Like father like son I had bought into the "bigger is better" idiom that The Big Three corn fed Americans for thirty or forty years but it was more than just the sheer size of the cars that enamored me. It was their styling. Especially the fabulous GM makes and models from about 1960 up until the great downsizing epoch began in 1977. I was concerned about downsizing because my gut instincts told me that the grand designs I loved might lose their luster on smaller canvases. How right I was. While there wasn't a single 1977 GM full size car that I thought was a better design than what it replaced, things got even worse with the upsized compacts they called their midsize line a year later. Even my beloved Pontiac Grand Prix wasn't spared the ignominy of designers who'd lost their way.
I wasn't alone in my sentiment either. Dealers coined the phrase "buyer resistance" to explain why the new smaller cars that, on top of everything else were more expensive than what they replaced, weren't selling. Contemporary reviews of the new cars were glowing if not chock full of hyperbole about how the cars performed, how much easier they were to maneuver, how much roomier the rear passenger area was (front passenger seating was actually slightly less) and how much farther they could go on a gallon of gas. Any mention of the styling was atypically cursory.
To be fair, GM had to downsize with ever stricter government mandated fuel economy and emissions standards stair stepping up. With today's engine control systems at the time in their infancy, they had no choice but to reduce curb weight and use smaller, less powerful engines. The net result was smaller, lighter automobiles that were better on gas but where also, and seemingly by happenstance, much better performing transportation conveyances.
Introduced in 1962, the first Grand Prix was a "full-size" Pontiac two-door sedan that was somewhat downsized in 1969 with glorious results. Relaunched as a mid-size "personal luxury car" its long hood and short deck design proved to be quite popular with many giving it credit for defining the market segment that came to dominate sales during most of the 1970's. Downsizing can be good; could GM and Pontiac catch lightning in a bottle again come 1978?
Nope. The great downsizing epoch came along and the smaller automobiles all lacked the styling moxie that made previous GM designs so wonderful; including the 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix. The '69 Grand Prix' may have been short on delivering the kind of performance it emulated save for anything in a straight line but certainly these stubby little foretold little of what they could possibly do. Why couldn't GM combine the best of both worlds? In the car business it's not so much what a car can do as much as what it appear it might be able to do or what positive reinforcement it can parlay for whomever is driving it. What does this thing say about it's driver? That they appreciate a less than 7/8 scale of what the car used to be and that it gets better gas mileage? Oh, let me tell you about how good the handling is. Please.
The lack of elan carried over to the interior as well. Amazing that there's just five model years between the fighter jet cockpit of, for instance, a 1973 Grand Prix and this 1978 model. All the new for '78 GM intermediates had the same basic interior layout; interchangeable interior bits and baubles a first for GM.
Sales peaked for all the GM intermediates in 1979 but the brutal 1980 recession took the bite out of whimsical, personal luxury cars. Just as well seeing they weren't anything like what they had been. Revisions to sheet metal fore and aft come 1981 while a welcome change did little to usage the ambivalence buyers now had toward the cars that just five years prior was a staple of sales. Would better looking, downsized personal luxury cars made a difference? Honestly, we'll never know. The confluence of circumstances conspiring to relegate personal luxury cars first to an even narrower targeted niche market then ultimately to the scrap heap. One thing for certain the 1978 GM intermediates, led by our Grand Prix here, certainly didn't help.
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