Engineering Desire

GM is killing Pontiac. Actually, the company killed the brand over the past 20 years.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Pontiacs were the cars everybody wanted. The GTO, Bonneville and Firebird were brute muscle, fast as hell and so what if the brakes were too weak compared to their outsized engines? That just added to the aura of power.

For the last two decades, Pontiac’s Red Shield migrated from mean cars to family-friendly mini-vans and grocery getters. I’m not insulting these vehicles. They’re pragmatic, but that’s 180-degrees from what Pontiac meant to millions of car buyers.

Among all the other sins committed by GM, the dilution and diminution of Pontiac’s brand will be textbook examples of what not to do. It will be a cautionary tale, retold in business schools as long as there are business schools.

It was at Pontiac, in the early ’60s, where a young John DeLorean looked at the most powerful muscle cars in production and asked, “What if we make a faster car?”

The answer was the GTO and its ultimate model, The Judge. With a 455-cubic-inch engine that could power a small city, it remains the most bad ass machine to ever roll off an American assembly line.

It’s easy enough to say this was also the beginning of the problems now threatening the very existence of American auto making. The industry, followed by much of the car-buying public, fell in love with gas guzzlers. And these cars did nothing so well as trash the environment and deepen this country’s dependence on oil.

But this argument discounts a crucial part of the story of American cars before their decline in the 1970s: Americans WANTED them. American companies designed and manufactured automobiles that Americans had to have. In short, U.S. automakers engineered desire. That’s not happening now.

Part of the reason is we, the car-buying public, now desire different things from our automobiles. We want fuel efficiency, reliability, safety. But when it comes time to buy, we still want our cars to be objects of our – and our neighbors’ – desires.

Now that Pontiac is headed for the scrap heap, where will a designer like DeLorean ask, “What if we make faster, environmentally friendly cars?”

This may not be a burning question in the minds of most current hybrid owners, but more Americans have to be sold on just the idea of buying a fuel-efficient car. For many, $4-a-gallon gas will change buying habits. But lots of people still need the image of an American speedster blowing past foreign cars – the way GTOs ate up and spat out Ferraris and Porsches.

I’m not saying the end of Pontiac means the end of desirable American engineering. But it doesn’t help. And right now, it’s not clear who or which company will spark the creative renaissance in American auto making we so desperately need.

If we knew this, the questions over bailouts and bankruptcy would fade – quickly – like a speed bump in the rear-view mirror of a fast car.