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I’m feeling a little ill today.  This is a sad day to be a car guy.

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when can I place my order for this?

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This picture alone should be more than enough to explain why this has happened.  My last experience with a Chrysler product was a rented Dodge Caliber.  That was a horrible car.  I mean, really horrible.

The best thing that Chrysler ever produced was the shame brought upon Gene for buying a Rumble Bee.

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It’s sometimes hard to be objective and rational when it comes to the car business. It’s easy to say “I’ love ‘x’”, even when their product happens to be crap. Or, even worse, it’s easy to forget that a product was crap because you have such fond memories of it. I should know…I have a soft place in my heart for the 1984 Camaro…which was crap, but was also my first car.

So I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly how I feel about Pontiac going away. I mean, I love Trans Ams, GTOs (both old and new), the Solstice and the new G8. But does that really excuse GM for building what really can be considered overly body-cladded turds for the past 20+ years, finally getting it right again in the past 3 or 4?

A bit of disclosure here: I’ve never owned a Pontiac. In fact, the only GM products I’ve ever owned have been the aforementioned Gen 3 Camaro and an LT1 Gen 4 Camaro convertible. If you looked at my long and sordid car ownership history, I’ve owned more Ford products than anything, with Toyota following in second.

But it still sucks. This is the marque that brought us the Screaming Chicken. It was the last marque to offer a proper big block V-8 in a pony car. It was what that my dad and his best friend drove across the country to celebrate their graduation from high school…in my grandma’s brand new 1955 Pontiac Sun Chief convertible.

I understand the logic. GM has too many divisions. Hell, they’ve had too many divisions ever since they decided to consolidate powerplant production and use Chevrolet engines in everything. You could argue that at that point Pontiac (and Buick) went away as anything more than a styling exercise 25 years ago.

But what about the “Excitement”? I can remember in the 1980s that two of the hottest cars for your older cousins to driver were a Fiero or a Firebird. Both which where crap, incidentally, but there really weren’t any American cars on the market at the time that could really be considered “good”. Pontiac served it’s purpose well…sell affordable cars that looked sporty. Stuff that a spoiled high school kid or a 35 year old secretary could be proud to own. An American car for someone that was too cool to drive a Chevy.

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I got married last week.  After the ceremony we did the cliche’ “drive away.”  My mother and father-in-law were nice enough to provide us with their Solstice GXP to use as our “getaway car.”  That fifteen minute drive with my new wife was probably the highlight of our night.  It was the first time we got to talk that day, and was a nice break of solitude in a day filled with ceremony, deadlines, and greeting guests.  Of course, driving around in a roadster on a busy Friday night in a tux and a wedding dress just made the experience that much more memerable.  People from all directions were yelling “Congratulations!” and honking their horns.

Personally, I love the Solstice.  It’s a little more refined than a Miata, not to mention faster than a lot of comparable roadsters.  Sure, it’s not as track-ready as it’s Japanese counterparts,  and won’t give you the poser cred that a Z or Boxter will, but it’s a fast, fun car, that’s comfortable and more than sporting enough for backroad driving.

Okay, this is not a review.  The point I’m trying to make is that in the back of my car guy mind, is a slight sense of sadness that someday I will show my kids the pictures from that day, and they’ll ask me, “What’s a Pontiac?”

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