Cars You Should Know: Pontiac

One of the top ten models at Hagerty, as measured by policy count, comes from April’s featured manufacturer: Pontiac. And it’s the first featured brand of the year that is completely extinct. Despite the fact that Pontiac is no longer producing vehicles, it’s still the fifth most popular vehicle brand (overall) that we provide protection for at Hagerty. It’s been 15 years since Pontiac stopped making cars, which makes many Pontiacs on the road today good potential fits for specialty policies at Hagerty.

Pontiac began as Pontiac Buggy Company before transitioning to a motor company under a couple different iterations and owners. Eventually it landed as a division of General Motors where it remained until it was shut down in 2010. The first Pontiac model was released in 1926: the Pontiac Series 6-27. But most people agree that Pontiac didn’t really come into its own until the 1950s and ’60s. Those were the years when well-known models were hitting the road, such as the Bonneville, Grand Prix, Firebird and more.

Speaking of well-known models, below are the Cars You Should Know: Pontiac Edition:

GTO | First introduced in 1964, the Pontiac GTO is often considered America’s first muscle car, and its influence is still felt in today’s high-performance vehicles. It wasn’t until 1967 that other car companies started offering some competition to the GTO with their own muscle cars, such as the Chevelle SS, and indeed 1966 was the GTO’s best year with 96,946 units sold (compared to 1967 when sales fell to 81,722). Here at Hagerty, the GTO is the second-most popular model after the Firebird. Which brings us to…

Firebird Trans Am | The Pontiac Firebird came out in ‘67, and then the Trans Am package was added to the Firebird in 1969. The 1969 Trans Ams are distinct with their white paint and blue racing stripes, but most people think of the “screaming chicken” hood graphic when they picture a Trans Am. The Firebird and its Trans Am performance sub-model enjoyed widespread fame in 1977 thanks to serving as Burt Reynold’s wheels in the movie Smokey and the Bandit. The year after that movie came out, some 25,000 Trans Ams were sold.

Grand Prix | The Grand Prix was introduced by Pontiac in the 1962 as a performance luxury car. With an impressively long production life, the Pontiac Grand Prix was produced from 1962 through 2008. A standout year for the Grand Prix would have to be 1969, the year that John DeLorean takes the credit for. That year, Pontiac introduced the long hood and short decklid design, which would become a design hallmark widely copied across all manufacturers through the late 1970s. Revamped in front-wheel drive format for the 1988 model year, the sixth-generation car is a favorite at RADwood (a celebration of the 1980s and ‘90s), but the first couple generations are the most popular when it comes to our core Hagerty policy-holders.

Forgotten Classic: Solstice | Pontiac was, in its heyday, known as the “performance division” of General Motors. And the Solstice, a two-seater, drop-top sports car, is a great example of Pontiac performance at its best. Introduced in 2006, it was an affordable alternative to the Mazda Miata and, in fact, in it’s first year it sold 21,000 units, more than the Miata that same year. The Solstice was available between 2006-2010, before it stopped production, along with every other model, thanks to Pontiac shutting its doors for good. But we’ll never forget.

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