Pontiac was meant as Oakland's sidekick and swallowed its parent within seven years
General Motors launched Pontiac in 1926 as a cheaper companion to its Oakland cars. The newcomer sold so well that by 1933 Oakland was gone. Pontiac lasted until a white G6 rolled off the line on January 4, 2010, a casualty of GM's bailout.
Oakland itself was the 1907 creation of Edward Murphy, a builder of horse-drawn carriages based in the town of Pontiac, and it became part of GM two years later. The new brand took its name from the city and, through it, from the Odawa chief Pontiac, who led an uprising around Detroit from 1763 to 1766. Its first car, the Series 6-27, had a six-cylinder engine with the shortest stroke of any American car of its day. It sold 39,000 in six months after its 1926 New York debut and 76,742 within a year, and by 1928 it was America's best-selling six-cylinder car. GM even assembled Pontiacs from kits at its Osaka plant in Japan from 1927 to 1941.
During the Depression Pontiac offered the cheapest straight-eight cars on sale, borrowing bodies and parts from Chevrolet and marking them with a chrome Silver Streak along the hood. That long engine was cheap to build but its crankshaft flexed, limiting compression and performance, and it stayed in use until 1954. At the 1939 New York World's Fair a Pontiac was shown with a body made entirely of transparent plexiglass. The last civilian Pontiac of the war years was built on February 2, 1942, and postwar cars were essentially 1942 designs until the Hydramatic automatic helped sales in 1948 and all-new models arrived in 1949.
Within GM's ladder Pontiac sat above Chevrolet and below Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac. From 1959 its advertising sold a lifestyle rather than a machine, promoting a Wide Track stance and calling Pontiac the performance division with the slogan we build excitement.
The end came with GM's late-2000s financial crisis. Dropping the brand was a condition of restructuring before a $53 billion government rescue. Dealer franchises expired on October 31, 2010, leaving Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC.
Source: Pontiac (automobile)
