Argen

Firstly, there are shops out there that "prepare" all of the cars sent out for mainstream press reviews. So I'm sure that specific G8 was as polished as an Audi, because it was half-disassembled and half-rebuilt by hand at one of those shops. Unforunately press cars are not really representative of real production models. That said, the G8 is still fairly good in regards to the interior. My problem is that GM considers taking after the Germans is a good thing for Pontiac. If they are going to take after the continentals, then they need to be taking after the Italians. The G8 is a bit cold and boxy for my tastes. A bit too Teutonic. It needs tan leather and curvy styling and little chrome highlights.

Yeah. The half-assed attempt to turn them into a Swedish luxo-rival to the Germans hasn't helped any either. Many modern SAABs just don't feel quite the same as their predecessors. That said, I like the 9-3X quite a lot.

If they'd make some kind of a Camaro Superleggera, then I'd be very interested. With carbon-fiber body panels and the turbo four from the Solstice GXP. Think a Camaro done the Lotus way.

Well, TTAC tends to ignore the positives of GM the way Cheers tends to ignore the negatives of GM. And sometimes you have to exaggerate things to get people to pay attention. Truth is I have no idea what Bob does, exactly. He's not a stylist, an engineer, a marketer, a branding advisor, or any other easily-definable role. All he seems to do is come up with superfluous, poorly thought-out niche models, and when they fail he's already off touting the next model that is going to save its brand and all of GM. He's very good at ramming projects trough all the red tape, but has a tendency to not consider the consequences or think things through completely.

Possibly, if I can find the time. I'm also not sure if I still have my imageshack acount. Isn't that a bit of a contradiction? By the very virtue of being a niche vehicle, means that not everybody will want it.

When this all changes it will have to be a relatively gradual thing. Maserati learned this the hard way when they went from the swoopy Khamsin to the boxy Biturbo in a couple of years. Yeah, you can't go from G3 to 911 in even ten years. But Volkswagen and Euro Ford have been moving up over the years, and back in the seventies Audi was to VW as Buick is to Chevy now. We're talking about establishing a long-term plan, a concept that GM does quite understand yet. I don't really advocate sending Pontiac that far up market, but I do imagine them as a cheaper Porsche. I want Buick and Pontiac to complement each other, seeing as they are under the same roof now. That said, they need space so that they don't blur together when our backs are turned. I imagine Buick taking on a Bentley-esque image, sans the price tag. I don't mind Buicks being powerful, but they will not become sports sedans or sports cars. I mean, the Speed versions of the Continental GT and Flying Spur are seriously fast, but no one would ever consider them to be sporty. The GT is best described as the "banker's hot rod", a nickname that was once used in relation to the old Wildcat. I pretty much see them doing what the're doing now, just more and better. Pontiac, is more difficult to figure out. You could try a small-car model, something like Mazda or Abarth. You could try an old-school musclecar brand like what Dodge is trying. You could try a supercar brand, but I can only see that going down in flames, fast. I want to try and do something that combines aspects of all of those. I want to use the Solstice as inspiration for a couple of other models, and then pretty much call it a day. Buick: --------------- Skylark - Sedan, obviously. Would like to see a 3-door coupe. Think Volvo C30 or VW Scirocco. Invicta - Self-explanatory, LaCrosse is a rubbish name. Roadmaster - Toss the Lucerne, give us a luxed-out Park Avenue. Riviera - Coupe. Probably Zeta-based and acts as image-vehicle. Enclave - Consider giving it a slight face-lift. Pontiac: --------------- Solstice - If it goes to Alpha, try and keep the looks somewhat intact. Has a Boxster quality, doesn't need major facelift. Firebird - A mix of musclecar and RX8. Keep it light, possibly on lengthened Alpha. Zeta is a bit heavy for my purpose. GTO - Most likely Zeta. Most powerful engine of the lineup with a Grand Tourer personality. Sleek and curvy. Like the Solstice, I see the GTO and Firebird getting both coupe and covertible. None of that hardtop vert garbage. The Sol and F-bird could both spawn four-door versions, like the AM Rapide but a four-door GTO would have to be planned extremely carefully so not to trample the Roadmaster.

Firstly, it is a commonly accepted fact that if you try too hard to be cool, then you most assuredly won't be. That's probably the single largest problem I've had with Pontiac for a long time. They try too hard to seem cool, rather than just being awesome naturally. I'm sorry, but Pontiac shouldn't try to be Burt Renyolds-cool. (Which is to say, not cool at all.) They should try to be James Dean-cool, or (this is sacrilege) Steve McQueen-cool. The mid-Sixties Ponchos had it spot-on - they looked brilliant but didn't burn your retinas off. A good-ol '68 Firebird 400, in my book, is just as cool at the Bullitt Mustang GT fastback. I would compare my ideal Pontiac to Porsche, but unfortunately Porsche seems to have gone insane these days what with the Panamera and the Cheyenne. I image them being lower production, more of a niche brand and moving up the ladder to be more like Porsche was a few years ago with a laser-focused lineup and sytling directon. Of course, I'd take the brand up market but not up to Porsche prices. I see Pontiac becoming a focused, mid-range performance brand. Buick, which would be the other half of that equation, would produce the traditional (read: soft cruiser) American luxury car. The two would work together to form a larger mid-range brand. Pontiac; the premium performance, and Buick; the traditonal luxury. Cadillac, thus, caps both brands and acts as a fusion of both while transcending them in price. I see the brand, as a whole, taking on the styling direction of the Solstice, while expanding on it and taking it in new directions. There also needs to be a wholeness in their design. So many cars just seem like the sum of their parts, rather than a cohesive whole. I saw an old thirties MG PA Airline at a motor show once, and was completly blown away by it. Every inch of the car screamed MG. From the wooden dash with the chrome-timed octagonal guages to the cathedral-window sunroof and the tan leather and red carpet. The whole car had a sense of being tailor-made, and not a parts-bin mishap. When the 2nd Gen F-bird came out, the styling was often compared to contemporary Jaguars or Maseratis. That's what Pontiac should be. Heart-wrenching beauty and performance. They should play with the senses and be imbued with an atmosphere so powerful that it becomes nearly impossible to remove oneself from the vehicle after a spirited Sunday afternoon drive. They should never have their hearts disguised by bland, grey plastic, but leave their engineering out for all the world to see. I know I'm being a bit over-the-top, a bit ambitious, a bit verbose. But where will GM ever get without ambition? They need to have the ambition to look more than 7-10 years into the future. And sometimes they need to be over-the-top to get the right ideas across. The performance of Pontiac has been "implied" for many years. Definate statements and plans need to be made, not catchy phrases about how Pontiac buyers like to go to raves with flashing strobes. And, as usual, I've posted something that is entirely too long. And if I've upset anyone by anything that I've said, I'm sorry.

One of the problems is that Pontiac has been so many different things over the years, that if you try to make it more focused by eliminating product no inline with the brand strategy you'll end up pissing someone off. I have a friend with a Torrent, and when I told him Pontiac wasn't going to do SUV's anymore he was seriously upset. There are people out there who genuinely love their Transsports, Montanas, and Azteks.

What I'm saying in regards to the brands is that the solution should be simple and easily communicated. It should also involve honing them down to their fundamentals before trying any kind of expansion. These are the point I do agree on: 1) Move Caddy on up. 2) Give Pontiac back it's soul. 3) Allow Buick to become more prominent. The rest I'm not sure about. Hummer needs to go. I don't care for Saturn at all. They've abandonned their original purpose and I don't think we need an Opel derivative. (Actually, the only reason Opel and Chevy don't overlap completely in Europe is because the Chevy name is restricted to smaller Daewoos.) Saab is neat, but it still conflicts with other brands. Also, SAAB - the airplane company half that is still Swedish - has expressed interest in buying Saab the auto brand. They be independent again and could still sell cars without competeing inside of GM. I'd really like to either kill off the Chevy truck line or GMC, but I know many people would have a fit outright if either were to go. They should be separated by more than trim levels, but I don't exactly know how.

Sorry about that. However, my computer (as usual) was having problems and I did not do it intentionally. I think you completely missed the point. As I said, I'm into small, light-footed cars that handle well and are sporty. None of those cars I listed would be considered "light-footed" or "sporty", unless you have Hasselhoff/Reynolds taste in cars. As for them still being around, I will admit it is amazing how long they have limped on. Both the Malibu and the Skylark underwent massive rebuilds, and the Malibu was only twenty years old when it was completely restored from the rust-riddled corpse it was. The Ventura has less than 40k miles on it and was driven by a little old lady to the store once a week. We actually have all the pink inspections slips for that car from '76 until we got it in 2005. But none of that is relevant to my point. Yes, they've been reliable but they lack any excitement. I have a friend to had an Alfetta, and while it did finally die it gave him seven years of unparalleled excitement. And that's what I want in a car. Also, I dislike how you use the word "judging" there. When I talk about cars, I do not think like some others that my point of view is the only true and right one. Whenever I make statements, they are meant to convey my feelings and nothing more. Some people might actually like an 80's Cutlass in moss green that belches black smoke, but that person is not me. What I'm trying to get at is that GM doesn't make cars that are better than those by other companies in areas that I consider important. The point is that I'm a car enthusiast. I don't care if it's a Chevy, a Nissan, or a Volkswagen. If it's a great car, I'll praise it to the heavens. If it's a piece of garbage, I'll condemn it forever. I like GM, because it is our American company. I also have a fondness for Ford and Chrysler. I can't help but want to root for the home team. I love their glorious past and all three have proved before that they are capable of making reliable, innovative, excellent cars when they put their hearts into it. Yet, almost every single time they come out with a new vehicle it is just short of being great. So many times I find myself thinking, "Well, I guess that's okay..." About my car: I bought it, not because it was foreign, but because it was the best car for the conditions under which I was shopping. I was looking for something in the 5k-7k range, and my mom didn't want me having anything older than ten years old. The most common vehicles I was able to find under those conditions were: 1) Grandpa Mobiles - LeSabres and Avalons 2) Trucks - Jimmys, Explorers (go thing I didn't go that way, huh?) 3) Ruined Econoboxes - Dad tried to talk me into a water-logged Protege with it's radio missing And then I kept running across this thing called the Audi A4, which was suspiciously cheap despite many example having four-wheel drive and turbocharged engines. Although some were in bad shape, their reputation for poor reliability makes the few example in good shape very affordable. Now, if the same car were to have, say a Buick badge on it, then I would still have bought it. Finally, I'd like to point something out that goes along with what YellowJacket said. I never realised until now, but the Tempest had a four-cylinder. A four-cylinder engine in an American car in the 60's. The last year it even made 166 hp, while the thoroughly modern Ecotec only makes 11 more horsepower more than forty years afterwards. Where was that kind of thing in the seventies? I know it wouldn't have been as powerful, but they could have compensated somehow. On a similar note, when the gas crisis happened Buick had only V8s. In a panic for more fuel-efficient engines, they dug an old Fireball V6 out of a junkyard, plopped it into an Apollo and it worked so well that they bought the dies back from Kaiser-Jeep. GM has developed some really neat technology in the past, but it tends to end up buried somewhere and when people really need it they don't have it any more. It just underlines that GM is capable of great things and can lead the world, but regularly chooses not to. Which causes my eternal frustration.

That's not really satisfying. With some people calling for GM to ditch everything by Chevy and Caddy and all of the nonsensical overlapping going on; your solution is to not only keep what we already have but add even more models to each division? If you're trying to make each brand more "focused" how does giving them more models help further that goal? I certainly agree with moving Caddy up, but I'm still not convinced that it will make enough room for Buick, Pontiac and Saturn if they are to each have full lineups as you have proposed.

Huh. Funny, I don't fit in any of those categories. I have an import, but it is not becasue "that's all I've ever known" but rather because imports are (relatively) new to me. Aside from the unstopable workhorse that is our '89 GMC S15, nearly every GM car our family has owned has been utter garbage. Our '93 Grand Am GT was good for a couple of years, but then it started leaking worse than the levees in New Orleans, In order to get ready for any kind of trip, we would have to wheel out the shopvac to suck the water out of the rear footwells and the trunk. We tried just about everything over the years to get it to stop, but it never did. Eventually, the car started to wear out in other places and we decided that we had finally had enough of it. And then, we replaced it with an '04 Grand Am GT. No problems there...yet. My dad had a fantastic '65 Malibu 283 hardtop in white with blue interior. That was actually one of the few decent ones. It still backfired five seconds after you turned it off and when you turned the wheels full-turn to either side the engine would die sometimes. Then came the '86 Monte Carlo SS. Probably the worst, barring my Skylark. It had been in a front-end collision at one point, and the fenders and hood never fit quite right. Although dad is obsessed with V8s and rear-drive, the SS was appalingly slow. Once it was up to highway speed it was smooth, but getting there it was sonambulistic. You could feel it had some torque, but it always felt like the engine was struggling to pull all of that unweildy girth. And then there was the constant squeaking and rattling and groaning from every single part of the car. My '77 Skylark is similar. It is technically my car, but only because my dad talked me into it back when I knew nothing about cars. Like the Malibu, it dies when the wheels are turned sharply to one side. It is like the engine isn't producing even enough power to overcome the fiction of the turned wheels against the ground. It also groans, though it is more sound than the Monte. But the engine is caked with oil from a leaking gasket left unattended in the seventies. It was repainted, but the previous owners didn't bother to fix any of the dings - or rust - first. The air conditioning is completely non-functional. The wonderful filler panels - urethane between the body and the bumpers - actually tends to trap dirt and debris between then and the bumpers causing even more rust to eat away at the bumpers. The odd-firing Fireball is so saddled down with emissions equipment that what little power it does make never actually makes it to the rear wheels. And this is all capped by the traditional Buick road-feel (that is to say, none whatsoever). Our project car, the '76 Ventura, largely has the same issues as the Buick. Except for the air-conditioning, which it doesn't have. It currently has it's Olds 262 V8 yanked and a Chevy 307(?) put in it's place. The rust-riddled fenders are still off, and there are no solid plans on what to do with the body or interior. The '78 Grand Am is actually pretty rare, and for most purposes is effectively a Pontiac Monte. Strangely, despite being older than our now-gone Monte it is actually more solid and better put together. But like the rest, the engine's power is poor and the steering and suspension worse. The arm-level console is nice, but the once-red interior is now pink and the air-conditioning is thwarted by a massive vacum leak that hisses like a snake hidden in the back of the dash. Some of these problems are from common wear-and-tear and others are from dumb previous owners, but the point is that most of these are rear-drive, V8, GM, two-door coupes (of which everyone here is so fond) yet instead of being exciting they are sloppy, lethargic, and ham-fisted in nearly every way. And that's why I'm never terribly enthusiastic about GM cars. Even their most sporty vehicles have some of that old "Riviera spirit". I think the only car that is truly different in that regard is the ZR1, and it should be different for 100 grand. It's just that I've never come across a GM car that has the liveliness, the light-footedness, temprement of some foreign cars. Even the closest the Big 3 have come vehicle-wise in that aspect is with cars (Opel Manta, Mercury Capri, Mercury Cougar) that are designed and made in foreign countries. The worst part is that Bob sLutz should be able to do better, having been around when the Opel GT and BMW 2002ti were made. That said there are some GM cars that I would love to have: Just about any of the original GM compacts, especially the Buick Skylark, Olds Jetfire, Corvair Monza, Pontiac Tempest. I'd still want to tighten them up suspension-wise with more precise steering. Actually, I have a Popular Mechanics issue from '63 next to me comparing the "Hot Compacts" I've listed without the Buick and adding a Lark V8 and the Falcon Sprint. The aforementioned Opels And....um..... Wow, is that it? I guess I'm not an import guy; I'm just picky. =P And I wrote pages without even touching on what I wanted to talk about.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy this "we did if for aerodynamics" crap. Aerodynamics and cd matter just as much to small things like panel gaps as well as overall shape. Firstly, it is a sedan shape with a boot. They could have gone for a wagon or hatchback, like the Prius, which would have been more aero, but they didn't because of styling concerns. That would explain the pointless rectangular divot in the hood, which on the concept lead to a vent of some kind. Like the inset side windows, it does nothing to decrease coefficient of drag and serves only for styling.

I'm not entirely sure how to respond to that. Mine was the rear-engined, tubro-charged Corvair hardtop coupe. I don't understand how that isn't "sporty". I have; however, started a possible entry for this comp. but I'm not entirely satisfied with it. It's kinda like a Chevy Mini, but I might do something else instead. I know this is a GM site, but I'm seriously getting sick of drawing GM cars. I'm gonna go draw a Plymouth or something.

I appreciate that the new competition is pretty much for exactly the kind of vehicle that I drew for the last competition. That said, I'm not sure If I'll participate this time around.