Monday, April 27, 2009
End of the Line for Pontiac
GM announced today that the Pontiac brand will be eliminated. This has been rumored for a while so it isn't a surprise, but it's a little sad personally. My Uncle Art sold Pontiacs, and so a number of them have come through my life. These are the four that I got to drive:
First was the Ventura that my had starting in the mid-1970s. It looked like this.
This image comes from here.
Our Ventura had a straight six and an automatic transmission. The car was surprisingly slow and heavy for its size, and not much fun to drive as I remember. It was also a horrifying putty color, like the one in the photo. I got in my first crash in this car, rear-ending a big old Lincoln on Second Street in Hayward. I was 17 or 18, and the crash was entirely my fault; how embarrassing. Fortunately we weren't going fast. The Lincoln sustained almost no damage, but the front of the Pontiac was creamed.
Second, my uncle (or maybe by that point my cousin Dale) loaned me a Trans Am for a week following high school graduation. Maybe he thought I was going to take my meager scholarship money and put it down on the car; fat chance. It was a black car with gold trim, looking exactly like this.
This image comes from here.
It was a fast and fun car, but I was not a fast or fun driver. What I remember most about the car, of all things, was the dashboard -- it was about a mile wide, smooth and flat, black. You could fry an egg on it on a sunny day. I was relieved to go back to my beat-up Toyota Corolla after the week was up.
Third was the T-1000 my dad handed down to me. I read somewhere that this was the worst American car ever made, but it actually served our family pretty well. It looked more like this than I care to admit. (Sorry, that's a Flikr link and I can't embed the photo -- but click over if you dare.)
It got to be quite a rattletrap over the years, but the engine kept running in spite of all sorts of problems. (I remember a mechanic telling me that the car had an unkillable "Iron Duke" engine, but I'm not so sure.) I was driving it 20 miles each way to Sunset in the late 1980s and I remember that eventually my carpoolmate insisted on driving his car all the time; unstated, that was because he didn't trust the Pontiac or feel safe riding in it. My dad traded it in on his next Pontiac -- the TranSport below -- and my cousin Tom drove the T-1000 back and forth to Tahoe for years more, even when two of the four gears (manual transmission) didn't work. (I don't think reverse worked either at the end; I remember vaguely helping Tom push it out of a driveway after a family gathering.)
Finally, there was the magnificent Dustbuster.
See the full-sized image here.
My dad thought the Pontac TranSport was about the best-looking car ever made. To me it looked like the Space Shuttle in a funhouse mirror. But it was practical; we could carry lots of folks and lots of stuff in it. It sat up high, so you had a good view. When I co-chaired the Speakers' Bureau at CSUEB (we brought speakers to the university for talks and debates) I borrowed the Dustbuster to pick up VIPs at the airport. And, of course, the vehicle was made famous as the "Cadillac of Minivans" in Get Shorty.
First was the Ventura that my had starting in the mid-1970s. It looked like this.
This image comes from here.
Our Ventura had a straight six and an automatic transmission. The car was surprisingly slow and heavy for its size, and not much fun to drive as I remember. It was also a horrifying putty color, like the one in the photo. I got in my first crash in this car, rear-ending a big old Lincoln on Second Street in Hayward. I was 17 or 18, and the crash was entirely my fault; how embarrassing. Fortunately we weren't going fast. The Lincoln sustained almost no damage, but the front of the Pontiac was creamed.
Second, my uncle (or maybe by that point my cousin Dale) loaned me a Trans Am for a week following high school graduation. Maybe he thought I was going to take my meager scholarship money and put it down on the car; fat chance. It was a black car with gold trim, looking exactly like this.
This image comes from here.
It was a fast and fun car, but I was not a fast or fun driver. What I remember most about the car, of all things, was the dashboard -- it was about a mile wide, smooth and flat, black. You could fry an egg on it on a sunny day. I was relieved to go back to my beat-up Toyota Corolla after the week was up.
Third was the T-1000 my dad handed down to me. I read somewhere that this was the worst American car ever made, but it actually served our family pretty well. It looked more like this than I care to admit. (Sorry, that's a Flikr link and I can't embed the photo -- but click over if you dare.)
It got to be quite a rattletrap over the years, but the engine kept running in spite of all sorts of problems. (I remember a mechanic telling me that the car had an unkillable "Iron Duke" engine, but I'm not so sure.) I was driving it 20 miles each way to Sunset in the late 1980s and I remember that eventually my carpoolmate insisted on driving his car all the time; unstated, that was because he didn't trust the Pontiac or feel safe riding in it. My dad traded it in on his next Pontiac -- the TranSport below -- and my cousin Tom drove the T-1000 back and forth to Tahoe for years more, even when two of the four gears (manual transmission) didn't work. (I don't think reverse worked either at the end; I remember vaguely helping Tom push it out of a driveway after a family gathering.)
Finally, there was the magnificent Dustbuster.
See the full-sized image here.
My dad thought the Pontac TranSport was about the best-looking car ever made. To me it looked like the Space Shuttle in a funhouse mirror. But it was practical; we could carry lots of folks and lots of stuff in it. It sat up high, so you had a good view. When I co-chaired the Speakers' Bureau at CSUEB (we brought speakers to the university for talks and debates) I borrowed the Dustbuster to pick up VIPs at the airport. And, of course, the vehicle was made famous as the "Cadillac of Minivans" in Get Shorty.
Labels: cars, personal history
# posted by F.S. @ 12:34 PM 
