2020 Pontiac SJ8

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I miss Pontiac so much. I feel their tendencies towards aggressive styling would play well in today’s market.

Here’s a SJ8 I designed to replace the G8 if Pontiac was still around today.

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The feeling is mutual. Pontiac ate the shit end of GM’s politics for many years and the decision to discontinue such an iconic and - even at the time of demise - vitalized brand has always struck me as odd. I suppose without doing so, there might be no GM entirely today since it was a step in getting backing for reorganization after their bankruptcy 2009. But now, its left them in a weird place because they don’t have a brand they can dedicate to driver experience and performance. And in spite of that, they’re trying to now regardless with Cadillac, but that’s just an utter mistake and hot mess since because of that, Cadillac’s build quality and comfort has not undergone the same improvements that Chevy, GMC, and Buick have all undergone since 2008. Instead they’ve been all performance oriented, trying to beat BMW and be as cheap as a Mazda and now Buick is outshining them in luxury and dependability which is hilarious because its supposed to be the cheaper brand. If they just had Pontiac, they could make mid-priced RWD sport sedans, hot hatches, and AWD beasts and not have to taint a brand nobody wants those products from anyways. If anything, they should have discontinued GMC since they literally haven’t made anything except Chevy truck clones since GM canned their medium and heavy duty truck lines back in the early 1980s. Why do you need an entire line of clones when Pontiac actually had some character?

Okay wow that turned into a long rant. But yeah, Pontiac should still be a around.

Now onto a little bit of business. Welcome to the forums! I see you are a new user. And on that note allow me to point out a few rules and guidelines:

  1. You haven’t done anything wrong yet but just so you are aware: Read the car sharing subforum rules. If you intended to keep posting designs, put 'em here and edit your thread title.

  2. We here usually like to know about stats and details of cars because we’re all car guys :grinning:. Don’t fail to deliver on those. And again this is not to say you’ve eff’d up but just an FYI.

  3. We also usually like to avoid toying with history too much. Be original. It promotes creativity, avoids conflict (since whaddya know? people have opinions on real things), and will help identify you more strongly in the community. Using history as a backdrop or precedent is usually more the approach taken here.

Being that Pontiac is a dead brand, 3 probably isn’t as applicable but be careful; you’re treading on holy ground there. So as a Pontiac fan myself, I would like to ask where you would like this to go in the future. Do you envision this A) a thread just for you on what Pontiac could have been? B) a thread for everyone on what Pontiac could have been? or C) a thread just for your designs, any and all of them?

With business out of the way (and sorry I realize this is now a really fucking long post), I would just like to say your design is very good :grin:. Very much better than mine were or indeed many ours were when we started posting. Keep up the good work and welcome to the Automation-verse.

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GM was giving Pontiac the shaft near the end. Be glad it was a clean kill, and not the long painful torture that was Oldsmobile. They took what was supposed to be a performance brand, and gave it cheap plastic pieces. I loved my Pontiac Sunbird from 1988, the G5 from 2008 couldn’t hold a candle. The G8 was a Holden Commodore, which GM also murdered, that was brought back as the Chevy SS, to little fanfare. The best place for Pontiac, is in your memories: Let it influence your designs, but make them your own.

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KmBlaine…thank you for the warm welcome! I will be sure to follow the rules more closely in the near future. I didn’t realize there was to be a dedicated thread for each user/car company. I made one shortly after, but didn’t post any stats for any designs. Unfortunately, most of those designs were made before the designer revamp, so I can’t find the stats. If you want to delete this thread, I understand. However, I do like the idea of everyone contributing their Pontiac ideas here, so long as everyone is okay with that…though, the Vibe (ha! ) I’m getting is that they’re not too keen on existing/legacy brands being rehashed. I’m working on a proper brand with its own identity. I’ll try to be comprehensive with the stats as well.