Grieving pet owners with a religious bent can take comfort in the story of the Rainbow Bridge, a place where pets wait patiently in the afterlife until heart disease, undiagnosed colon cancer, or botched club-race blocking maneuvers bring their owners to be with them once again. With the arrival of recent news regarding Pontiac’s unceremonious retreat from rear-wheel-drive, one is tempted to wonder if there’s a “Renaissance Center Bridge” somewhere out there as well. This magical place would be where the many orphaned single-generation General Motors products frolic and play until they become collectible enough for Barrett-Jackson or rusty enough for the crusher. Or worse, LeMons. If you close your eyes with me, perhaps you can imagine it for yourself. Oh! Look! There’s the Buick Reatta, chasing a Cadillac Allante around a corner! Why not cast your eye over the sleek curves of the Oldsmobile Antares? What? You don’t remember the Antares? Sure you do. When GM decided not to develop a second-generation Aurora, they renamed the upcoming Antares as an Aurora, thus replacing one orphan model with another. Beyond the herd of plastic Dustbuster- nosed minivans, there’s a flock of Saturn Ions. Chevettes, Citations, and Cimarrons, oh my! And out there at the edge of our vision, just disappearing in the distance, is the final, nearly perfect, 1988 Fiero GT!

Emerson told us that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” but one has to wonder if perhaps part of GM’s thirty-plus years of staggering from crisis to crisis is not partially a result of the company’s inability to steer by a consistently plotted course. This was not always the case; General Motors appeared to be virtually failure-proof from the post-Depression era all the way to the Tet offensive, dominating the American market with an onslaught of perfectly positioned product for every possible niche. More importantly, GM was a leader, if not always in automotive substance, then certainly in sheer style. The import-car avalanche of the mid-Seventies should have firmed the General’s resolve to develop the best American cars possible, but instead it simply broke the company’s will. From the arrival of Honda’s Accord right up to the present day, GM has been in reactive mode, dodging this way and that in a fruitless attempt to match - not beat - competition. The 1980 X-car was a panicky response to that original Accord, rushed into showrooms so quickly that nobody bothered to check to see if the brakes worked. Since that day, the world’s largest automaker has chosen to lead through imitation, if such as thing is possible, and the results have ranged from the amusing (Pontiac’s decision to imitate Audi’s nomenclature with the T1000, J2000, and A6000) to the sadly ironic (the Chevrolet Celebrity “Eurosport” model, which consisted of a GTI-style red trim package and a black grille) to the scarcely believable (hiring the PT Cruiser’s designer to come to Chevrolet and, er, “style” the HHR).

Counted among the casualties of GM’s waffling ways have been plenty of “orphan cars”, vehicles introduced usually before they were ready and painstakingly developed into competence, only to be dumped right as they were finding a following. The poster child for this behavior is the Pontiac Fiero, the fire-breathing (as in, it frequently caught on fire) pseudo-commuter car which, it its final production year, was revised into a fire-breathing (as in, actually fast and fun) sportster thanks to new body panels, an all-new suspension design, and a revised powertrain. Why’d GM cancel it as soon as they got the car “right”? It’s simple: the original Fiero was conceived as a reaction to the small Japanese commuters of the early Eighties, and those cars were virtually all gone by 1988. GM was too busy reacting to another trend — in this case, Chrysler’s 1984 innovation of the modern minivan — to continue with the Fiero. So by the time sporty two-seaters were in vogue again — around 1997, with the introduction of the BMW Z3 and Benz SLK — GM had no product with which to compete.

The car which eventually arrived as a reaction to those late-Nineties sportsters, the Solstice, is now supposedly on the chopping block, right next to the big Pontiac G8, a car which was rush-developed in reaction to the marketplace success of Chrysler’s mid-sized RWD sedans. They’re both good, even great, cars, and given time they will both find a devoted market following. Instead, Pontiac’s chosen to panic over fuel prices and imitate the cars which are selling well at this precise moment. It’s reactive, and it’s always going to result in being stuck well “behind the curve”. This is never a good place to be; if you don’t believe me, compare first-year HHR sales with what the PT Cruiser managed to accomplish eight years ago.

GM still has the styling talent, the engineering know-how, and the residual brand equity necessary to be a leader in the industry again, but it won’t happen until they are willing to consistently lead. Cadillac’s been a shining example of what can happen when GM decides to strike out in a direction and stick with it for more than a year or two. Everybody recognizes a Cadillac on the road nowadays, both because the brand has a strong, consistent identity and because the cars are selling well as a result of that identity. Pontiac needs a dose of the same medicine. Speaking personally, I’d advocate retaining the G8 and the Solstice in the lineup, and perhaps fashioning the brand in the image of those cars. It is the “Excitement Division”, after all. But if the bigwigs want to make Pontiac the FWD division instead, they should stick with that, regardless of what happens in the short term between now and then. As any high-school guidance counselor will tell you, having no plan really means having a plan for failure, and it won’t take too many more failures for the Pontiac brand itself to join the Fiero out there on that automotive Rainbow Bridge.