GM's budget-performance division is at the forefront of the post-Millennial budget rear-wheel-drive resurrection with the 2004 Pontiac GTO, imported from GM's Aussie Holden division. It is, alas, a car that disappoints all but its drivers.

As the rear-wheel-drive Pontiac G8 launches in the Fall of 2007, rumors abound that Pontiac will more closely cooperate with Holden, the GM Australian division that is taking the lead within the company for developing rear-wheel-drive engineering for vehicles around the world. All Pontiacs, the rumor mill would have it, are likely to be rear-wheel-drive in the future, and with a more grown-up feel than the '90s, body-clad Pontiacs of old.

"The new Pontiac won't be all about boy toys," predicts CNNMoney.com staff writer Peter Valdes-Dapena, adding, "GM wants sophisticated performance cars adults won't be embarrassed to drive" ('GM's plan to outmaneuver Toyota,' CNNMoney.com, October 7^th, 2007).

"Driving is about more than getting from here to there," muses GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz.

"Any vehicle will do that. But driving a car that truly feels connected to the driver is a passionate experience" (GTO: The Legend Returns, Paul Zazarine & Gary Witzenburg, Automobile Quarterly, 2004).

After Lutz noted at New York 2005 that Pontiac and Buick had their issues, the media was abuzz with rumors that one or both of the two divisions might not be around for much longer. After all, GM had already killed Oldsmobile.

Before Lutz, then-Pontiac-GMC General Manager Lynn C. Myers would cite the Toyota-sourced Pontiac Vibe as being critical to Pontiac's renaissance, having "worked very well to bring new buyers into the division" (GTO: The Legend Returns, Paul Zazarine & Gary Witzenburg, Automobile Quarterly, 2004).

Lutz's influence at Pontiac is visible in the 2006 Solstice; the 2005 G6; and 2004 Grand Prix and GTO, in greater doses in the newest vehicles, as product development cycles since Lutz's appointment in 2001 might permit.

That this is a list of actual products, all of them now on the road, is what one might expect of Lutz - a man who speaks strictly in product terms when discussing either the success or the failure of his charges or their competition.

From the BMW 2002 Turbo, through his experiences at Chrysler with cars such as the Dodge Viper, the product development guru is known for galvanizing the market with niche products that, paradoxically, make a business case in and of themselves.

Bean-counters might not agree - but Lutz has found a way of convincing them, too, that spending money on niche production makes sense. Advertisers, Lutz knows, concern themselves with how many people can be reached per dollar; Lutz emphasizes the quality of that reach to management, and the efficiency of it to bean-counters. "The Viper was a very efficient form of communicating that big things were happening at Dodge... and it's cheaper than advertising!

"Doing the Viper cost $50 million. At Chrysler, we used to blow $50 million in advertising in half a month." (GTO: The Legend Returns, Paul Zazarine & Gary Witzenburg, Automobile Quarterly, 2004).

Rumors swirling around Detroit have it that the Solstice's budget was taken out of Superbowl advertising. "If you try (rebuilding Pontiac) with advertising, you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars and not move the needle," Lutz explains, "because the guy who sees the ads will say, no amount of advertising is going to convince me that Pontiac is worth a [expletive deleted], because when I go look at the cars, they haven't changed."

Yet the Solstice will - Lutz believes - get people on Pontiac's website and into Pontiac's showrooms.

Evidence of Lutz's message propagating through General Motors is everywhere. "We've been saying excitement without the hardware to support it for way too long," mused Pontiac-GMC General Manager Lynn C. Myers (GTO: The Legend Returns, Paul Zazarine & Gary Witzenburg, Automobile Quarterly, 2004).

The key to understanding Lutz's influence is an understanding of brand-building from both the product and consumer end. One trusts designers and engineers with the initial stages of the former, and yet checks the sums with consumers in the mid stages of development, with concept cars that hide in the plain view of auto shows.


In 2002, General Motors begins grouping its Buick; Pontiac, and GMC dealers into one distribution channel. By July 2008, 1,600 dealers aligned with the Buick-Pontiac-GMC channel account for approximately 80% of the sales from the trio of GM nameplates. GM says that the channel allows the automaker to optimize each brand by developing distinct and complementary vehicles that reduce overlap.


Pontiac is born on January 3^rd, 1926, as a descendant of the Oakland Motor Car Company (circa 1907), acquired by General Motors in 1909.

The first Pontiac car debuts at the 1926 New York auto show.

By the 1950s, Pontiac sales are flagging, as the brand is seen as an "old ladies" car, with its signature "silver streaks" of chrome on the hood and trunk.

In 1956, Semon "Bunkie" Knudsen takes over the division, stripping off the streaks for the 1957 models, and redefining the corporate "split" grille.

Pontiac spawns the muscle car era in 1964, when it stuffs a 389 cubic inch V8 engine into a Tempest and calls it the GTO.

Pontiac also saw success with the Firebird and Firebird Trans Am in the 1960s and 1970s.