Posts from ‘Pontiac’
1941 Chevrolet
You can’t exactly say that Plymouth created a market segment, but the new-for-1928 Chrysler division went to great lengths to define one. Plymouth was founded specifically to tackle the “low-cost” competition, which at the time was primarily Chevrolet and Ford.
Classic Car Ads: Pontiac Grand Prix
1967 Pontiac Grand Prix
Talk about a good run. The Pontiac Grand Prix, introduced for the 1962 model year, remained in continuous production until 2008. During that time its mission change a few times. Grand Prix started out as a premium coupe, and was for a time the most-expensive Pontiac ever offered. Premium versions of the Bonneville and Firebird Trans Am would eventually claim the priciest-Pontiac title.
Favorite Car Ads: 1971 Pontiac GTO
1971 Pontiac GTO ad
The tone of this GTO ad is somewhat analogous to how some restaurants currently brace customers for lousy service in advance of seating. You’ve probably seen such signs posted near the door of your favorite diner the last time you went out for lunch or dinner. Today, restaurants are contending with labor shortages. In 1971, Pontiac was dealing with low-lead gasoline.
Classic Car Ads: Cars of 1974
1974 AMC Matador
It was a bad year to sell cars, especially large American cars. For those not yet alive, 1974 arrived towards the end of the OPEC Oil Embargo—and the related record-high gas prices—and at the beginning of a mild recession.
Classic Car Ads: Safety
JJD Twin Tyres
I haven’t heard much about how “safety sells” in recent years. Automotively, we’ve moved on from safety—in general terms—to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). ADAS systems include things like blind-spot alert, rear cross-traffic alert, pedestrian detection, and lane-keep assist. Really, stuff we should all be pretty good at by now—without help.
Functional as they were, station wagons were generally marketed as upscale. Not that low-end models weren’t available, but ads and commercials for wagons generally put a luxury spin on the situation. And, at least for a while, inextricably linked to the premium wagon experience was the woodie look.
1963 Ford Country Squire wagon
So much has changed in American culture over the past decade or so, but there’s at least one time-honored tradition that appears to be holding on just fine: the classic car show. From low-key summertime cruise nights to high-profile concours gatherings, people young and old love to get together and enjoy special-interest vehicles of all stripes. And some car shows, such as those produced by the Goodguys Rod and Custom Association, get big—really big. Goodguys bills itself as “America’s Favorite Car Show,” and every year the company produces an ambitious nationwide schedule of large-scale car shows that take over fairgrounds-sized venues. The events are two- or three-day extravaganzas that typically attract 3500 to 6500 vehicles and 35,000 to 100,000 spectators per show. Put on your walking shoes!
Classic Car Ads: Coupes of 1981
1981 Ford Granada
My dad was a coupe man, though I cannot say he owned coupes on purpose. He was a bargain hunter, and a car’s door count was less important than its price. Nonetheless, my sister, mother and I never complained about having to squeeze into the back seat. For the most part, my dad’s Chevrolet Nova 2-door, and multiple Oldsmobile Cutlass and Pontiac Ventura coupes, offered sufficient rear-seat space, provided you didn’t mind negotiating the path past the folded front seat—and for the most part, we didn’t mind.
1941 Ford, and a clown
I don’t know when it was that stand-up comics began telling clown jokes. I want to say I was fully an adult before it was brought to my attention—by those stand-up comics—that the whole clown thing is pretty weird. I recall a local shock jock dedicating considerable attention to the whole clown-as-a-career thing.
1964 Mercury Marauder
Say the word “hardtop” and any vintage-auto enthusiast knows what you’re referring to: a closed-roof car with a pillarless roofline (i.e., no door posts to break up the flow of the styling). Though there were earlier examples of the basic concept, General Motors kicked off the hardtop as we know it by introducing a pillarless-coupe body style in its Buick, Cadillac, and Oldsmobile product lines midway through the 1949 model year.
