GM has made many a baffling brand choices and is the General of badge-engineering, but I believe in Canada they have made some of the most baffling of all. Near the end of the eighties, the US got the Geo brand an attempt to battle the imports. They easy and logical thing to do if GM had really felt the need for another brand would be to bring Geo to Canada as well, but instead we got: Passport. And if that wasn’t confusing enough, yet another brand was created, with the most asinine name ever: Asüna. By the time this article is finished, I guarantee you that you will be confused. Actually, it might not take that long.
Passport was a brand as well as a dealer network, and also it sold Saab and Isuzu vehicles. The one Passport branded vehicle was a re-badged Daewoo developed from the Opel Kadett E. It was named Optima and was also more commonly available as a Pontiac LeMans.
I haven’t seen a Passport branded car in a couple of decades so we’ll have to make do with these promotion photos which come from Hugo90’s photostream. There are almost literally no other photos around for these so he has the market cornered. This might just be the one brand that has no enthusiasts or fans. The Passport make died in 1991 with the introduction of Saturn 1992. Belatedly Geo as well came to the Canadian market in the same year but not with the Prizm oddly. Go figure.
So now we have Saab and Isuzu lumped into a Saturn-Saab-Isuzu division and Geos being sold at Chevrolet-Oldsmobile-Cadillac dealers where they’d previously been badged as Chevrolets. In 1993 Pontiac-Buick-GMC dealers now asked to have an import fighter brand of their own so GM Canada creates yet another brand called Asüna. Asüna gets its own version of the Pontiac LeMans. Technically two versions as each was considered a separate model instead of a trim line. The SE is the base car and the GT is the more highly optioned “sporty looking” car.
I could only find a GT in the junkyard so this is the best photo I could get of the ever-elusive Asüna GT.
In addition there is a re-badged Isuzu Impulse called the Sunfire which must have been interesting in Pontiac dealers with the unrelated Pontiac Sunfire in the same showroom. The Sunfire was never offered with the turbo engine or all wheel drive. There were two grill variants on the Sunfire: one with the Asüna name and the other with a stylized A logo.
Rounding out the lineup is a version of the Suzuki Sidekick called the Sunrunner. Canadian Pontiac-Buick-GMC dealers had previously sold a GMC Tracker but this was dropped when the Sunrunner was introduced. The Sunrunner was only sold in the higher trim level.
There are very few Asüna vehicles left these days with the Sunrunner making up the bulk of the survivors. It was probably easier for most owners to scrap them than to keep having to explain what the two dots over the u are. I bet they also had a great time explaining that Asüna is indeed a brand to the vehicle registry folks as well. I know the rare for sale ads I see for the Sunrunner usually have “Like a Chevrolet Tracker” before the actual name in the title.
Asüna lasted only two years and for 1995 the Sunrunner became the Pontiac Sunrunner until 1998 when it was dropped. The Pontiac was available in both base and GT trim thus giving up what was unique about the Asüna.
The SE/GT and Sunfire were dropped. For those keeping count the poor Suzuki Sidekick had been sold in the following variations in Canada -GMC Tracker, Chevrolet Tracker, Geo Tracker, Asüna Sunrunner, Pontiac Sunrunner and of course the Suzuki Sidekick. Six variants of the same vehicle with hardly a difference beyond the badges – madness! Internationally it wore the following badges and names:
Suzuki Escudo (Japan)
Suzuki Sidekick (North America)
Suzuki Vitara (Australia)
Chevrolet Tracker (North America)
Geo Tracker (North America)
GMC Tracker (Canada)
Asüna Sunrunner (Canada)
Pontiac Sunrunner (Canada)
Santana 300/350 (Spain)
Chevrolet Vitara (Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela)
Suzuki Nomade (Chile)
Wow, that is eleven variants on the same vehicle. So can anyone think of a more badge engineered vehicle?
The Pontiac Sunfire came out in 1995, well after the Isuzu version was dropped, so there was no brand overlap. Not even GM is that dumb.
David is right – This was no way to run a car company.
By introducing so many names into the market in such a short time, GM threw away any brand equity that any one marque could muster.Lots of Canadians watch American TV- by selling under a different brand altogether, that TV ad budget is wasted by calling the same cars something else north of the border. A more asinine marketing strategy is hard to imagine.
Am I correct that the Asuna (I’ll just have to owe you the umlauts) cannot be imported to the U.S. because of speedometer and emissions laws?
“Am I correct that the Asuna (I’ll just have to owe you the umlauts) cannot be imported to the U.S. because of speedometer and emissions laws?”
I think it can’t be imported here because of the umlauts. 😛
How do you even pronounce that? I’d be afraid of people seeing my car, giving up on pronouncing the name and just calling it an Anus.
I know Canada is different, but is it really so different that GM had to go with totally different (and utterly unfocused) branding, given that such a large proportion of Canada’s population lives within a couple hours of the border anyway?
It is pronounced ah-soon-ah – or least that is how I’ve always heard it. I don’t remember a TV or radio spot for these ever.
Here’s one for the Sunfire.
I never understood why GM had different branding in Canada anyway. Makes no sense to me. Anyone care to explain?
I lived in Niagara Falls, Canada 1969-1970, and remember there was great concern about losing their Canadian identity which I think contributed to some of the unique branding. It wasn’t just limited to GM, or even to cars…a number of American consumer brands were given different names IIRC. Sears, Roebuck & Co. was Simpson-Sears north of the border. “Bayer” was “Aspirin” (as a brand name). Coke and Pepsi did run the same ad campaigns, however.
Also there was some treaty between the two countries signed in 1965 that led to greater standardization between US and Canadian automakers…which is to say it was even worse before.
This doesn’t necessarily explain the “Asuna” branding…then again the more I learn about the internal workings of GM in the 80’s and 90’s…from Roger Smith to Smale and Zarella, it’s a wonder any of the company survived at all.
Canadian re-branding of American cars is nothing new at all. It has gone on since the 1930s at least. I’m a collector of late 50s MoPars, and love seeing the occasional Dodge Kingsways or Mayfairs, which essentially are Dodge bodies with Plymouth grilles and back ends. I, too, have never understood why car companies did this, but it gives collectors some rare and unusual vehicles to claim . . .
Here’s one I spotted in Tacoma a while back. I believe that the 57/58 Plymouth front bumper has been retrofitted.
Rear view of the same car. You can’t really read the letters on the trunk, but you can see that there are five. That car looks completely Plymouth to me except for the front clip – this is usual for Dodge Regents afaik.
Dodge Kingsway Plymouth savoy same car in NZ
I plan to do a more in depth piece but basically before the mid 60s car assembled outside of Canada were taxed heavily. So mainstream brands assembled most everyday cars here. Canadians generally buy cheaper cars too so it made sense to use the cheaper and smaller Plymouth shell and Dodge trim to make the Canadian Dodge. There were a small number of Dodge shelled Dodges sold as well but most of them were the Dodge/Plymouth hybrid – known unofficially as a Plodge.
Living in the middle U.S. all my life, I had never heard of all of these unique brand names. Clueless, clueless, clueless. I mean, Asuna? The name just begs for a bad pun. Asuna they thought of one brand strategy, they came up with another. Sorry.
+1
I might have had a vague awareness of Passport, but Asuna?
Has ever so much been done to confuse such a small market? (Nothing against Canda, I just know the population is quite a bit lower than the U.S.A.) What I’d love to see is the accounting tables that show how much was spent on new brand names, signage, badging, and advertising vs actual profit.
It is madness. They could have easily made them Pontiacs from the start as per tradition in Canada. I’d be really interested if the whole nonsense made them any profit at all.
I never knew about this nutty badge soup mess in Canada. I’m sure if we asked a GM executive of the times why they would commit such goofy acts of marketing, they’d show us some presentation with bar graphs and regional studies and consumer trends and after an hour went by we’d either be convinced or asleep.
I also just recently found out about Dodge/Fargo/DeSoto trucks. Why did that go on for so long?
I’m sure a Canadian will give you a better answer but likely the sum of that answer will be: The same reason as GMC vs Chevy.
As I Canadian , I will try.
The history of renaming Canadian cars for specific Canadian markets goes way back , but I will start with the late 50s… In Canada , with the lower population previously mentioned , not every town had both a Ford and a Mercury Dealer , nor did every town have both a Chevrolet , Oldsmobile, Cadillac or a Pontiac, Buick , GMC dealer as these were grouped in Canada… when GM began importing Vauxhall and selling them through Pontiac,Buick, GMC dealers , the Chevrolet,Old, Caddy dealers complained that they too wanted the small economical cars and GM invented the rebadged Envoy and Epic models to sell at Chevrolet Olds Caddy. It remained this way throughout the 60’s until 1971 when Chevrolet got the Vega and GM sort of did the opposite and sold the Firenza by General Motors at the Pontiac Buick GMC for 2 years… fast forward to the 80s when Chevrolet got the first Sprint and Pontiac got a rebranded Pontiac Firefly at the same time … in 1985 , Chevrolet got the Spectrum and Pontiac got the Sunburst at the same time… by the late 80s , GM had begun to sell SAAB and Isuzu Trucks and needed to somehow rationalize smaller import brands , they did so by creating Passport Dealers… these sold SAAB , Isuzu Troopers , Passport Optimas ( Korean GM Opel / Pontiac Lemans ) and Isuzu Impulses… this unholy marriage lasted only 4 years until GM was again facing angry Pontiac Buick GMC dealers who needed and wanted a bigger piece of the import pie , and GM of Canada responded with the Asüna nameplate , rebranding the Optima to Asüna SE and Asüna GT , Asüna Sunrunner ( Tracker ) and the Asüna Sunfire ( Impulse) for 2 years … the strategy had much more to do with keeping both sets of dealerships happy and able to sell a full line in their own town , this actually had merit and made sense in Canada.
Comes down to population density. A lot of Canada was (and still is in a lot of cases) very sparsely populated and spread out. So you’d have a smaller town with either a Dodge or a Plymouth dealer and potentially hundreds of miles to the other one. So the Fargo brand enabled Plymouth to sell trucks – they were identical to the Dodges except for minor trim variations. The practice stopped in Canada in the early 70s but continued as Dodge’s international truck brand after that.
Don’t forget Ford got in on the act for the same reason, giving Mercury dealers Mercury badged trucks and badge engineered Fords to sell as Meteor in “the low priced field”. Ford dealers were given re badged Mercurys to sell as Monarch as mid priced cars.
Yes indeed – we have done the Mercury truck line already – https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-american/curbside-classics-mercury-trucks-we-do-things-a-bit-differently-up-here/
FARGO was still in use in Japan recently Isuzu Fargo vans are imported used into Aotearoa. I really must start fotographing some of this humor for the cohort page.
I’m probably one of the handful of Americans who’ve heard of the Asuna name. That was by virtue of a trip I took to Montreal in the early 90s. The Chevy/Pontiac badge engineering was still ongoing at that time, with the Chevy Corsica being rebadged as a Pontiac Tempest and the Geo Metro being sold as a Pontiac Firefly.
Good piece and timely, too, as I was just thinking about it. Small cars always seemed an embarrassment for GM. Have a gander at Maximum Bob’s latest book and you will see this obviously. Because the GM brass hated small cars and the dealers were screaming for them, GM came up with the worst possible solution with brands like Geo, and even more bizarrely, Asuna. Problem was the Passport and Asuna cars were utter junk, with the exception of the Suzuki clones. The LeMans thing was probably the worst POS I have ever driven.
Edit: I know I say, “This car was the worst POS I have ever driven,” quite a lot. However, the list of horrible stuff coming from Detroit in this era is so long, this term is, ahem, relative. It’s hard to decide what is the worst. Okay, it is easy: the Vega, followed by the Tempo, next Hyundai Stellar and then four banger Taurus.
GM finally seems to be getting something right with Chevrolet being the small car division, Buick the middle and Cadillac the top. Seems rather too late to me.
The Korean LeMans thing I got as a rental once actually smacked the side of my head hard with its steel door frame once during normal driving. It was indeed the worst new POS I have ever driven for sure.
The LeMans thing was probably the worst POS I have ever driven
My sister would agree she tested one new and promptly bought a Toyota
How did this marketing experiment got past GM’s notoriously tightwad accountants? Typical of GM’s bizzare decision making: penny pinching its cars to death (to the point of uncompetitiveness) then spend money on bizzare marketing exercises like this. No wonder the company went bankrupt. But the taxpayers bailed them out, removing the part about free market system that weed out losers and let the strong survive. Thankfully they seem to have learnt from their mistakes. Better be, I don’t think the taxpayers going to bail them the second time if they fail _again_.
I think GMs current strategy is “fail as slowly as possible.” This is the change from the last 30 years where the idea was “fail as quickly as possible.” 🙂
In regard to the Passport dealers in Canada….they were very few and far between too. I think there was one maybe two in the entire Vancouver metro area and Lower Fraser Valley. By the time Saturn started selling in Canada there were a few more dealers around but not as many as other GM brands. The whole thing was doomed from the start.
Were these brands actually OWNED by The General? I’m wondering if an independent group of entrepreneurs negotiated rights to sell GM vehicles in the Canadian market – vehicles which GM’s in-house distribution network chose to not make available in the Land of the Maple Leaf. If that were the case, this re-branding would make more sense.
I can actually see it. The Swift and Sidekick, of course, were Suzuki creations; and GM may have had an agreement with Suzuki to not sell under their own name in Canada. Perhaps the wording of that agreement left the door open for third-party rebranding – if one wants to own a car company, that’s a cheap and easy way to do it. Find a supplier with products of reasonable quality; and this one had already shown itself open to such shenanigans. Then sign on dealers and set up a network.
Not unlike what Malcolm Bricklin did with the Yugo.
Yup, the brands were 100% owned by GM. There was no third party involved whatsoever. From what I have heard from my experience at GM, the Pontiac dealers here did not want crap like the LeMons, oops, LeMans, in their stores and the service departments could not get their knuckle-dragging mechanics, oops, technicians, to train on the new products. Around the same time Saab and Saturn came a long and many Saturn stores here dealt with Saab and Passport, too. It was all ad hoc, bizarre and very short lived.
Suzuki also sold their stuff in their own stores.
All those Suzukis were rebadged by GM all over the planet Aus /NZ got Holden versions the UK got Vauxhall/Bedford versions but it looks like Canada got whole new badge divisions that encompassed every outlying GM affiliate Daewoo, Isuzu who rebadge Honda,Subaru and others, the horrible Pontiac Lemons are over here lots of survivors still on the roads more a testament to local mechanics skill than build quality.
Like where Top Gear claimed the Suzuki Carry van was a “rebadged Bedford Rascal”…
Looking at the first Passport, we got them as Daewoos I’m sure a few years later – and they didn’t get any better with age either
Read this story twice and still do not understand it. Wonder how all that ‘talent’ at GM understood it. Most strange model line-up since the British of the late ’60’s: BMC, British Leyland, Mini, maxi, Austin, Roots, and do not get me started on Damliers or what ever.
Too late right now to look up correct spellings but now realize Canada and UK had more in common than I thought. Who else could deal w/ all these stupid marks?
You missed one the HOLDEN DROVER another rebadged Suzuki Im glad you arent doing the clues, Those old rehash Chrycos were exported to Aus NZ but with US badging so ours are real confusing it was a commonwealth thing all our US cars were Canadian sourced either as ckd pack or built up.
That was a rebadged Suzuki Sierra/Jimny not Vitara/Sidekick. Great name though, just like the Shuttle van. There is one at a local drag strip with a jet engine!
GM’s re-badging was so superficial we could do that ourselves now. Seriously, any of us can do far better than Asüna.
Stuck with some bland nameless vehicle? Just pick your own brand name. Umlauts, accents, slashed Øs, knock yourself out. Draw a logo on your computer, send it off to Shapeways, pry off the old badges and glue on the new. Once a Kia, reborn a Häagen-Dazs.
Now you own the only example of a rare marque.
One thing wasnt this Suzuki sidekick/ whatever meant to be cronicly unsafe? it seems to have been remarkably saleable/popular worldwide despite its alledged short comings
I don’t agree that “Passport” was ever a brand, it was only the name of the dealer network. The Optima never had Passport badging of any sort – it was a curious brandless car. Most of the Passport dealers morphed into Saturn dealers when Saturn was introduced to Canada – Saab went to it’s own dealer network, and Isuzu disappeared. I remember an issue after Asuna was dropped, wherein a number of dealers were advertising their leftover Sunfires as “Pontiac Sunfire”, and were told to stop by GM. I’ve always imagined that the thinking was that this would poison the name before the J-body version was introduced.
You may very well be correct. The whole thing is very confusing and I am not sure if GM even knew themselves. I remember ads with Optima by Passport but perhaps that wasn’t the make.
Saturn-Saab (and Isuzu until they stopped making light vehicles) were tied together until GM bankruptcy. Saab is now on its own dealer network – well, for the time being – and, Isuzu only sells heavy trucks in Canada.
The understanding that I got was that the creation of Asuna was dealer driven. If you were to apply to get a GM Franchise you had a choice:
1. Chevrolet-Oldsmobile-Chevy Truck
2. Pontiac-Buick-GMC
3. Chev-Olds-Pontiac-Buick-GMC Truck (for rural markets that couldn’t support 2 GM dealerships)
A Cadillac franchise could be added to either franchise choice if research shows there was a market for Cadillac in your dealer catchment area. The same was true for GM Medium Duty.
So, when Chev-Olds dealers were offered Geo (we originally got the 1989 Geo Metro as a Chevrolet Sprint and Pontiac Firefly), Pontiac-Buick dealers were upset that they didn’t have competing product. Yes, they competed against each other, even though they represented the same manufacturer. So, GM Canada ‘created’ Asuna so that if I was at a Chev store and didn’t like the deal on a Geo Storm, I could walk across the street and get an Asuna Sunfire and still buy the GM captive import of my dreams.
GM didn’t offer the Olds Sillouette and Olds Custom Cruiser because Chev-Olds dealers would get more 2 times more allotment because they sold these cars as Chevrolets (Pontiac didn’t offer a Custom Cruiser equivalent, and Buick didn’t have Sillouette equivalent)
So, to keep it even and fair for everyone who got a franchise, we Asuna. Also, we got the Pontiac Tempest (rebadged Chevrolet Corsica) so PBG dealers had a competing L-Car to market below the Grand Am and Skylark.
There are more commercials that could be interesting on Youtube.
One for Passport dealers is the most confusing, since the name is written “Passeport”, with an extra e, like the document is called in French. Not only way too many brand names, but GM wasn’t even sure on how to spell them!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jJYaU0SYWg
Also, in Chile the Suzuki Nomade name was used for the 4 door only, The 2 door was called Suzuki Vitara. No Chevrolet Vitara here (I’m Chilean) but the Chevrolet Swift was sold for a while around 1994, even though the Swift was available at Suzuki dealers.
I had a 1992 LeMans for about three years starting in 1998. It was the three door hatchback version, with the four speed tranny. Great little car, extremely cheap on fuel. I actually hauled home a full-sized refrigerator in the back, by disconnecting the gas struts to allow the hatch to open wider, put the compressor end in first with probably four feet of length sticking out the back. Took secondary highways the entire 88km trip home. I actually briefly lost traction crossing railroad tracks at 10kph as the front end lifted due to the insane weight distribution. Had I not needed a larger vehicle for work, I would have kept it. Best $1000 car I ever owned.
The parts interchange with the other models was great. The previous owner sold it to me partly because someone stole the tires and rims off of it while she was asleep; as a result, my car had “Asuna” badged mags on it. Same deal with the grille; I hit a crow one morning and found a suitable grille at Pick-A-Part on an Asuna. So my car actually had half LeMans badges and half Asuna badges, which made it interesting to look at if nothing else.
One other item of note. Apparently it was built as a radio delete car. When I got it, it had a radio blanking plate, and the previous owner threw in the portable transistor radio that she kept on the front seat for music. It must have been the last car that radio delete was available on. Funny thing was, the speakers were in the doors, the antenna was in place and the wiring was ready to use behind the dash. All I did was swap in a generic cassette deck I had and away I went. Weird way to do it, but there you have it.
It would be an interesting article to write about the unique cars the Canadians get..Living in Buffalo right on the border I’ve seen many cars sold in Canada no t available here….usually cheaper or decontended models.
These include Mercedes B class, the first generation Smart car. BMW 325, E90 with the 2.5 liter engine, I mean litre.
I remember the Hyundai Pony, a rear wheel drive Hyundai predating the original Excel. The Pontiac Laurentian.
A friend of mine from Toronto had a Golf Mk3 with a 1.8 litre engine unavailable here in the Us where the base engine was a 2.0 liter.
And the Ladas! For years, every time I crossed the border – whether it was just for a poutine lunch, a day in Montreal or a weekend in Ottawa, I would see exactly one Lada – usually a Niva or 3-door Samara. No more, no less and never the same one twice!
Look at all the unused space on that Passport ad! Even its makers seemed to struggle to come up with a list of positive attributes.
“-Daytime running lights”
Weren’t those required at that point? When you’re bullet-pointing mandatory safety equipment, you’re really at rock bottom.
I think at the time the Pontiac was still called a Sunbird and therefore Sunfire was a different name used for the Asuna. I always wondered as a Canadian what would attract me to buy a GM car under this name when I could also buy a Suzuki.
Badge engineering (at GM) hit home for me between 1989-1991 as I bought TWO Geo badged cars; one – the Geo Prizm (Fremont built Toyota Corolla clone but with the Toyota 102hp DOHC 1.6L vs. the Toyota 1.8 DOHC that was in the Corolla at the time) and a Geo Metro (Suzuki built Swift – 3 cylinder – 53 mpg on the highway A/C off!!).
Shortly afterwards, I was transfered to Guam. No Geos’ on Guam, but the Metro was still being sold as a Chevy Sprint through the Toyota/Suzuki/GM distrutor, Atkins-Kroll. Oddly, you COULD get a Suzuki Swifit and a Chevy Sprint – same car – side by side at the same dealer. As I mainly drove the Prizm on Guam at the time, the Metro wasn’t driven very often, but was started up frequently not only to keep the battery charged, but to prevent the wasps from building nests in the exhaust pipe.
The Metro was sold on Guam in ’93 – I think I maybe filled it up every fourth month. I did enjoy the 3-banger; did my own tune up on it (but was forced to buy FOUR Champion sparkplugs as I couldn’t buy ‘just three’) . . . In the Bay Area, said Metro would pull 51-53 mpg fifth gear crusing at 60-65mph but once the A/C was turned on, that little compressor sapped enough power out of the Suzuki three-cylinder that it felt like I threw an aircraft carrier anchor out the side window.and snagged the Carquinez Strait!
Wife and I parted ways later on and the last I saw of the Prizm, it was probably wholesaled to some dealer in Tidewater, Virginia . . . . .
Living in Cleveland between 1997-2002, made many trips to Ontario where I saw beau coup Pontiac Fireflies (Geo Metro/Chevy Sprint for the Dominion); Acura 1.6 TL’s (was U.S. Honda afraid of cannibalizing Civic sales?) and the occcasional oddball Asuna.
For an American, I felt – “different country – different dealer network(s) – whatever”.
BTW at the time, I was amused at the numerous “Chrysler Dynasty” and “Chrysler Intrepid” cars. Also discovered Ontario roads in winter stayed pretty clear compared to New York State, PA and Ohio but I guess that’s because maybe Ontario used twice as much road salt. Once back in Ohio, a trip to the BP car wash with underside spray wash was in order . . . that and a trip to 5/3 Bank to exchange all my Canadian bills.
Rebadge of a rebadge of a…rebadge?
Asuna is only slightly worse than Ford’s oddly named Merkur brand.
Well I can only think it would have more sense to use the Geo name everywhere for all of General Motors captive imports. Geo was after all rather successful which makes me wonder why they axed the nameplate and absorbed the Geo cars back into Chevrolet for 1998 which by the way after this re-label the sales for all of the Geo cars tanked
Here’s another example. From 1987 to 1991, Pontiac dealers in Canada sold a version of the L-body Chevrolet Corsica sedan as the Tempest. That meant that Canadian Pontiac dealerships had both this and the N-body Grand Am to sell as compact offerings.
1997-2001 Pontiac as Chevrolet Trans Sport (long wheel base) and Chevrolet Venture as Opel Sintra (short wheel base).
I’ll do you one better with 12. GM’s J-Platform (1982-2005) produced five American variants alone with all five car brands getting a version, including the infamous Cadillac Cimarron. There was even a curious Japan-exclusive model, the Toyota Cavalier.
Seriously—take a look at that second model below. Is there ANYTHING about that car that says, ‘Standard of the World,’ a tagline used by the Cadillac division for many years?