Michigan wllz

So the Pontiac G8 will live on in America after all. Well sort of.

Chevy has announced plans to sell the Caprice police cruiser, which is a modified version of the car sold here as the G8. The vehicle will be available only to police departments starting in 2011.

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Categorize this in the Save the G8! file. I can’t ever remember so many laments of the loss of a single car model as has been the case with Pontiac’s G8. Seriously, the entire Plymouth and Oldsmobile brands went by the wayside without a tenth of the ink the G8 has gotten as it goes out to pasture. It makes you wonder …

Really GM? There’s no business case for sticking a bowtie logo on this thing and calling it a Chevy, Caprice or otherwise?

Requiem for a heavyweight.

BY EDDIE ALTERMAN

Though we covered the passing of Pontiac two months ago in lush, one-page detail, I was strangely unaffected by its death. For someone who gets emotional when General Mills discontinues a line of breakfast cereals, I found myself shocked at my callousness and determined to peer deeply into my soul for an answer as to why I didn’t seem to care.

I found it, almost immediately. The Pontiacs I grew up with were not the great ones. There was no ’66 Ram Air GTO for me, no ’69 Grand Prix with the Royal Bobcat 428. The ’Yaks of my formative years—let’s call them the big-hair ’80s and no-hair ’90s—invariably stunk. That’s unfair. They mostly stunk. Those years held out one outrage after another: A Korean hatchback wearing the storied LeMans badge. Mesh headrest inserts passed off as performance cues. Grands Am and Grands Prix so festooned with injection-molded hideousness that they looked like a dollar store exploded right in front of them. Those cars displayed such contempt for their customers that they made me lose faith in General Motors, and I am one of those who grew up teething on the company’s seatbelt buckles.

So it was good riddance from me, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, and sorry to all those dealers who demanded that GM make them a minivan.

Then, out of morbid curiosity, I recently grabbed the keys to a G8 GXP that came to our office. I drove the car 200 miles to the west, to GingerMan Raceway, in South Haven, Michigan, for this month’s Best Cars for $20,000 roundup. For reasons unknown, the GXP’s XM radio kept playing Boston. My college roommate owned just two albums of music, and he played them relentlessly, punishingly. One was Boston’s Don’t Look Back. The other was Boston’s Boston. From this I learned that Boston’s music is not appropriate for every occasion. But it proved suitable for a high-volume blast through the moustache farms of central Michigan.

When I got to South Haven, I made the tough, top-level decision to release the car onto the track, a judgment call over which I agonized for about four milliseconds. If the GXP was great on the highway—controlled ride, excellent ergonomics, and boatloads of power from a 415-hp LS3 V-8—it was nothing short of a revelation at GingerMan. It’s a big car that manages its weight beautifully, with all sorts of lucid feedback from the steering, suspension, and body. Its long wheelbase means you feel oversteer coming a mile away, and you can easily change the car’s cornering attitude with its throttle pedal. It felt like a cruder, more flatulent version of another car I love—the E39 BMW M5 of 1999–2003. Apparently, this is no coincidence. A few of the engineers on the Holden Commodore—the Aussie sedan that GM turns into this Pontiac—worked on the E39 5-series. The suspension geometry, driving position, and dimensions all owe a heavy debt to the 5er. The M5 and the G8 GXP are within a mere four pounds of each other, and their power-to-weight ratios are similar, too: 10.09 for the BMW, 9.59 for the Pontiac.

This is late delivery on the promise of Bob Lutz’s Pontiac as the “American BMW,” wrapped up in an understated, proportionally timeless body. I was sad after I drove the G8, for a couple of reasons. First, I felt sorry for the brand’s lost years and how they turned off a generation of car enthusiasts. Second, like an old Rambler or a Studebaker guy, I felt pangs of bittersweet nostalgia for a brand whose true essence many people never got to know. I will weep with my weight-belt-wearing brothers at every GTO-intensive cruise night henceforth.

Soon after that drive, the news came through that Lutz is staying on at General Motors but the G8 isn’t, not even as a Chevy Caprice. It would have been a great cop car. But it was the perfect Pontiac.

Source: Car and Driver

A comment that came out of the story about Ford ditching the Crown Victoria reminded me of this Car and Driver story from a few years back. While it appears that GM has taken its excellent Pontiac G8 away and doesn’t plan to let those of us in the states have that great car anymore, it is interesting to note that Ford also has some excellent rear-wheel-drive cars from the Land Down Under. Eh, mate, I wonder if anyone over at Ford is looking at the continued interest in the GM’s own car from Australia.

Think I’m kidding about interest in the G8? Why does the G8, which was essentially a Holden Commodore and was even built in Australia, continue to show up in Google’s 100 Hot Trends? It’s because the car developed a very loyal, cultish following in its only year on the market. Those who love the G8 see GM’s decision not to rebadge it as a Buick or Chevrolet as just another backwards decision, one like the giant automaker used to make on a regular basis.

So, here’s the 2006 article about these Fords from far-off lands.

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Ford Motor Co. Friday confirmed plans to phase out production of its popular police car, the Crown Victoria, in 2011 at a plant in Ontario.

However, the Dearborn automaker declined to say if that means the Crown Victoria police car would cease to exist afterward or confirm reports that it wants to replace the Crown Vic with a police version of the Ford Taurus. Ford recently launched a new version of the Taurus, which is built in Chicago.

Ford’s decision could impact General Motors’ decision about bringing the Pontiac G8 back as a police-only vehicle, an idea that top company officials have said is a possibility.

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From social media junkie, Joel Feder: Just had a great talk with #BobLutz and then took some pics w/ him! I’m going on a limb the G8 will be back as a high end #Chevy #GMtech #GM

… later …

More detail on #G8- #Lutz said as a really high end #Chevy no caprice. High end brakes, huge engine, big and fast. Like four door corvette

If you think that the high-level conversations inside the RenCen about the G8 are over, think again. The G8 hit no. 60 on Google’s Hot Trends last week, and that was based on a couple of photos some fan sent to an Internet blog site. Click here for a link to that story. Those photos showed a G8 in a parking lot with some special trim pieces. There is a fanatical following to this car that is all but going to force GM to act.

Think there’s no interest out there in seeing GM rebadge the Pontiac G8 and offer it as a Chevrolet or Buick?

Then why was the G8 listed at no. 60 on the list of Google’s Hot Trends early Friday afternoon? That’s higher than most any story out of GM in months and that includes news about the Chevy Volt. The G8’s ascension up Google’s Hot 100 was based on some photos of a modified G8 on Autoblog

There is strong interest in GM continuing to offer the G8 in some form. It would be worth GM’s
time to take a second look at this awesome sedan.