R.I.P. Pontiac: Respects, but No Remorse

Pontiac has been dragging sand for more than a year. See my essay from March 2008:
The Pontiac Problem; What Would Sloan Do?

Unlike Buick, Cadillac and Chevrolet, Pontiac was not one of originally independent companies that William S. Durant amalgamated into General Motors between 1908 and 1918. Durant had collected nearly a dozen automobile truck and tractor brands, which Pierre du Pont whittled down in the crisis of 1921 to Cadillac, Buick, Olds, Oakland and Chevrolet (GMC represents the amalgamation of three truck brands).

Gaining control as CEO of GM in 1923, Alfred Sloan began to parse the middle three brands, which had been competing directly with one another. His objective was to shoehorn each into one of the five distinct price ranges identified in the Product Plan of 1921, which set General Motors’ – and the entire industry’s – policy until the recent past.

Read about how Pontiac was the key to GM’s early success: The Pontiac Problem; What Would Sloan Do?

Sloan’s problem was that Oakland, which had long been the weakest brand in the line, couldn’t compete in the second-lowest price range, which was a potentially high-volume segment, vital to the Product Plan’s strategic goal of weaning the mass market away from the dominant Ford Model T.

Sloan’s gambit was the beautifully-executed, Chevrolet-based 1926 Pontiac. It quickly eclipsed the “damaged” Oakland brand, but never embodied the ancestral brand value that helped Cadillac, Buick, Olds, and Chevrolet endure the Depression with strength and surge after World War II, when Pontiac became stale.

Precisely because 1950s GM senior management ignored Pontiac, it was able to rise again as the emblem of the 1960s Muscle Car era. That was a great run, but like a lot of high school football stars, Pontiac has never really grown up since then. At this point, the Camaro is all that’s needed to cover what’s left of the muscle segment, and Chevy and Buick make plenty of good sedans; Pontiac lives on fleet sales.

So, Pontiac doesn’t really doesn’t have a job any more, and failing to realize that is what cost Rick Wagoner his. Born not as a brand, but as a dispassionate market stratagem, Pontiac is now on the wrong side of GM’s imperative to be leaner, and needs to take the bullet. Winner? Buick gets the Solstice.

Where Pontiac came from and why it has no place left to go: The Pontiac Problem; What Would Sloan Do?