I’ve spent the last several years of my life feeling sorry for General Motors. The much-maligned conglomerate of American auto manufacturers has always turned out some of my favorite cars on the road—particularly anything under the Pontiac arrowhead badge—and I always felt they were unfairly criticized. Every car I’ve owned has been a Pontiac, and I’ve always felt that Pontiac was the best-equipped brand at GM to understand the idea of driving passion. After all, Pontiac builds excitement—isn’t that what they used to say?

Sadly, PMD no longer flies under that slogan, and it’s clear that most of their products no longer do, either. With each successive vehicle introduction or facelift, the design team at Pontiac destroys another piece of their lineup which I once loved. The cars are becoming homogenous, unexciting, and uninspired—exactly the things which kept me from so much as looking at any foreign manufacturer in the past. Form is clearly following function now, and while the engineering behind GM’s fleet is clearly its best ever, I can’t justify buying a well-built, well-performing car if it looks like crap.

This is precisely why I never wanted, for example, a Honda or a Toyota. They’d get you to the moon and back, but who wants to ride in something so boring? Being a young, red-blooded American guy who was passionate about driving, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the style I loved for that simplistic peace-of-mind.

Times have changed, as they always do. It was exactly eight years ago this past Monday when I first got my driver’s license, and not only has my license photo changed since that rainy February afternoon, but so has the automotive industry. In 1998, when I got my Trans Am, it seemed that Pontiac was flying at a high point in their history. But the disassembly of that history began when the Firebird was axed in 2002. Then the Grand Prix, once a sporty, mid-sized car that spoke of solid construction and affordable power, was bloated into something overweight and overdone, ostensibly to cover the ground of the full-size Bonneville whose days were reportedly numbered.

Arguably the worst tragedy for Pontiac is the utter self-destruction of the Grand Am. Since I last posted about the G6, Pontiac’s replacement for their best-selling model, I have seen and learned more of it. Frankly I am let down, and based on comments I’ve read in various media outlets, so is much of the general public. The design is nothing short of a total departure from the concept—in a bad way—and the tail end of the car is so bloated and disgusting that it reminds me of a Dodge Neon with a swollen ass. Meanwhile, the 2005 Vibe is getting a facelift that removes its edgy, aggressive styling and reduces it to a bland bore that smacks of mini-Montana, no doubt making it more appealing to the college chicks and soccer moms. As if the fact that there’s still no V6 option wasn’t enough, that new front clip does it—there go our chances of buying another Vibe!

Soon, the Sunfire will be replaced by the Pursuit, a Scion-looking, “hip” little goofmobile that’s worlds uglier than the Chevy Cobalt, whose chassis it shares. Worse yet, the Chevy Aveo—the rebadged Korean import I unloaded on a couple updates ago—is getting a Pontiac sister model called the Wave. And then of course there’s the boring GTO, whose only strong point stylistically is that it reminds me of the better-looking Grand Prix of the nineties!

Pontiac…what the hell are you doing?

There are only two PMD models left that excite me. One is the Solstice roadster—set for a 2006 introduction—but the car is about as practical and powerful as a Miata, being a two-seater with a four-cylinder under the hood. Great for some folks…not for me. The other is the Bonneville GXP—a really muscular, aggressive alter-ego of the usual Bonnie, and the only other car in Pontiac’s stable whose lines get the blood flowing. My dad might be lucky enough to get one of these as his company car next year. I doubt I’ll ever have that kind of money—it’s sure to be Pontiac’s most expensive model.

So where does that leave me? Shopping elsewhere, is where. The lease on my wife’s Vibe expires in 2005, and currently we’re favoring the Mazda6 as its replacement. Later this year, Mazda is introducing a 5-door version of this excellent sedan they’ve built, which would give us similar cargo room and versatility to the Vibe which we currently enjoy. The car is powered by a 6-cylinder engine and is nicely styled, as is all of Mazda’s current lineup. For one of the lousiest Japanese manufacturers of the nineties, Mazda has really gotten it together.

It looks like I’ll be sticking with my Trans Am until late 2008, so it’s absurdly early for me to even be thinking about vehicle choices for myself, given that I’ll be looking at the 2009 model year. (I hope that T/A stays in one piece that long.) Still, unless something changes drastically over at GM, I won’t be interested in anything they’re selling. It’s more likely to come down to a choice between a Ford Mustang GT (hopefully a Mach 1 or Boss special edition, if they’re still offering something like that) and a Mazda RX-8. The Mustang is still far more appealing to me with its classic American design and muscle car roots (and the A Plan, heh heh), but the RX-8 is a nice model, too. I still don’t favor the Japanese design all that much when it comes to sports cars, but I’m much more willing to consider them now.

I would go so far as to call it an end of an era at Pontiac Motor Division. The cars I grew up with and loved all throughout my childhood, adolescence and even young adult years have become watered-down. The design team at PMD, supposedly tasked with bottling excitement in the soul of an automobile, seem to have lost their way. The fact that I had to look back to the 1989 model year to find a Pontiac I really wanted to buy speaks to that. There’s plenty of excitement brewing under many a hood at General Motors, but even if you put that Northstar V8 with Displacement-On-Demand in a stupid-looking car, I’m not going to buy said stupid-looking car. Sorry.

In this way, my philosophy has never changed. It’s surreal, somehow, to see GM on the other side of that fence now. Maybe, one day, they will find their way back.