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Bon voyage for Bonneville? Pontiac not saying beyond '05
Jim Mateja
Published November 19, 2004


What was to have been the last piece of the puzzle has become the puzzle.

Pontiac mapped plans to revamp its product portfolio by 2006. But where the full-size Bonneville sedan fits is a problem.

"We'll build Bonneville through the '05 model year, but beyond that we aren't sure what we'll do," Pontiac-GMC general manager Jim Bunnell said in an interview.

The swing to sport-utility vehicles and crossovers has reduced the ranks of domestic full-size sedan offerings to Bonneville, Buick LeSabre, Ford Crown Victoria and Mercury Grand Marquis.

But more telling is that Bonneville sales have steadily slipped, to 27,000 in the first 10 months of 2004 from a high of 96,000 in the 1995 model year.

"We keep asking what direction to take beyond '05 and if we should have a full-size sedan or a crossover like the Nissan Murano instead," Bunnell said.

"There might not be room for a full-size car. There's a lot of other things we could do with the money. Crossovers may be what we need to watch and where we need to react, perhaps a Pontiac or a GMC crossover or both," he said.

One possibility is to produce the next-generation Grand Prix sedan and a successor to Bonneville off the same platform and make the Bonneville successor a crossover.

That's what Cadillac does in producing its compact CTS and midsize STS sedans and SRX sport-utility off the same rear-wheel-drive platform.

If Pontiac goes that route, it's also possible the next-generation Prix and Bonneville successor would switch from front-wheel-drive to rear-/all-wheel-drive.

Bunnell said the latter is under strong consideration for the Prix--and AWD would set the stage for a crossover successor for Bonneville.

Here's one vote for the option that gives the Snow Belt another AWD car and crossover.

General Motors plans more rear-drive vehicles. It wants, for example, to build the next-generation Pontiac GTO in North America.

By doing so, Pontiac would cut out the time it takes between producing the GTO at GM's Holden subsidiary in Australia and shipping it to the U.S. GTO is a derivative of the Holden Monaro.

Holden stopped building '04 GTOs and converted to '05s at the end of September, but the '05s won't arrive here until late December or early January.

Shipping is the reason '06 GTO production will begin in May, so the '06s will arrive in the traditional fall time frame.

GTO is a low-volume 12,000-unit model, so having other rear-drive cars built alongside it here would ensure steady production at the plant.

Stay tuned.

Another plan is to use more alphanumeric designations rather than names. For example, the replacement for the Grand Am is the G6.

"We're looking closely at G5 or G8 designations. Lexus [ES330] and Infiniti [Q45] have done well with it," Bunnell said, hinting that the next-generation Prix could be the G8.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/class...,4423231.column

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