The Pontiac Fiero was a sports car disguised as a thrifty commuter
General Motors bosses did not want a two-seat sports car that might steal sales from the Corvette. So young Pontiac engineers pitched theirs as a frugal commuter that merely happened to seat two, and built a running prototype in under six months. The trick worked, though it also crippled the car.
The idea took shape in 1978, and the oil crisis made a fuel-saving car look like a business opportunity to management. The Fiero became the first mass-produced American car with its engine mounted behind the driver, a layout chosen to cut weight and drag and to help handling and braking. Its plastic body panels did not carry structural loads, which kept it light. The most economical version was rated at 50 miles per gallon on the highway and cost under 8,000 dollars.
The project was run by Hulki Aldikacti, a Turkish-born executive who clashed with the GM bureaucracy. He seated the design engineers beside the manufacturing engineers so drawings stopped bouncing between departments, and three times colleagues told him the project had been cancelled. Pontiac chief William Hoglund protected it, reopened a closed factory in Pontiac, Michigan, and let the hourly workers choose the name; Fiero means proud or fierce in Italian.
Money was tight, with a development budget of 400 million dollars, so Aldikacti's dream of an aluminium V6 gave way to GM's heavy Iron Duke four-cylinder, and brakes and suspension were borrowed from humbler models. Critics praised the handling but found it slow, and reliability and safety complaints followed. Even so, first-year production beat its 80,000 target, and a Fiero paced the 1984 Indianapolis 500.
Pontiac spent the following years fixing things, adding a V6 GT in 1985 and, in 1988, the redesigned suspension and better brakes the car had been meant to have from the start. By then sales had been falling steadily, and production ended after 370,168 cars.
Source: Pontiac Fiero
