The other day my on again, off again search for a replacement for my beloved but aged 2002 Dale Earnhardt Chevrolet Monte Carlo had me looking at a Pontiac Solstice. A dealership down near Akron, Ohio has a gaggle of them including the Solstice's corporate kissin' cousin, a Saturn Sky. I'm looking for a fuel efficient roller skate of sorts for my two-hundred mile per day commute and what could be funner than a two-passenger sports car? Especially one that's reasonably priced, is in really good shape, has low mileage and is a re-badged Opel?
Unfortunately for the Pontiac Solstice, the bar I've set for sporty cars boils down to a "fun-factor" comprised of my wheel time with Mini Coopers and my freshly rebuilt, 1977 Chevrolet Corvette. Don't laugh; our '77 Corvette now handles like it probably did straight from the factory and despite its myriad foibles and rugged edginess is a blast and a half to drive. Darty, responsive and quick, it's such a departure from anything else that I have that I look forward to long jaunts in it. Fun car. And of course the Mini Cooper's are, in my opinion, the most fun you can have driving a front wheel drive car.
At the end of the day, somewhat surprisingly, about the only thing really going for the Solstice was that it was really good looking. General Motor's mid to late 2000's styling department hit one over the fence with these things. Problem was in their efforts to build an affordable, four-cylinder Corvette, they forgot to dial in some fun. Perhaps the upgraded GXP version with it's turbo-charged engine and heavier duty suspension offers more of what I'd be looking for but as is, the Solstice was remarkably unremarkable.
Handling was vague, numb even. Sure, the car did what I asked but it was way more Fox-body Ford Mustang than Mini Cooper agile; '77 Corvette agile now that I think about it. Or at least the feeling of agility. In a car I find fun, it really doesn't matter to me if the car can actually do what it feels like it might be doing; if I'm having a good time I like it.
The biggish four-cylinder chugged amply enough but it was fairly industrial. Felt and sounded like a powerful farm implement rather than a purpose built, sporting machine. Transmission shifter felt much better than I thought it would seeing it's a parts bin unit borrowed from the Chevrolet Colorado pickup truck. Kid you not. Road test gas mileage estimates are an unimpressive twenty-five miles per gallon. No wonder there's a cottage industry that swaps Corvette V-8 engines into these things; those cars might get better mileage and have more than twice the horsepower.
What really killed the deal for me was that you sit very low in these cars. You sit low in most sports cars but with this thing I felt like I was sitting in a bathtub and I felt as though I had to look up to see over the dash. You sit even lower in one of these if it doesn't have a power seat adjuster. Despite that, no matter how low I sat in this thing, with the top down I had the feeling the top of the windshield was going to put a guillotine blade through the middle of my forehead; it's an odd optical illusion of sorts that I also experience somewhat with my '77 Corvette with the tops out but whereas I feel our Corvette was built to fit a five-foot-nine inch person comfortably, no matter how I tried I could not get myself comfortable in a Solstice.
Who knows where this search will lead us. The Monte Carlo has nearly 230,000 miles on it and is still running strong and gets a consistent twenty-six miles per gallon. It needs rear tires, rear brakes, could use struts all around, the AC condenser is leaking and the catalytic converter needs to be replaced and while that sounds like a lot and more normal people would get rid of a car this old, most people don't have the commute that I do that will burn up anything else I get. Who knows. Maybe the delta variant will post-pone my return to commuting everyday until after the first of the year. That would push off the "new-car" search even longer.
All I know is that my next car won't be a Pontiac Solstice. The dictionary defines a solstice as either of the two points of the ecliptic at which its distance from the celestial equator is greatest and which is reached by the sun each year about June 21 and December 21. In automotive terms I surmise it to mean, "disappointing".
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