Third generation Pontiac Grand Ams (first generation N-bodies) haven’t been common sights in the Northeast for a long time now, but a recent visit to the Sunshine State gave me a decidedly different change of scenery, both in natural landscape and automotive.
Among the throngs of rental cars, from a Disney Transport I caught glimpse of this post-1989 facelift Pontiac Grand Am sedan, or as the missing badging shows “Pontiac ___ Am”, and caught this one shot before it faded off into the sunset in all its grand-less glory.
Photographed: Lake Buena Vista, FL – January 2017
The beefy tire sdiewalls, alloys, and cladding give a slightly cuv look
Yeah, Had they wagonized it, it would have been ahead of its time.
When I lived in Michigan, I used to refer to these things as “The Midwest VW GTI” – they were driven by all the young hoons who aspired to drive a GTI, but their daddy wasn’t gonna co-sign a note on “one of them furrin’ cars”. Either that, or grampa worked for GM, so they had an A-plan number, making a Grand Am cost about half of what a GTI went for.
That really is a good way to describe the Grand Am.
I couldn’t agree more.. VW’s were “evil” here in the suburbs of Detroit growing up, and I had a Grand Am.. it was OK, but the Accords, Civic Si’s, and the GTI’s were so so so much better.
My family wasn’t a “big 3” family but “furrin'” cars (lol) would get keyed in the school parking lot and stuff. Plus, Grand Am’s were cheaper.. which is why I had one.. it wasn’t too bad though, at least it was a 5 speed!!
I have to laugh at people who say that now… “Evil Foreign Cars”. I just bought a really nice (yeah, I actually just said that) Honda Civic EX-T Coupe. Its engine was built in the United States, and the car itself was assembled in Canada… just like my Dad’s 1985 Grand Prix back in the day. Aren’t Buick’s from China now? It seems that all of this doesn’t matter anymore with a “global economy”. I think my 2007 Mustang was still built in the USA, but I’ll still bet some of its parts came from other places around the world. I think my ’88 Turbo Coupe Thunderbird had a Mitsubishi alternator. I seem to recall it was expensive to replace at the time because it wasn’t the normal Ford alternator like my ’88 5.0 T-Bird had in it. Then again, my mechanic might’ve been blowing smoke, but as usual, I digress…. ;o)
My 1993 Tempo V6 had a Mitsubishi alternator, as well. Irritated the snot out of me, when I had to replace the original at 167,000 miles and found out the alternator cost $135!
I’ve said it before, but my Dad was a union man ( who I never saw read a book in 49 years) who always told me if I bought a foreign car ( and he was so woefully uneducated he wouldn’t have known or cared if they were built here) I would not be able to park it in the driveway, and our street did not allow street parking. I heard from day one “that was taking a job away from an american”. In fact when the Mazda became a clone of the Ranger to the point they were built in Flat Rock Michigan by UAW 600, our little member credit union would not loan money on them because they said Mazda and not Ford! That ignorance is one of the main reasons I’m not a union fan. And one of the many reasons me and dad never got along.
My Dad was an ‘only buy American type’ for a while, something he got from the previous generation, I suppose. His Uncle was a union steel worker and WWII vet, and wouldn’t even think of buying something foreign. But oh my has that changed. Since he bought is first Japanese car, an Acura RL, my Dad has had a Lexus RX-350, an Acura MDX, and now he’s downsized to an Acura RDX…. All of that said though, his “for-fun-car” is a 2014 Mustang; V6 with the Pony Package. As he says, “that’s fast enough for this old man. Who needs a V8?” ;o)
My folks didn’t buy many cars over my lifetime. Only one’s we had were a 65 Impala SS (65-74), 69 Chevy C10 ( 69-81), 74 Montego (74 till now, I still own it), 81 F100 (81-88) , 88 Suburban ( 88-93) ,and a 97 F150 mom still owns. Their “fun car” was a 62 Vette they restored in 82-84. Sold it in 05. If you ever see a 62 Vette called “Ms. Candy Brandy Wine” at a car show, thats the one. The new owner had it all chromed up so it’s not a driver anymore. We drove it however. In fact I think he shows it in the “World of Wheel’s” shows now.
If it wasn’t for unions your dad wouldn’t have had the money to buy you a car and barely anything else. Also you would have to go everywhere by yourself because he would be working 60 hrs a week or more and you would be lucky to have much schooling and would be working from the time you were 8 or 9. And unions are bad because they championed the 8 hour workweek, minimum wage & child labor laws and compulsory free public education to grade 12? None of these things would have appeared magically on their own if they had not been fought for. Talk about forgetting where you came from. The best years of my life were when I held union jobs and was able to pay taxes. And one of them was a restaurant which I had health insurance, made 30% over minimum wage. employee locker rooms, showers and laundry service of our work clothes and the food we could eat for free. I bet you think that is too much for just a restaurant worker. After the union jobs were gone I never made enough money to pay taxes and worked myself into an early total disability at age 49 having had worked 70-80 a week at physically demanding jobs. If I sound bitter it is because I am.
Hmm..I’m not union and I’m doing great…home, wife ( who doesn’t have to work) , and my job is sitting in a rig…home on the weekends too…i do work 65 hrs a week, but I LIKE my job. So your argument does not apply to me.
Evan Reisner
I personally thought the Grand Am visually was much more better looking than the VW GTI by a nice shot. There were nice cars, affordable.
Crummy Engine is you choose the Tech 4, and ho hum quality of used Grand Am. However, these cars did have their devote fans (mostly women). That simply liked the cars. then usually the mothers handed them down to the kids after 6-7 years.
That’s what I mostly saw.
When I still lived in Johnstown, PA and had my E30 BMW 325is I could always count on some high school kid in one of these on a Friday night getting antsy at a traffic light. Like a proper BMW-owning douche, I ignored him.
For whatever reason this particular generation of the Grand Am didn’t last long around here. Even the older ones are more common. Not sure why.
OTOH, I still occasionally see the Buick Skylark version. I can’t imagine they were built differently. Perhaps Buick sold more?
James, I contacted CR about the same thing. Grand Am, Calais, Somerset/Skylark built in the same plant, same workers, same mechanicals for the most part.
They gave some double speak about the drivers of the cars.
Ironic in that all of them had “worse than average” reliability ratings, one or another less bad than the in one or two different areas.
It still makes no sense.
These were all over the place until the mid-to-late ’90s. We deride them today, but they were very popular, even with the “tech IV.” It wasn’t uncommon to see them with the quad-4 or V6, though, so people liked them enough to buy well-equipped examples. The bolt-upright rear seats always shocked me–much in the way that the fixed rear glass in yesterday’s Malibu shocked me–as deliberately inhospitable, but I liked the uber-formal roofline.
That used to be the car of choice (well, budget more like it) of high schoolers when I was that age. I had a 1st generation Taurus and felt like I was driving a Lincoln in comparison.
I haven’t seen any of these Pontiacs since I don’t know when. I’m sure the tin worm got a good deal of them.
Back before I knew much about cars, I always wondered why anyone would have bought the downsized Sevilles and Eldorados that looked like these Pontiacs…
Did the Taurus and those Grand Ams travel through time?!?
For all the very legitimate criticisms heaped on the Grand Am, I confess to enjoying the one I rented years ago. Crude, sure, but fun in its own way. Even the torque steer made it entertaining to stomp on the gas from a stoplight, I recall. Would I want to own one? No, but there’s something good to be said about almost every car.
Even in the Deep South, I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these cars with shiny paint.
To drive one is confront one’s mortality.
Haven’t seen one in awhile or a Calais for that matter. Never forget what those Quad 4s sounded like going by!
Partly because of this, I would guess
I always thought that the rear end treatment on these, with the center backup lamp and “PONTIAC GRAND AM” spelled out above, to be one of GM’s better designs of the era. It worked really well with the formal roofline.
The trunk lid opening lift height appears unnecessarily high. When they could have had the middle section between the tail lights open with the trunk lid. It would have lowered the loading lift height by around a foot.
Strange as well, they didn’t have the trunk lid opening lower edge align with the tops of the tail lights. It would have cleaned up the rear design considerably.
The fact that the lid doesn’t align with the tail lamps looks terrible–I never noticed before but now I can’t un-see it. I’m sure it was a parts commonality move so this car could use the same lid as the Calais and Skylark, but it’s more of the same kind of penny-pinching that was already killing them by this time.
Perhaps they felt most buyers wouldn’t notice or care, but it is easy to perceive indifference in attention to detail. It does lend the impression of half baked design/engineering, and/or cost cutting.
For a car with such blasé/simple styling, it is noticeable, and should have been fixed.
Typical GM, especially from the Roger Smith era. My theory is that they originally designed it to save money on the trunk and rear panel stampings. But the three model lines (Grand Am, Calais, and Skylark) used wholly different trunk stampings, and probably rear panel stampings, too. If they had made a lower liftover/sill, then put completely different lights on the trunks to differentiate, it would have looked much more different between the 3. But instead they penny-pinched 3 completely different designs with 3 different stampings. They spent, say, $50 per car to make different tooling then saved $10 per car by making the trunk lip so high as to be user-unfriendly. They could have saved $35 per car by making 1 better trunk lid and 3 different tail light designs (which they made anyway).
Just a theory, but probably close to reality.
I like the styling on these cars in their quirky 1980s ways. Even in junkyards these Grand Ams are quite rare in the Portland, OR area and I might photograph the next one I find. I sort of remember these Pontiacs as I was growing up in Central New York.
The 86 Calais I owned [and which little bro still has] was great to drive. The handling was probably the best of any of the misfit cars I’ve owned over the years.
Once going up to see the parents in OR little bro was driving section of the 5 up around Mount Shasta. I woke up and he had his triple e sized foot mashed and was taking the turns like a racing pro.
He still loves how it handles.
So much potential, so many beans to count.
My friend Chris had one new in 86. We called it the “Damned Am”. It was ok for the first two years, then it began falling apart. He replaced it with a VW Fox!
Well, at least my 4th gen has all its grand glory… (Badges are from a 5th gen)
This car had so much potential, shame they did not refine it more, and provide a engine that would do it justice.
Sure they sold a ton, but still a missed opportunity to be a true collectors car.
While the Olds Cutlass Calais version of the N-body manages to achieve Deadly Sin status (and the Buick Somerset/Skylark, as well, by default, due to it’s similarity to the Buick Riviera), the Pontiac Grand Am doesn’t seem to attract nearly the same amount of scorn. Indeed, it was the best selling of the N-body variants.
It was probably the best version, too and, for the time, I suppose it was okay, certainly a cheaper alternative to the VW GTI, although I don’t know if that was the intended competition.
The intended competition for the N-Body was the Tempo/Topaz, the K-Car, the Camry, Accord, and Stanza, to name a few…
Ty’Eira: these were priced way higher than the Tempos and Ks initially.
GM actually had the gall to try and market them to BMW intenders, as if they would actually cross shop GM offerings. As if.
Ignorant souls never understood that the Tech 4 far surpassed any 4 cyl BMW engine of the period, dontchaknow. /sarc Such hubris from GM.
They did eventually replace the Xs in the brand line ups.
The target buyer was what some marketing hack at GM called “New Values Customers” [ in English: “yuppies”- young upwardly mobile professionals ].
Ironic how they got purchased by older brand loyal Buick Olds and Pontiac buyers and younger parents for their kids !!!
Good background on their development can be found in Car and Driver of the period [84-85]: styling analysis, engineering, etc.
That’s what I thought, although the market for the N-body ended up being closer to those who ‘aspired’ to be a yuppie (and didn’t know any better). ‘Real’ yuppies with better credit bought German sports-sedans, i.e., BMWs and GTIs. I figured the GTI was more of the target since they were cheaper than BMWs and were FWD. Ultimately, the N-body was just another, typical GM marketing con-job.
Well then, you learn something new every day…
Seems like there used to be a ton of these around, but you never see them anymore. A college girlfriend had one, a well-used ’86 or ’87 4-cyl sedan with something over 200k miles on it. (This was in 2002.) Impressive longevity–but wow that car was terrible to drive. It shook, rattled, groaned, clattered, strained to get up to speed and stay there, and was just generally unpleasant. But given the mileage, the fact that it was still running at all was something of a miracle.
Probably made all the same noises at 27k miles…
You know what they say about GMs…
The funny thing about the n-body…all the gm 80s fwd platforms got more reliable with age …a,w,j,etc but not the n body. They were crappy unreliable from 1985-2005. My achieva was a pos and so was my mom’s alero.
The last gen grand am and alero were fun cars to drive though. If gm used quality parts instead of cheap as shit plastic parts it could have been a real contender.
Hey now, I still have a 4th gen..,
When that Gen Grand Am came out, I sat in one at the LA Auto Show. The seats were perhaps the best I have ever experienced, or at least the ones I butt tested there.
To this day I remember how comfortable they were.
Certainly better than the 86 Calais, 99 Cavalier, 95 SL1 and current 05 ION that have entered my life at various points.
A low bar, I know….
Plus the 4th Gen Grand Am styling was better than what came after !!
Well, I have custom leather seats in mine, so…
My dad has one. It was crap with a noisy quad 4 and covered in plastic. It was cramped and fell apart. After driving Pontiac since 1966 he switched to. Toyota.
I saw one of this vintage Grand Am in the metal about a month ago and was genuinely shocked! Most of these returned to the Earth by the end of the 1990s in Michigan. Don’t know what it was about this iteration of the Grand Am in particular, but they all seemed to be driven by people in high school that beat them like a sex slave.
I don’t know what it was about the look, but I always thought Pontiac/GM pulled this one off pretty well. They managed to make it look just sporty enough to balance the formal lines. I didn’t spend a lot of time in these-like I said, most had returned to the earth by the end of the ’90s-but my memory is that late 1980s Pontiac interiors were generally coherent in their design. I don’t remember these being nearly as well put together as my ’89 Bonneville was, but the design at least was attractive enough.
Surprising find, anyway!
My beloved granny…….still own it….no problems….fine car.
I remember that Gm praised the Quad 4, it was going to built as a 6 and 8cyl.
Short lived It was a flop overall, noisy as hell with so so gas mileage.
It was indeed noisy and the mileage was subpar for the engine size, but at least it made quite a good amount of power for an 80’s 4-cylinder engine–150 to 160 HP. That’s the same power figure as the non-HO version of the 5.0 V8, for example. (Torque was far less. But still.) Plus the LD9 Twin Cam evolved from the Quad 4, with balance shafts added to make it less noisy/thrashy. So if you count the Twin Cam for longevity, it had an over 15 year run–I wouldn’t call that short lived.
I liked my 88, it was a Quad4/5speed so it was light years better than the standard Iron Duke/auto cars. Especially with the better suspension (I know Chevy called it F41, but I can’t remember what mine was…) Anyway I got 180K on mine, it was parked outside it’s entire life, and never failed to start. It did rust to pieces, though… but was dead reliable.