You wouldn't be alone thinking this was a Chevrolet Vega but it's the Pontiac version of the Vega known as the "Astre". This one hails from model-year 1976. Pontiac sold these down here from 1975-1977, GM of Canada from 1973-1977.
There's little to distinguish an Astre from a Vega. Front and rear facias are different, the interior is debatably "better". Underneath this it's all Vega.
It's all Vega right down to its alloy, 2.3-liter, overhead cam, 4-cylinder engine. Although by '76 Chevrolet had worked out most of the kinks of the horrible little paint shaker, Pontiac tossed it for 1977 for their own cast-iron, 2.5-liter, overhead valve 4-cylinder that was literally half of Pontiac's also new for 1977, 301-cubic inch V-8. Chevrolet started using the Pontiac built four in 1978.
Fun facts, the 2.5-liter Pontiac four displaced 151-cubic inches - the Pontiac 301 displaced 301.6 cubic-inches making it, technically, a "302". Some GM suit (justifying their haughty paycheck perhaps) determined that folks would confuse the Pontiac 302 with the Ford 302, thus, the Pontiac 301 was "born".
If you're familiar with Pontiac engine history, seemed Pontiac liked to slice their V-8's in half and make four-bangers out of them. They did the same thing back in the early '60's when their "Trophy" four-cylinder engine was half of their 389-cubic inch V-8.
Although GM had been badge-engineering for decades prior, the practice began to really rear its ugly cloned head in the '70's. "Badge engineering" an oxymoronic term for a manufacturer taking a model and doing little more than changing its name and selling it as something else. Pontiac stickered these for some $500 more than a Vega.
Shameful, but Ford and Chrysler "badge-engineered" as well. At its best, and that's possible, buyers would be hard-pressed to see the similarities in badge-engineered models. There's no hiding what this Pontiac really is.
The Pontiac Astre and Chevrolet Vega were GM's second foray into sub-compact cars. Their first was the Chevrolet Corvair in 1960 followed by the "senior" subcompact (they were a scooch larger) Pontiac Tempest, Oldsmobile F-85 and Buick Special in 1961. The Pontiac, Buick and Olds went to the dumpster (the nameplates lived on) after 1963 but a rebooted (for 1965) and very handsome Corvair soldiered on through 1969.
For 1971, GM tried a subcompact again with the Vega. Without question a handsome design, it's gone down in history as one of the worst automobiles of all time. From failed engines to bodies that rusted out and did so quickly, the list of Vega and later Astre maladies went on and on.
At the time, GM could ill-afford, although they hardly knew it at the time, to have such a calamity on their hands what with superbly built, affordably priced sub-compact Asian imports washing ashore en masse in the early '70's.
Pontiac replaced these with the first generation "Sunbird" in 1978 that was their badge-engineered version of the Chevrolet Monza, itself a stretched version of the Vega. Curiously, Chevrolet and Pontiac continued to sell the two-door wagon of the Astre and Vega in 1978 and 1979 that they called, respectively, the "Monza Wagon" and "Sunbird Sport Safari".
Our Facebook Marketplace find here is for sale in Jackson, New Jersey, a town famous for being the home of the amusement park, Six Flags Great Adventure. It's for sale as part of an estate purge and they're asking $2,500. Yes, twenty-five-hundred-dollars. It's not running and the driver's side floor, at least, has rotted through. Talk about a, ahem, "Great Adventure".
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