Sometimes, slapping a famed name on a not so great car isn’t enough to pull buyers in. But, General Motors tried the approach with the 1988 Pontiac LeMans.
Unlike the LeMans that came before it, the new LeMans was not a large four- or two-door car; it was a small two-door hatchback with a 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine good for 96 horsepower in its most sporting GSE trim. The car even received Recaro-style seats.
The ad proclaimed affordable thrills with standard equipment aplenty, but the car was immediately tarnished with reports of poor quality. The LeMans was actually a rebadged Daewoo LeMans, itself based on the Opel Kadett at the time. Sales died, and the LeMans died with the fact. The car went away after only a handful of model years in 1993.
It’s actually not a terrible looking car, but it hardly fit Pontiac’s “We Build Excitement” tagline. However, it wouldn’t be the last time a foreign GM brand would attempt to save Pontiac. We all know how it ended with the Holden-sourced G8, though.
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And some want to know why Pontiac died here is one of many reasons.
The decline of Pontiac began when the 400 engine was killed and the decline continued to where Pontiac claimed to be a performance division but at the time did not offer one single RWD V8 car?
This was why Lutz tried to get the GTO here with no budget and time once he arrived.
Too bad he was not here in time to kill the G3 before it happened.
I had one, first car out of high school and had it while in military. Ran “The Snake” Mulholland drive well after swapping Astra GTE Koni’s, Springs, and 13×7 enkei’s. Car was fun for low money, but its life ended on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn NY when it go t-boned by a drunk driver. With insurance money I bought a 1966 Impala SS 396 Convertible. Nothing like cruising lower Manhattan in a drop top with big block rumble
“You hear the thunder! The call of the road!”
*Pontiac LeMans rolls over the top of a hill*
If the LeMans had 96hp to get over that hill, Pontiac’s marketing department had a bigger hill to climb with even less HP.
It’s an Opel Kadett re badged also as a Daewoo Racer, a cool car to drive at an affordable price.
Not a great car…at all and undeserving of being called a Pontiac but the marketing guys absolutely killed it back then with the advertising. Pontiac’s ‘We Build Excitement’ tagline was both appropriate and memorable and their catchy theme music created enthusiasm for the brand. In those years, Pontiac had risen from an also-ran to the third best-selling car brand in America while selling the same A-bodies, N-Bodies, H-bodies, etc. as Buick and Oldsmobile. They did that partially by adding their own magic to standard issue GM platforms but also by having a really good marketing department to hype their work. This ad is an example of a very ordinary, even underwhelming car, being promoted in such a way to actually seem desirable.
I miss Pontiac. GM just doesn’t have the same youthful spark without them. They were like the jovial middle brother of the family that kept everyone else enlivened.
Its not “based on” a 1987 Opel Kadett/Vauxhall Astra it __IS__ a 1987 Kadett/Astra made under licence in Korea by Daewoo. And it returned as the Daewoo 1.5i about 10 years later…
Ten Yeats later in 1997 the racer/LeMans was replaced by the Daewoo Nexia/Cielo