Extensively covered before, GM’s N-body needs no formal introduction. First introduced as 1985 models, the original GM N-body Buick/Oldsmobile/Pontiac trio debuted to lukewarm reception. Critics panned their sleep-inducing styling, stubby proportions, elderly powertrains, uninspiring performance, cramped interiors, and cheap finishes. In light of this, Pontiac’s Grand Am quickly proved quite popular, becoming Pontiac’s best selling model with over 225,000 examples sold in 1986. Although Pontiac did make meaningful improvements here and there over the course of its run, by the end of the first this first generation N-body Grand Am’s run in 1991, it was still a rather dull and uninspiring car that lacked the refinement of rivals.
Pontiac made further strides to address this, well at least the dull part, with a redesigned Gran Am for the 1992 model year. Gaining some seven inches of length, the 1992 Grand Am sported rounder, more expressive styling, largely by way of plastic lower-body prosthetics and cladding. Its 103.4-inch wheelbase was the same as before, but redesigned front and rear seats boosted interior dimensions by a marginal amount.
Among notable improvements was the addition of standard antilock brakes, something Pontiac heavily touted, even going so far as to add “ABS” badges to the decklid. The track was widened, giving the Grand Am slightly better handling ability and visual appeal. The trunk and rear doors also opened wider, to 90 and 80 degrees, respectively. V6 power also returned for the first time since, 1987, giving buyers more ample power over the base I4, without the coarseness of the Quad 4.
Yet despite improvements, overall refinement was still lacking, especially compared to the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, both of which Pontiac frequently benchmarked in its advertising. The Grand Am’s chassis and suspension were unchanged, the latter meaning it retained its twist-beam rear suspension. A redesigned interior still looked and felt cheap. Unfavorable levels of NVH were still prevalent, something especially true of Grand Ams equipped with the Quad 4. Then of course, there is the fact that its rambunctious styling was highly subjective.
Regardless of its shortcomings, the 1992-1998 Grand Am still proved very popular for Pontiac, typically selling over 200,000 units per year, even if many were steeply incentivized and sold to fleets. For better or worse, it was the car that most people soon came to associate with Pontiac, and the Grand Am is likely one of the reasons GM kept Pontiac around for as long as they did.
Photographed in Washington Square, Boston South End – December 2018
Related Reading:
1989 Pontiac Grand Am LE coupe
“Pontiac’s Grand Am quickly proved quite popular, becoming Pontiac’s best selling model with over 225,000 examples sold in 1986.”
Although some of us (okay, me) tend to criticize GM for their less-than-great cars, and Pontiac in particular for its plasticized styling, it’s kind of hard to argue that a car that sold 225,000 examples in a single year was a failure. Sure, Hondas and Toyotas were far superior, but sometimes “good enough” is good enough, and a burger is an okay meal. I don’t believe that matching Toyota et al in quality (assuming a corresponding price increase) would have increased sales of these cars…in fact a price increase might have hurt sales more than an increase in quality would have helped.
This wasn’t a deadly sin car; Vegas and Citations were an experience like finding a roach in your burger but these were more like having artificial cheese and wilted lettuce on it. No surprise… you knew it was a cheap burger when you bought it and a lot of people are okay with that. A Toyota-burger might have been more delicious, but at the end of the day, a Grand Am with cheese satisfied your needs.
Hmm. Actually, that’s exactly what qualifies the Pontiac Grand Am for a Deadly Sin. Some of the DS subjects are cars that were just plain mediocre, but that enjoyed strong enough sales to lull GM into a sense of complacency…when really they were losing ground to other automakers and needed to try much harder. The original Cadillac Seville is one such example. The Saturn SL was another.
This one is even worse because, while GM asked sky-high prices for the Seville (and got them), the Grand Am was sold to fleets and buyers at fire-sale prices, cutting into profit and cementing the perception in customers’ minds that no one should ever pay full-price for a GM sedan.
That’s a DS because GM continued to make cut-rate small cars and put an emphasis on trucks and SUVs. They really went wholesale on price discounts after 9/11, to spur the economy. But suddenly, in the late-aughts when the market crashed and people flocked to small cars en masse, GM had nothing to sell that was all that decent. And even if they had, they couldn’t do so without discounts that made it unprofitable…because why would you pay the same or nearly the same for a Pontiac as you would a Honda? Pontiacs were supposed to be cheap!
@Kyree My thoughts exactly…
The Grand Am sold in such high quantities because of fleet sales and steep discounts. Private buyers shopping for affordable new compact cars, far more so than buyers of larger and more expensive vehicles, were much more likely to sacrifice the Grand Am’s inferior refinement to save a few thousand dollars.
These strong sales to penny-pinching consumers and rental fleets only made GM comfortable in its ways, and as a result, cars like the Grand Am were left to soldier on with the bare minimum in terms of upgrades/updates. This was largely the case for most GM cars of all classes.
“This one is even worse because, while GM asked sky-high prices for the Seville (and got them), the Grand Am was sold to fleets and buyers at fire-sale prices, cutting into profit and cementing the perception in customers’ minds that no one should ever pay full-price for a GM sedan.”
That’s how the story goes according to Bob Lutz himself during GM’s bailout. He recounts GMC, Buick, and Pontiac were all being considered for the chopping block. The Feds wanted to know what kind of money these brands were bringing to the table. GMC was fairly profitable, Buick not nearly so much. Pontiac? Lutz admits Pontiac had not made a profit whatsoever dating back to 2000. Case closed; shutter Pontiac if you want the loan.
As if that is shocking to anyone paying attention to the actual prices Pontiac dealers were willing to get their cars out the door during the 1990’s…
You make an interesting point there, Kyree. So by sticking with ‘good enough to get by’ quality and engineering, and the discounted pricing, Toyota and Honda moved upmarket in buyers’ minds by default, and sort of took on the status of where Buick or Cadillac used to be.
Well, Paul originally made that point in his Deadly Sin series; I’m just parroting it. But it’s worth considering. Strong sales do not equal a successful product.
And even regarding the products that were temporarily successful and profitable, hindsight tells us that GM management should have seen them as just that…temporary. They should have been stopgap measures to get their respective nameplate/segment to a better place–not excuses to do the same thing in perpetuity.
The problem is that, during GM’s heyday, people didn’t “settle” for a Pontiac. They aspired to own one. Chevrolet was the inexpensive brand, and even Chevrolets featured handsome styling and offered a plethora of options to make them more desirable, if that was what the customer wanted.
When the supposed “step up” brand is now selling to people who settle for cheap transportation and not much else, there is a serious problem.
Made even worse for the brands that were supposed to be an even “higher” step-up like Oldsmobile and Buick. Each division started serving up the same cut-priced crap, so any N-Body from this generation seemed to rapidly fall into the undesirable cheap wheels category, irrespective of brand.
The styling may have been outrageous then, but compared to the robo-insectoids on showroom floors now this Grand Am is nostalgic simplicity.
Relationship to the Achieve is particularly evident in the rear three-quarters shot, I hadn’t noticed that before.
That was my first thought as well. When these came out I thought they were terribly garish, but they look downright tasteful by today’s standards.
Peter DeLorenzo’s tome “The United States Of Toyota” documented these years in disgusting detail.
They’d benchmark the current Accord and Camry for their next model, and then as soon as the new Accord and Camry came out, the GM cars were instantly and hopelessly obsolete!
Maybe as Lokki notes above, matching Toyota in quality would’ve meant a price increase that would’ve hurt sales.
But I believe when the accountants have the final say, and you refuse to look beyond the next quarter, bad things happen.
Vega and Citation COULD’VE both been OUTSTANDING cars. Given GM’s history of leadership and innovation, they SHOULD HAVE been.
But the bean counters were given the last word.
And a company that once had a 53% market share struggles to maintain 17% today while arguably building the best vehicles in the General’s history.
Of course the Silverado and Camaro need a complete restyling…oh well.
My opinion on what would help (or have helped) the Big3 make their vehicles more competitive is to make all the executive ranks including the accountants and engineers rotate their supplied or low-cost leased vehicles with the competition’s on a monthly basis. So no matter your level on the “creation team” you’d have your company’s vehicle one month (GrandAm), then the next month a mid-to-upper spec Camry, then an Accord, then a Taurus or whatever). Just make it the three vehicles that are most successful in sales in the category. Overall I think the companies are too myopic and while they certainly benchmark and deconstruct the competition, they don’t necessarily drive them on a continuous normal daily basis long enough to actually acclimatize to them and then realize what a crap box the home vehicle may be. Or perhaps they just don’t care and I am overthinking it….
That would make sense if they actually cared about product excellence. But the GM way was to call anyone who drove a competitor’s product a “traitor” and “not a team player” and shunt them out of the favored ranks. And the GM cars executives drove were massaged and tended by company mechanics so they never even got a representative view of their own products.
Because producing cut-rate crap for short-term profits was the real name of the game, and people pushing to maximize quality and performance were an annoying nuisance to be silenced or eliminated. To make them face the deficiencies in their own products was not perceived as enlightenment but a threat. They were well-paid to pretend not to notice. A stupid, myopic bunker mentality.
If you’ve worked for a large corporation you’ve probably seen this — everything becomes a cynical game of cutting corners for short-term profit unless there’s a strong culture to countervail it. Honda had engineering excellence, at least while Soichiro was alive; and Toyota had its quality focus.
I get all the arguments, but at the end of the day, as long as people shop by price, GM will continue to sell cars (or SUVs, or trucks) like this in fairly large quantities.
We on this site are enthusiasts, and to continue the burger analogy, we would never willingly eat at McDonalds, especially when there is a decent restaurant nearby. Or we are willing to wait and cook whatever we want at home for ourselves. But, we never purposely set out for a McDs. Yet, an inordinately large part of the population does willingly go for a McDonalds, and enjoys it immensely. They rave about the fries, or how the sloppy Big Mac is always a favorite, just like saying the performance or handling of a Camaro is similar to a real sports car. The it-might-be-fish-but-doesn’t-seem-likely Filet o’ Fish sandwich seems to be a popular choice, just as the Corvette has many of the characteristics of a Ferrari, but costs way less.
The buying public is often satisfied with just okay, as long as the price is good. GM really started to fail when their pricing jumped the shark and they were charging as much or more than a comparable but better built and equipped competitor’s model was available. When they cheapened product and increased price, they made it easy for the public to want to cross-shop, which had not really happened as much. But even with all that, given incentives, in house financing, and the made-in-the-USA rep, they still sold in great number.
Just good enough. The unofficial GM motto.
@Jim Klein — My impression of General Motors and their more-mediocre sedans of the era isn’t as generous as yours. I don’t think the managers were in an echo chamber; I think that by the 90s, they knew exactly what the foreign competition was doing, and just did not care. They were perfectly capable of making competitive or class-leading cars when they wanted to; it’s just that they hardly ever *did* want to.
They figured their stuff would sell on price…or that they would (between their multitude of brands), invest a minimal amount in the product, put discounts on it because it was clearly inferior to rival products, and then make it up in volume. They could also count heavily on their middle-America and Canadian markets, a lot of which either held anti-foreign settlement or were mostly unexposed to foreign cars and so habitually bought GM’s wares.
And that worked. Until it didn’t.
But I don’t see how they could *not* know that their cars were leagues behind the Japanese, in particular.
They were trapped by the corporate structure and sheer inertia. GM’s cost structure was out of line with the competition (even, to some extent, the cost structures of Ford and Chrysler), and the Sloan Brand Ladder was hopelessly obsolete by the early 1990s.
But attacking these issues head-on required a level of leadership far above what existed within GM at that time.
Couple this factor with a management tendency to seek solace in past glories, and the belief among management (and even union leadership) that GM’s size precluded the possibility of going out of business, and it’s not hard in retrospect to see why it failed to change direction.
Someone once said that, “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first give 40 years of success.” GM proved that.
“attacking these issues head-on required a level of leadership far above what existed within GM at that time.”
Bingo! It is not well enough understood that GM’s management in the early 90s was a lot like Chrysler’s in the period around, say, 1960, where there was lots of management, but very little of depth and quality.
I think you raise an interesting and age-old question concerning the Detroit automakers: did they make conscious decisions to ignore market trends and the competition based on cynical assumptions about buyers and a burning quest for short-term profits? Or were they just clueless with reinforcement for their world view coming from a very provincial and closed-minded group of industry insiders (Grosse Pointe Myopia)?
For much of Detroit’s collapse, all the way into the 1990s, I’d argue the latter. Detroit fully misunderstood the desire for smaller cars, repeatedly missing the real needs of that market. Detroit completely missed the changing tastes of luxury buyers, falling victim to both German brands and Lexus, to such a point that Detroit luxury brands are now seen as second string at best. The mid-sized car segment, long a Motown stronghold, was ceded to Japanese products that “grew” into the category. The only remaining bastions where Detroit remains dominant are trucks and SUVs, at least for now. But look at the recurring pattern: Cute Utes are dominated by the Japanese (Honda, Toyota, Nissan), while luxury SUVs are dominated by the Europeans (MB, BMW, Audi, Porsche, Range Rover). History repeats (or at least rhymes), while Detroit dithers. Is it ignorance or strategy?
My wife is from Detroit and I spend a lot of time there. The thing that’s immediately apparent is just how few imports there are up there. It’s like you’ve entered some alternate reality where Europe and Asia simply don’t exist. It’s really bizarre. I can only imagine it was far worse in the 80s and 90s but even today it’s just so weird.
My wife often asks me about cars she thought were popular only to find out that no, they were never popular anywhere except in Grosse Pointe which is where she lived when they came out. “Nope, no one cared about the Dodge Nitro.”
Grosse Pointe Myopia explains so much GM behavior that’s simply baffling to anyone not from there.
I think there is something to what all of you say, and will add one more factor:
By that time GM’s management systems were a mess. Managers “in development” were moved from this place to that so that they could amass a wide range of experience. But the side effect was that none of them got any deep experience, and usually never saw a project through from beginning to end.
Every manager either finished up something that someone else had started and was far enough along that it could not be changed much, or started something he knew he would not finish and so the only thing he would get measured on was keeping project costs in line.
That sort of experience-rotation is common in other industries/government too. I watched a documentary about 12 years ago called “No End In Sight” about the Iraq War. Several ex-CIA and government officials spoke about how just when the people running the provincial government and the military and intelligence officers tasked with counterinsurgency started to make headway and develop relationships with the mullahs,/leaders, they would get rotated out and it would have to start again, over and over. Often just because CIA officers wanted foreign duty on their resume.
I had a friend with one of these. I just thought it was a tacky sad little car. Damn those bean counters.
For me that front style seems to be the inspiration source for this guy’s snout:
The JA Cloud Cars’ styling was largely an evolution of the larger LH sedans. In any event, at least JAs were handsomely styled vehicles.
When my friend Bill sold me his 1985 RX-7 he bought one of these to replace it, quite like the white one in the photo.
It was very much unlike the RX-7, but as disappointing as that was in some ways it was good in others. The A/C worked, it didn’t break down regularly, and since there was a Pontiac dealer in his town he could get it serviced without having to drive 20 miles to the Mazda dealer.
It provided him with good service as transportation, I think the worst thing that happened was that the dealer convinced him to power flush the transmission fluid. Shortly thereafter the transmission grenaded, no doubt the process knocked some gunk loose.
At any rate he replaced it in 2015 with a Hyundai. Not an exciting car, and not a great car, but not a bad car either.
Chuck Jordan was in the house! Compared with the insipid Irv Rybicki designs of the 1980s, these were a relative breakthrough. Though I am no fan of any N-Body, I appreciate the styling transformation of these cars versus their predecessors (at least for Pontiac and Olds, the Buick Skylark didn’t fare as well). I give credit to GM for trying once again to apply styling differentiation and character (love it or hate it) to everyday cars. Had the cars been more refined and offered higher quality materials and finishes, they could have garnered a much more enthusiastic fan base.
The gap between design and execution on the Grand Am was most apparent inside. The design was striking from a distance, but the materials were very cheap, especially the plastics. When my wife and I were first married, we got one of these as a rental car, and her first comment was that the air vents looked like hair curlers–what was envisioned as cool and futuristic wound up in reality as silly and tacky.
A small handful of N-body Grand Ams passed through my circle of family and friends, the last one being the burgundy-purple ‘95 4-door that was my stepdaughter’s first car.
I always liked the styling of the N-bodies. Depending on one’s station in life, they could even be aspirational. (This coming from a guy that spent 8 to 10 years between a Datsun B-210 and a Chevette. 😉 )
Ennyhoo, my stepdaughter’s GA was pretty dependable, but hard on the rear brakes. The rear drums frequently went out of round – at least partially due to the mass market imported drums I was buying.
The interior was slightly claustrophobic, but I did like the 3.1 V6. It never had any intake manifold coolant leaks and ran smoothly, with a minimum of internal engine noises. My 2000 Malibu, on the other hand had loud piston slap when cold. I came to find out that the General redesigned the 3.1 pistons sometime between ‘95 and’00.
I lived in the Midwest during peak Grand Am. These were bought (often on dirt-cheap GM employee discounts) and thrashed by the type of folks who would have bought Volkswagen Golfs and GTis if it wasn’t for the anti-“furrin car” mentality of the era and location.
Lots of K-Mart chrome hubcaps and Pep Boys mods. Also, lots of rust.
Yeap, these cars were all over the place in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Then suddenly, they were all gone. There’s still a few of its larger, W-body relatives around, but Grand Am’s of any generation are pretty scarce nowadays.
Depending on what you read at the time, the 1985-1991 cars were panned or got lukewarm reviews. C/D panned the Calais, elsewhere on this site, and then Consumer Reports liked the cars but the 1985-1991 cars never got reliable enough to be recommended. Still, they were attractive, upscale, more powerful redoings of the J car and very suitable for the young professionals they were aimed at between the younger, cheaper J car and the more family oriented A car, and there wasn’t a lot of domestic competition from Ford or Chrysler. The Accord or Galant was sportier than a Camry or Stanza but still not as fun as the 1985-1991 cars.
The 1992 cars went for styling that was both flamboyant and awkward- do any of these lines really go together? The interiors were cheaper and more plasticky with poorer quality upholstery; the prices rose dramatically, but the underlying tech didn’t improve. Still old tech engines, the old 6 and the Quad 4 had yet to receive balance shafts, a three speed automatic, and no airbags. The GM quality problems didn’t really get better either. They were still popular with teenagers as a first car and generally gave pretty good service.
God, how I hated these when new, and the feelings haven’t improved with time. I spent lots of time in these as company cars in the early/mid nineties and if I could pull PTSD related benefits from exposure to these toxic waste lumps, I would. A friend who also oddly enough had one, we collectively referred to it by its given name: Chernobyl, AKA Cheery, for its zombie teal peeling paint. Ugh!
Being raised in the Midwest US, I have been surrounded by Pontiacs. Their attraction was that they were sporty and exciting. They weren’t the Chevrolets many Pontiac owners grew up with, but they were cars that they knew because they were GM products. Trans Ams were considered star cars thanks to Burt Reynolds. Pontiacs always interested shoppers because they were affordable and trendy. People who were in creative businesses or professions, often had an experience driving a Pontiac.
What was trendy, in hindsight, looks odd later on. It is a natural thing. Anyone interested in buying a car for a few years is often attracted to a vehicle that looks different and trendy. Pontiac was an affordable car for these folks.
Pontiac drivers aren’t bigots, or ignorant people. My neighbors aren’t phobic or have a dislike because something is different. Pontiacs were always different. Owners of these cars were open minded folks who enjoyed trends.
Now – in order to keep this market happy – you had to keep trendy. That is what the Grand Am did. While keeping under budget, Pontiac used inexpensive plastics to remold and update the trendy things they did so well. That Grand Am grille went from being the size of a large belt buckle to being a giant shovel scoop over the decade. The fenders, bumpers and plastics grew shapes and bumps, faux lights and vents, and their interiors went from Nintendo to Chinese appliance during that time as well.
We can look at these Grand Ams and groan. Yet we also groan at our own decade old photos of fashions that suddenly look awful. Fashions and fads, trends and silly things are toys we enjoy daily. No reason to beat this car up over the fact that we find it embarrassing now.
Also – don’t insult the people who drove them. They are usually pretty great people. If you want to feel superior to the guy next to you, you have the problem – not him. Don’t be a hater.
That is the best explanation I ever heard for this car, and trends in general. What you say makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
You highlight an important issue of political incorrectness, in that owners later model Pontiacs are often discriminated and labeled as low class, “rednecks”, “white trash”, etc. on many automotive media publications.
Labeling, generalizing, and discriminating against owners of certain makes/models of vehicles in a derogatory manner is wrong. I don’t think it happens often on this site, but if it does within any articles of any contributor, myself included, I think and hope that it is in the most broad, inoffensive sense.
I genuinely hope that I have never done so and insulted anyone as a result. Unfortunately, it occurs more in the comments, and I have on more than one occasion called out a particular commentator or simply edited his comments regarding his labeling of German luxury SUVs as “Asian mommy mobiles”.
I generally agree with your general comments on generalizations – but in my mind a Rambler will always be a geek car.
The Ramblers in my neighborhood were filled with hourly-wage, blue-collar kids like me. Being called a geek would be a compliment for a lot of those guys – they often never finished high school.
Brendan – the fact that you wrote up such a nice piece about this car shows us that you get it. You did it justice. You are my favorite snob. I just hope you have someone change a baby diaper in the backseat of that new car of yours. You obviously need a lot more kid poop in your life.
Very good statement. I was 12 when this body style come out. It was very popular for young families. Family and friends drove these.
“If you want to feel superior to the guy next to you, you have the problem – not him. Don’t be a hater.”
Philosophy quote of the week!
Brendan, I loved this! I’ve long considered the G/A the “Michigan State Car”, as these were positively everywhere in my home state for so long. That it was in that ubiquitous shade of “1990s Turquoise” is the icing on the cake. Great find and post.
We had a ton of them in the State just to your south, as well. Lots of GM factories always meant lots of Pontiacs and Chevy Trucks being on the roads.
I did own one, a used ’94 just like the feature car. I wanted it because it was affordable to me.
In defense of my particular car, I still tell people that it was the most efficient car I ever have owned. I think it was the combination of the 3.1, 4 speed auto and just the size of the car was perfectly matched. Highway cruising was great. Montreal to Cambridge, Ontario on a tank (650 km/400 miles) and I could have pushed it a bit more.
In high school I always wanted this car (1988 with composite headlights or the 1989 refresh), but finally was able to afford a brand new one. I special ordered one of these as my first brand new car in 1994 right out of college. Two-door SE dark green with light gray interior and the V6 with the 16″ rims. I loved that car but it did ride rough with the short wheelbase and front brakes pads wore out quick. Kept it for almost 4 years (43K) and then upgraded to 1998 Pontiac Grand Prix GT coupe.
Even here in Lansing, where these were built and seemed to be the most common sedan on the road for, oh, about 30 years (replaced now by the W-body Impala), these Grand Ams have finally disappeared. I still see the 1999-2005 ones, pretty much always in horrible condition, but the 1992-1998 models have all but vanished.
They were not built to last, but they definitely fit the stereotype of “GM cars run poorly longer than most cars run at all”. My memories of these mostly involve missing hubcabs, peeling paint, plastic cladding flapping the wind and dragging on the road in massive sheaths, whining, hissing power steering pumps, loud exhausts and LOTS of color-coordinated duct tape holding the exteriors together. Cosmetically these cars fell apart so rapidly that most owners seemed to give up on keeping them in good condition long before they stopped actually running.
They did seem stylish at the time, and looked like nothing else on the road. With an already low price and GM employee discounts on top, it was the perfect combo for many in Michigan.
My mother had one of these later Grand Ams, a 1996 example with the V-6, purple in color. It was her first new car (well, a dealer demo car, anyway), and she loved it. It had a ton of power compared to the LeBaron it replaced. The A/C worked, the cruise worked, and-importantly-it was purple and she loved it.
And I loved it too. Oh, it was a terrible car! The seat was two sizes too small for me as a high-schooler. The dash was the crappiest-looking bubbly grey plastic I can think of. The paint on the radio buttons started to wear off within six months of her buying it. Dumbest of all, though, was the fact that it had power locks, but manual crank windows! It was a stupid, uncomfortable car.
Also of note was the time in 1998 it tried to burn itself to the ground after an electrical failure of some sort. She wound up having a bunch of stuff under the hood replaced under warranty because of it, although the particulars now escape me.
But, thanks to it, I got my first car, mom’s 1986 Chrysler LeBaron GTS. The Grand Am went on to give mom 11 years and 125,000 miles of mostly trouble-free motoring, and she still thinks very well of it all these years later.
I, on the other hand, don’t miss it a bit.