Chip Heartfield was sad but not surprised when General Motors announced this week it was ending the Pontiac brand.
“It was the obvious next brand to go,” said the Bethesda car buff, who still owns the 1968 Pontiac Firebird he bought in high school. “For the last 10 years, Pontiac hasn’t had an identity that people understood.”
Defining its image never used to be a problem for Pontiac.
Starting with the iconic GTO, which was considered the world’s first muscle car when it was introduced in 1964, Pontiac gained a reputation for youthful, exciting cars. The Pontiac Firebird, GTO’s 1967 successor, sealed the brand’s image as a purveyor of cool.
“For a kid growing up reading car magazines, Pontiacs were the signature cars of that era,” Heartfield said.
The brand steered its way into popular culture, immortalized in rock songs and favored by Hollywood bad boys.
“Burt Reynolds in ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ — that’s the iconic Pontiac image for me,” said Kevin Smith, editor of Inside Line, an online auto magazine. “A lot of guys my age were imprinted by that movie and were Firebird fans after that.”
But the brand has languished since its muscle car heyday, struggling to find a place in a changing automotive culture.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, safety standards and environmental regulations put a squeeze on Pontiac’s production model — and made consumers think twice about what to look for in a car.
“You could say the times just changed,” Smith said. “It became nearly impossible to engineer and market something that people understood to be a Pontiac.”
The move to kill Pontiac was part of broader cuts that will leave GM employing about 38,000 unionized workers at 34 plants across the country.
The company is also closing half of its dealerships.
Daniel Jobe, who owns Capitol Buick-Pontiac-GMC in Greenbelt, has already seen the number of GM dealers dwindling. Pontiacs have actually sold well lately, he said, but this is largely because his three competitors in Prince George’s County have shut down in the last two years.
“We’ve been selling about as many Pontiacs as Buicks and GMCs,” Jobe said. “We’re expecting our business to drop accordingly.”
But poor sales figures were only the symptom — not the heart — of the problem for the troubled brand.
While the Firebird posted decent numbers throughout the 1990s, Smith said, “it was no longer a product that got people excited or made them understand what a Pontiac is.
“In this marketplace, you don’t have the luxury to be an undefined brand.”
