that wasn't just Badge Engineering.
Most of the lineup were slight reworks of Chevy, Daewoo, Holden, Saturn, and Toyota

G3 Daewoo Gentra
G5 Chevy Cobalt
G6 Chevy Malibu (and SAAB, Opel, etc)
G8 Holden Commodore
Montana The TranSport minvan Dead in US, but units made at Doraville sold in Canada and Mexico
Vibe Toyota Matrix
Torrent Chevy Equinox
Solstice the last original Pontiac, but also sold as Saturn Sky, Daewoo G2X and Opel GT

Pontiac pretty much died in 2005, but GM disguised the corpse, doing the Weekend at Bernies with Badges

So the only thing that really was Pontiac was the Solstice, made at the Wilmington Plant, that closed in 2009, and the Minivan, that was already dead in 2008 with the closure of the Doraville plant
 
On top of @marathag 's post above, I would also add that Pontiac had never totally been a muscle-car brand throughout its history. The best example of this is actually Canada, where as part of the P-B-GMC dealer chain Pontiac functioned more as a family car brand just slightly above Chevrolet (and that dealer chain's Chevrolet counterpart). It was also somewhat similar in the US once you looked beyond the few iconic models, except that in the classic GMUSA model each autonomous was meant to be full-service to some degree - with exceptions, of course. Limiting Pontiac to just a few models misses out on the real Pontiac story and makes it more vulnerable to many of the same problems affecting, say, Saab-Spyker, on top of fluctuating oil prices dampening sales. If Pontiac somehow miraculously survived while retaining a transitional model lineup inherited from the GM era, its best bet is to follow the strategy that always worked in Canada - a reboot of sorts, with performance models eventually on the side but not its core focus.
 
what if its sold in like 03 along with Oldsmobile before Olds gets shuts down as a package deal. Then someone can make olds your semi luxury brand and Pontiac the completer to ford and Chevy
 
what if its sold in like 03 along with Oldsmobile before Olds gets shuts down as a package deal. Then someone can make olds your semi luxury brand and Pontiac the completer to ford and Chevy
Even then, what was Pontiac was tied in tight with the GM supply chain, for electronics and drivetrain.
 

CalBear

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Big problem that there was very little left of Pontiac by 2009 that wasn't just Badge Engineering.
Most of the lineup were slight reworks of Chevy, Daewoo, Holden, Saturn, and Toyota

G3 Daewoo Gentra
G5 Chevy Cobalt
G6 Chevy Malibu (and SAAB, Opel, etc)
G8 Holden Commodore
Montana The TranSport minvan Dead in US, but units made at Doraville sold in Canada and Mexico
Vibe Toyota Matrix
Torrent Chevy Equinox
Solstice the last original Pontiac, but also sold as Saturn Sky, Daewoo G2X and Opel GT

Pontiac pretty much died in 2005, but GM disguised the corpse, doing the Weekend at Bernies with Badges

So the only thing that really was Pontiac was the Solstice, made at the Wilmington Plant, that closed in 2009, and the Minivan, that was already dead in 2008 with the closure of the Doraville plant
It would have been nice to see the G8 continue, maybe as a Buick. Very nice performance sedan, something quite lacking in GM's current line-up.
 
I was an Olds, Pontiac, Buick raised kid in that order and it broke my heart when the first two were killed. I always thought the same as @Somedevil that the Pontiac/Olds combo would have been tight.

It's a hard piece of auto history because they were always GMs "excitement division" and they never really let it be exciting. Take a genuine look at the Fierro, the 88 GT was America's first real midmounted sports car. And is it ever fun to drive! But almost every iteration before then was what everyone remembers.

There would have to have been a model honeymoon for the new owners on the models available, so they could start their own lines. Either continue on with the new model branding of G8, G6, etc, with the aim to use those successes. I imagine GM would be open to an engine deal, at least starting out.

I got to drive a G8 gxp and it was one of the few times I was a really pressed back into my seat. Most automags were putting it in the same level as the 5 series. Gm again under sold its potential, because what driver wouldn't want a RWD V8 that made BMW nervous?

There were also plans for using caddies roadster frame for the next gen G6, which would have made it a hell of alot sportier. Thats a route worth looking at because it could have been an import fighter, I was always shocked by how good it was on gas, and I liked it's stylings.

And introducing a midmounted sportscar would be key I believe, and maybe... A partnership with the company in Tampa that does "Trans Am" conversions to catch the retro muscle car wave.

This also seems out there but I would also reintroduce the Aztek, the Breaking Bad hype could have been a coup if GM management weren't habitually sticking their collective heads up their arse. Some light restyling, and fixing the visibility issue, because the blind spots made it a task to drive, I'm 6' and struggled sometimes changing lanes with lower cars beside me.
 

CalBear

Moderator
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Monthly Donor
Rebranded maybe as a Skylark would fit the Buick brand
Skylark, with the High Performance Package called the Stage 1 or GTX!

Once upon a time I had a 1970 GS Stage 1 with the 455 and the M-22 four speed. Great car, IMPOSSIBLE to get parts for.
 
the 88 GT was America's first real midmounted sports car. And is it ever fun to drive! But almost every iteration before then was what everyone remembers.
Problem with GM was, anytime the performance of one of the Divisions sporty cars made Corvette look bad, they had to tone it down.

Corvette was Chevys Golden Calf, and GM told all the other divisions must abide by that.

GM had many opportunities to make real sportscars besides the Corvette, and either strangled in the crib or left to die by withholding development. Look what happened to the GNX. It embarrassed Chevy, badly.

Even the Caddy CTS-V, GM had no idea how to market that, without making Corvette look bad
 
Would they have sold the factories? Or just the name?
I could see Tata or Isuzu or some other car maker with little presence in the US buying the name to sell their cars.

NO ONE is going to want to sell Chevies they have to buy from GM to resell as Pontiacs.
 
Here'a what Pontiac had when the Hammer came down in 2009
how many days of inventory was sitting on lots as of April 1.

  • Pontiac G3: 617 days of inventory
  • Pontiac G5: 443 days of inventory
  • Pontiac G6: 83 days of inventory
  • Pontiac G8: 92 days of inventory
  • Pontiac Solstice: 276 days of inventory
  • Pontiac Vibe: 149 days of inventory
  • Pontiac Torrent: 99 days of inventory
The national average for all brands was 83 days of inventory in 2009. There was also a number of excess Montanas still being sold in Canada and Mexico, but not US

So that's the assets, plus the Wilmington Plant, and a were among 1000 dealerships had franchises, but very few were Pontiac only
 
Uh, no - a Skylark would have been something Opel Astra/Ford Focus-sized.

yes Skalarks were smaller my grandparents had one in the early 80's then my mother had one of the last versions in the 90's she then moved on to a 03 grand am. But it was also Buicks more sports line. also by 09 it was off the market for a decade.
 
I was an Olds, Pontiac, Buick raised kid in that order and it broke my heart when the first two were killed. I always thought the same as @Somedevil that the Pontiac/Olds combo would have been tight.

In that case, in Canada the problem was that because it's a smaller market, GM Canada found it easier to consolidate the various brands into ~2-3 dealer channels, Chevrolet-Olds and Pontiac-Buick-GMC (not sure about Cadillac's status in this whole thing; later on, of course, there was Saturn-Saab-Isuzu, along these same lines) and most areas in Canada had a GM dealer that belonged to only one or the other of the dealer chains, with the rare area having dealers from both. This made for easy parallelism (regular cars: Chevy/Pontiac, trucks: Chevy Trucks/GMC, upscale cars: Olds/Buick) in a way that would not be possible in the US because it would be seen as going against elements of brand loyalty and the expectations from its fans and owners. Which made it easier to lower R&D costs on the Canadian Pontiacs (which we in the US largely had a taste of in the '80s when the Parisienne made the trek south), especially in the pre-Auto Pact days. Having a P-B-O-GMC dealer chain would be interesting, but that would leave the question of what to do for parallelism in the case of the Chevy dealer chain. Or having someone or something take enough advantage of GM's doldrums in the late 20th century by taking at least Pontiac, Olds, and Buick out of GM's hands and putting in the hands of someone more capable of making it work, including the full potential of Pontiac as a family car and (for export purposes) Buick's positive reputation in China.

It's a hard piece of auto history because they were always GMs "excitement division" and they never really let it be exciting. Take a genuine look at the Fierro, the 88 GT was America's first real midmounted sports car. And is it ever fun to drive! But almost every iteration before then was what everyone remembers.

Not necessarily, even in the US. For every vehicle that embodied that "excitement" you also have more "humble" models like the Catalina, the Astre, and the Kadett E-based LeMans coexisting in the lineup. In Canada it was more obvious, particularly in the pre-Auto Pact days where it was easier to replicate the lineup at lower cost by building up from the equivalents at Chevrolet. Hence the Acadian (= Chevy II/Nova), Strato Chief (= Biscayne), Laurentian (= Bel Air), and Parisienne (= Impala); you can figure out which of those "Cheviacs" slotted where in the US Pontiac lineup. The Canadian Pontiacs to me are closer to what Pontiac was all about (and also proves that Pontiacs as rebadged Chevys is nothing new) than the US Pontiacs, as something that is both a step up from Chevy (to follow from Sloan's ladder of success) but more family-oriented and for tighter budgets that would preclude something higher like, say, an Oldsmobile. It could have been possible IMO for GM to build on the export success of the Canadian Pontiacs to build up Pontiac's family-oriented reputation abroad and even in the US. You could argue that it was because deep down in reality GM never really knew what to do with Pontiac, given that it started out as a companion marque for the long-since-defunct Oakland marque.

For some of our non-Canadians/non-petrolheads who want to know more, here's an article about an Alberta man restoring a late 1960s Grande Parisienne (= Chevrolet Caprice) back in 2014:
https://driving.ca/pontiac/local-co...ac-grande-parisienne-as-canadian-as-they-come
There's also a great series of posts called "Canada's Unique Automobile Landscape" that I've been trying to retrieve since my computer had trouble a while back (I know those posts exist!) but I'm having a hard time tracking them down.
 
Big problem that there was very little left of Pontiac by 2009 that wasn't just Badge Engineering.
Most of the lineup were slight reworks of Chevy, Daewoo, Holden, Saturn, and Toyota

I agree. However the rationale of Jim Waldron and his group was that Pontiac at that time was the third best selling GM brand behind Chevy and GMC, that it had a very loyal customer base that was not too keen to switch to other GM brands, and that it had a heritage worth saving (nameplates like Firebird, Trans Am, GTO..etc are still sellable if properly executed).

I would also add that Pontiac had never totally been a muscle-car brand throughout its history

Of course not, but it had a very strong heritage of muscle cars, especially in the 60's where they practically had a performance model/trim for every car segment they sold. The GTOs helped sell a lot of midsized Tempests/ LeMans, Trans Ams helped sell cheaper V6 powered Firebirds, 2+2 tried to be the GTO for the fullsize Catalinas. Pontiac was no doubt a volume seller but because of the 60's and early 70's it had that affordable performance image aura that set it aside from other GM brands.

what if its sold in like 03 along with Oldsmobile before Olds gets shuts down as a package deal. Then someone can make olds your semi luxury brand and Pontiac the completer to ford and Chevy

That would have been an even more interesting POD.
You just gave me an idea. One of the primary reasons GM refused to sell Pontiac was that it wasn't easy to separate the brand because it was sold in combined Pontiac-Buick-GMC dealerships. If the investors buy Saturn (it was for sale) they would already have a dealer network in place to ease the seperation.

Problem with GM was, anytime the performance of one of the Divisions sporty cars made Corvette look bad, they had to tone it down.

Corvette was Chevys Golden Calf, and GM told all the other divisions must abide by that.

GM had many opportunities to make real sportscars besides the Corvette, and either strangled in the crib or left to die by withholding development. Look what happened to the GNX. It embarrassed Chevy, badly.

Even the Caddy CTS-V, GM had no idea how to market that, without making Corvette look bad

Couldn't agree more. Pontiac didn't get the 2-seater Banshee in the 60's and the Fiero ended like it did all because of the Corvette. That is why I always wonder what an independent Pontiac would be able to do. Would they be able to revive some excitement if they were unconstrained by GM bureaucracy.

There were also plans for using caddies roadster frame for the next gen G6, which would have made it a hell of alot sportier. Thats a route worth looking at because it could have been an import fighter, I was always shocked by how good it was on gas, and I liked it's stylings.

Yes the next G6 was destined to switch to the RWD Alpha platform. If Pontiac goes independent they could still license the platform until they develop their own (after all Opel is still making cars for Buick despite being sold to Peugeot). But you must wonder if going all RWD is a good decision. It all depends on the path the new owners would choose. If they go for the affordable performance niche then RWD is preferable. If they go compete with the mainstream brands then perhaps FWD is preferable (more spacious interior, easier to drive in the snow compared to RWD).

Would they have sold the factories? Or just the name?

Presumably they were interested in buying some of the factories that GM was planing to shut down. Don't know much more then that.
 
Ultimately, the way these large scale car groups work, buying any one brand is just that, you’ve bought yourself a name plate.

Then, either, you’re going to basically have to licence or buy all the GM wide platforms, engines and other bits and pieces required to make the cars, find another manufacturer to buy said stuff from, or start from scratch.

It’s like proposing to buy Audi. All their stuff is based on the same VW Group platforms, making it very messy to extricate them.

Now, you could propose an already big car group could buy a GM brand or two, and launch a range of new models on their own platforms, but there is still that awkward crossover phase dependent on GM hardware.

When you factor in the relative lack of brand value, it’s just not worth the effort.
 
About the only way to make things work with Pontiac, would have been to split off Saturn along with Holden, to get enough Dealerships and manufacturing plants that would get the new group somewhat independent of Delphi and GM, and have models that were actually selling.

People in 2009 were in love with what Pontiac had been in the past, and not the lineup they had been selling since 2004-5

s-l300.jpg

hadn't been true for some time
 
About the only way to make things work with Pontiac, would have been to split off Saturn along with Holden, to get enough Dealerships and manufacturing plants that would get the new group somewhat independent of Delphi and GM, and have models that were actually selling.

Except that starting with the L-Series the Spring Hill plant became fully integrated into the GM Assembly Division and was no longer Saturn-exclusive. Not saying that it's impossible (if, say, the Tata Group or Suzuki had its hand into a good sized chunk of GM, for example, they would need an avenue for selling their passenger vehicles - a Tata Indica or Tata Indigo with the polymer panels characteristic of Saturn, for example, would be interesting to see - and hence making Saturn the equivalent of, say, Renault's Dacia division in Western Europe or even what Geo was in North America), but that whoever decides to acquire P-B (and somehow fill the hole with GMC in the Canadian and US dealer chains) as well as Saturn, Opel/Vauxhall, and Holden will probably need a partner with big pockets and are willing to not be afraid of starting off the first couple of years with failure during the transition period.
 
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