After reveling in that glorious ’61 Impala coupe this morning, starting with its delightful and graceful front end, seeing this ’73 Canadian Pontiac posted at the Cohort by canadiancatgreen was a painful come-down. This front end came from the same Bill Mitchell styling studios? Yes, the new ’73 bumper regulations were overkill, but couldn’t it have been done just a wee bit more gracefully? This looks like a “safety car concept” commissioned by NHTSA. How depressing, especially in that color, which looks too much like rust.
The rear is a bit better. I remember how depressing it was in the fall of 1972, when these bumper-buggies all appeared, except for those ones that got an exemption for one year.
When gold is dirty it looks like rust. It’s a gold car with a white top. Not bad.
1973 had this regulation. So what? Beneficial in tight parking areas like new york city. Not everyone lives in the burbs.
To boot the bumper matches the grill. Very nice.
The rest of the car doesn’t have much flavor. However, the interior is certainly nice since it’s the brougham.
it has the wonderful gm Trans, possibly a 455 and lots of space. A great car to be bought for pennies.
I thought the 73 Pontiac one of the better versions of the freshman class of big bumpered cars. But you are right, this view is not terribly flattering. The way that front bumper sticks out reminds me of the rear bumpers of those cars retrofitted with Continental kits in the 50s.
I thought the rear of this entire series of Pontiac was its weak spot. Those unimaginative taillights were never enough of a payoff to offset the horribly high trunk liftover that they caused.
I remember kind of liking those vivid golds of the early 70s, but they really needed a black roof and interior to make them look right.
So what?
Wow. That bumper is like they where giving an obscene gesture to the regulators. The US-market ’73 Grandville definitely fared much better, and got what I think were the better taillights as well.
Here are the taillights. My grandmother had a similar four-door to this one.
Yes. Oh yes. The Grand Ville is my absolute favorite early 70’s B body. I’m not sure the bumper is any different than the subject car, however. But somehow the upgraded trim, better tail light configuration (I love the “fin” mounted backup lamps), etc.just made them look so ‘right’.
I think the drab lighting, the dirt and lack of or limited brightwork on the subject car makes it look rather bland. At its core it’s a nice looking car. A set of whitewalls, some more attractive wheels or wheel covers, a wash & wax, and she’d be looking just right. The “Coke Bottle” styling, which was still alive and well on these cars, is best viewed in certain lighting. These shots don’t do it any justice at all.
I believe the bumper is the same depth, it’s just a trick of the camera that makes the gold one appear so huge.
Hi hank. Beautiful car. Did u put the wheels on or was that factory? Nice touch matching the paint.
What engine does it have? I have a flame orange gs stage 1 conv.. most cars were the red with white not blue. The blue white design looks great. Classy and lower key for the luxury cruiser.
Ah, the sporty Grand Villes. I’m a huge fan, particularly the earlier ones without the fender skirts.
Did you know that the Grand Ville body combined the big C body with the roof off the B body? That’s what gives the Grand Ville its distinctive sporty (bit still enormous) flair.
What a difference a decade makes. The 1963 big Pontiacs were hot stuff. 1973, not even warm.
My great Uncle bought a 74 Laurention new, I think that front end was nicer.
This color is more butterscotch to me. I also like the flush deco-like front end treatment
Paint that car brown and give it whitewalls, and we have my HS buddy’s family car that he’d occasionally drive us in, a 73 US-spec Bonneville 400.
I think the car looks great with a very cool period colour, and there is nothing wrong with the nose. For the record, I am not a GM guy either.
I am however big fan of the 1969-74 era cars, emissions gear aside.
I’ll probably have to admit that the 64-69 era was probably the pinnacle of domestic automotive styling (globally too?) but this era is so easy to like, so pretty, so accepted that it’s kind of boring.
What the early 70s lost in pretty, they gained in more interesting, bewildering, unusual, and complex styling – Chrysler C-Bodies for example.
French Connection > Viva Los Vegas.
Fast forward to 2017, sure a 1968 Chevy Biscayne is very cool (though probably today would also be found wearing terrible fat alloy wheels, maybe chromed), but I’d so much rather check out a 1971 Newport.
I also certainly hold big respect for owners who keep cars alive that don’t fit into the conformative conventional hierarchy of automotive acceptability (I’m looking at you Mustang II owners. Oh how you have suffered so over the decades…)
Add some seat belts to the front bumper and you have a 9 passenger coupe
These make awesome demo derby cars – that 5mph bumper makes a serious battering ram, once you drill a hole in the bumper shocks to drain them and then weld them solid.
Oh, come on! It’s only a short walk from grille to bumper. Also, from the rest-of-world perspective, it is – jealously – just another big, smoooth n’ squishy, 8mpg, melty, elongated, out-of-whack US car and absurdly two door at that. Those enormous soft-chopped proportions are all proportional, still yet all Bill Mitchell classy, and that bumper extension was just another curlicue till Someone just now had to go and mention it’s prominence. Quite glorious, all up. Even in faded metallic We Suspect You Have Diabetes.
Agreed on the proportions, just need to dial the size back 10%.
They may have had to incorporate big bumpers but surely no-one was mandating how they styled the sides.. Throughout the 60’s Pontiac had some of the most distinctive side sculpting, it was in their DNA, and this could have incorporated some of that here. However, maybe it’s a color thing keeping me from loving the Parisienne, the Grand Ville’s pictured above look really good in strong punchy metallics. I’m in awe of the Parisienne’s tyres, was that size standard?
That’s pretty darn bad, but I think the Edsel still has it beat in the awful front end sweepstakes.
I think it seems rather restrained compared to the thing next to it.
I agree.
Me too.
+1
“The rear is a bit better”
Since for ’73 they still were 2.5 mph bumpers. Full 5 mph rears, from ’74 on.
Looks like a Laurentian, since that was the Catalina’s Canuck twin. Rear is the Catalina tail lamps.
I admit, that front bumper is way out there on this car but, again, it had to be pointed out to me to be obvious. I guess I was born after the fact, but I didn’t notice “train girder bumpers” until they’ve been mentioned on CC on numerous occasions. Ever since I was a little boy I always implicitly (how could have I known consciously when Oreo cookies were more important to me at the time?) thought protruding bumpers filled by plastic filler pieces were all part of cohesive automobile design. But after this regulatory requirement was being pointed out on this car; yes I agree, it’s awful. The bumper on my hand-me-down 1970 Chevrolet Impala does (in hindsight… the car is long gone now) seem more complimentary to the car’s overall design than say this Parisienne or a mid 70s Ford LTD. Our 1978 Plymouth Caravelle had noticeably smaller filler panels for a car that is noticeably smaller. I guess this precedent also contributed to make this overall impression on me as our family never owned a true full-size car until my Grandfather gave me his old Chev. Even then, it was pre-regulation.
Can’t win for personal experience.
I don’t know what’s more offputting, the front bumper or the amount of sidewall
Cars like this usually sported whitewalls, reducing the thick sidewall appearance somewhat.
Sigh…I feel old. I remember my dad bringing home a 73 Grand Ville as a courtesy car and thinking it was a thoroughly modern luxury car. It was that long ago, wasn’t it ?
The 1971-76 Canadian Pontiacs were the first ones to be true Pontiacs under the skin, with Pontiac chassis and drivetrains. Prior to that, they used Chevy running gear, which was strange considering they kept pace with styling south of the border, just on a shorter wheelbase without Pontiac’s famous wide track.
As if in contrast to the bumpers are the beautifully thin A pillars
Wow, that is unflattering. I don’t usually think of GM bumpers being quite so……Ford worthy.
I was sort of surprised about the negative ruckus that the ’73 Plymouth Fury caused in recent post. But, by comparison, Chrysler’s efforts with Federalized bumpers deserve a design award……..
Pontiac really had some strange front ends in the early 70’s! My favorite is the beautiful bumperless ’71, followed by the very nice bumpered ’72, the classy ’76 and ’75, the somewhat odd looking ’74, and then last but not least the absolutely hideous ’73.
I always thought the ’73 looked like it was designed in a hurry, like an “in-between design” if you will. In essence that is exactly what it was. The new bumper regulations forced those huge bumpers on the automakers, and as a result the unattractive front ends from Pontiac emerged for a couple of years. Even the ’73 Oldsmobiles had an odd look to them in the grille/bumper area, not quite as homely as the Pontiac but pretty close! The Grand Ville may have pulled it off the best of the full-sized ’73’s, and the large bumper guards seem to help balance out those huge bumpers somewhat.
It’s like a shapely coupe (if rather large) trapped between unattractive front & rear ends.
Also I had never really noticed the ’74 before the last comment–somewhat odd is an understatement. I don’t know why but the ’74 front end design gives me the creeps just a bit.
So true Chris! The ’74 is freakish to me!
I came here hoping to find that the Canadian ’73 Pontiacs didn’t have the new 5-mph front bumper requirement. Sadly, I see they were the same as ours in the US. I always wondered what the ’73s would have looked like if not for the ugly bumpers. (Not so much for safety, I believe the 5-mph bumpers were a gift to the insurance industry to help them reduce claims.)
When Dad, a Pontiac man, came home with a ’73 Catalina 4-door sedan—white, with a forest green interior and matching vinyl top—I liked it a lot, probably because it was nearly new and so ‘modern’ compared to the ’69 Catalina he traded in. I think my favorite part was the wraparound dashboard which was a lot more like a cockpit. When I was a junior in high school, he won the chance to buy a fully-loaded ’75 off lease at work and the white ’73 was handed down to me. I drove it halfway through college.
For ’74 and beyond—see the ’76 Bonneville, his last Pontiac and my last hand-me-down, attached—GM designers were able to tone down the holy-cr*p-how-are-we-going-to-do-this-on-such-short-notice vibe, and front bumpers looked okay again. Still very large and heavy, not as nice as the ’72s but, certainly better than the atrocious ’73s.