Pontiac's demise gets a muted response

The decision by General Motors Corp. to eliminate the Pontiac brand disappointed many people, but it didn't surprise anyone.

For fans, dealers and experts, the division has been fading for decades.

"It's been a long time coming. For the last 20 years, Pontiac has just had the same car with lots of different badges on it," said Karl Brauer, editor-in-chief of car buying guide Edmunds.com in Santa Monica. "They're going out not with a bang but a whimper, and it's not even that big a deal for a lot of people."

As part of GM's restructuring plan, Pontiac will be phased out by the end of 2010.

Dealers sold nearly 517,000 Pontiacs in 2002, taking an average of 64 days to sell the cars after they arrived on the lots. But sales have dropped steadily since then, down to just 267,000 vehicles last year.

This year the cars have remained parked in dealerships an average of 139 days before being bought, according to Edmunds.com.

Bill Caudill, 44, has owned more than 40 Pontiacs over the years. A salesman at an auto parts company in Evansville, Ind., he's a "hard-core Pontiac guy" who is a member of several fan clubs and whose garage "looks like a shrine" to the brand, he said.

But when looking for new cars a few years ago, he and his wife bought a Mini Cooper and a Chevrolet truck. The newer Pontiac models were a letdown, he said, "uninspired, bland and dated" compared with vehicles from the brand's glory days.

"The Pontiac of the past had a distinct identity of being 'fast with class,' and you could tell it was a Pontiac from half a mile away," Caudill said. "It broke my heart this time to have to go buy a new car somewhere else, but there was nothing else that was attractive."

The brand has steadily lost its appeal to younger consumers, Brauer said, despite Pontiac's colorful history since introducing its first car in 1926.

The storied high-performance Pontiac GTOs, Grand Prixs and Firebirds were at the forefront of the muscle-car era in the 1960s and 1970s. But the brand stumbled in recent years: The Aztek crossover SUV was criticized for its looks, and the 2004 relaunch of the GTO met with lukewarm reviews.

At the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. factory in Fremont, Calif., which produces the Pontiac Vibe and the Toyota Matrix, some workers described a heavy feeling over the plant's undecided fate.

"This is the scariest situation I've seen in 20 years," said David Busbee, 45, who works in quality control.