(first posted 9/25/2017) When I was an eight year old kid and during my professor father’s year-long sabbatical from the university, our family took a trip overseas. Our ultimate destination was a nine-month stay in Dad’s native Liberia, but on the way to and from western Africa, we visited five cities in Europe, including Paris – which was our very first stop. Upon our arrival to and subsequent departure from Charles De Gaulle Airport, one of my first, distinct memories was of all five of us piling into a ’70s-era Peugeot 504 taxi after the driver (the sixth person in that car) loaded our luggage into the trunk. Our destination was a place whose name my older brother translated to us as the “King Hotel” (which might actually have been something like the “Hôtel Du Roi”).
My face was soon flush with what felt like a million pin-pricks of embarrassment as my mother (a Midwestern farmer’s daughter of German and Irish descent, who looks a little like Petula Clark) proceeded to ask the driver, “You take American dolla?” in a most inauthentic-sounding, American Ebonics accent that I had never heard come out of her mouth before that day. I thought to myself, Who is this woman, and why is she speaking English that way to a Frenchman who might have had issues understanding her even in her normal dialect? At that moment, my mom’s voice sounded, to me, about as French as… a Pontiac Parisienne from the mid-1980s.
An original souvenir from my visit to the Eiffel Tower in 1983.
I’m sure Mom didn’t mean any disrespect – not to Blacks, not to the French… not to anyone. This was just one of those profoundly weird moments that could have happened only in a multi-cultural family like mine. Maybe Mom’s thought process was that by speaking in an accent (any accent), her English might have been more understandable to our poor taxi driver who surely must have been confused. I’ve asked Mom about it, and she still laughs and claims she “doesn’t remember” why she spoke that way to our white, French taxi driver. Oh, well… this happened over thirty years ago, and I guess we’ll never know.
All of us usually speak in a manner consistent with our environments of both past and present. What I think of as mere traces of my old, Flint accent (think: a little “country”, a little urban, vowels through the nose, and with a slightly slower cadence) often come roaring back with full force after an extended weekend back in Michigan. It’s involuntary. It just sort of happens, and I’m glad it does.
This final-year Parisienne, sourced from Canada, “spoke” Le Français with a decidedly North American accent. The Parisienne was introduced to the U.S. market for 1983 after Pontiac’s previous miscalculation that full-sized cars were finished due to tightening fuel economy standards and higher gas prices than people were used to. Try as I did, I was never able to shake the impression that the smaller, ’82 Bonneville “Model G” that was supposed to supplant the B-Body in Pontiac’s lineup was just a slightly restyled and repackaged LeMans. As reasonably handsome as the Model G was for an early-’80s midsizer, I preferred the sportier looks of the earlier, A-Body LeMans on which the G was based.
The first Parisienne that I can remember seeing on the street confused me for many reasons. While I could clearly recognize it as a B-Body, it looked more like a Poncho-fied Chevy Impala… which it basically was. The chopped tail and flat, blocky taillamps of the 1983 and ’84 Parisienne looked downmarket from those of the last, full-sized Bonneville that had bowed out after ’81. It seemed more than a little “Pontiac-lite”.
And then there was the name. How do you pronounce that? I wonder how many times I had asked my parents and older brother how to correctly pronounce “Parisienne” before it finally stuck. I’m all about making mnemonic devices to remember things, but I honestly can’t think of how I would have tried to remember the correct pronunciation of this model name outside of just practicing it. I event-ZHU-ually nailed it.
I feel the mild restyle for ’85 improved things considerably, with a return to more of a luxurious ’81 Bonneville look, with its wide, wraparound taillamps and slightly rounded rear, even if it did keep its Caprice face. My piano teacher of seven years and her husband had one of these for a while, and to this day, seeing one reminds me of Mrs. Susana Patek (a lovely woman), and of being held hostage by my parents in my living room after school during the week to practice my scales. There were times when I hadn’t practiced as many hours as I was supposed to before my weekly lesson and I knew it would show.
As I would walk up the driveway of the Pateks’ condo not far from the GM Truck & Bus factory in Flint on Van Slyke Road, I would wish I could just duck into the back seat of their Parisienne and crawl into a ball on that soft, burgundy, pillow-tufted seating and just wait it out until the time for my lesson had passed. Needless to say, I eventually (and thankfully) made friends with self-discipline, and I had the mastery of the first and second movements of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to claim as my crowning achievement before turning my attention and focus to other interests.
Looking again at these photos, it made me wonder about the year, make and model of the final, American production car to feature separate fender skirts. I’m not talking about the look of, say, a 1991 Buick Roadmaster, the rear wheel openings of which suggest this look, but rather what we see in these pictures, where they could be removed (i.e. for repair or replacement) if the owner chose to do so.
Regardless, I think this Parisienne is a fine example of the type of mainstream, mid-priced, American, full-sized, V8-powered, RWD sedan that sat in many garages and driveways in the Midwest. It may be about as French as Kraft salad dressing, but did it really, ever need a dose of Gallic authenticity to be worthy of its model name? With sales of the sedan versions of the ’86 Parisienne being 70% over those of the G-Body Bonneville (70,600 units vs. 40,900), that question becomes largely irrelevant. I’m glad this Parisienne “speaks” with its own accent instead of trying to sound like something it isn’t now and certainly wasn’t then. C’est si bon.
Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois.
Sunday, September 10, 2017.
Related reading:
I love when you tell a story in your articles. This was a delight to read! That story about your mother put a smile on my face after a long and tiring day.
I loved the ’80-81 Bonne but the Parisienne wasn’t as nice inside or out. Great that they resurrected the old rear later in its run though. GM did a similar thing years later resurrecting the Saturn Outlook’s rear styling – also a nice rear end – for the 2013 GMC Acadia.
Always thought the Pontiacs were the best-lookin of the downsized Bs. And you’re right: the Bonneville G was nowhere near as attractive as the 78 LeMans (or the striking 81!). A retrograde step like the 80 LeBaron… too starchy!
Thanks, Will!
I actually have a soft spot for the 1980 and ’81 Chrysler LeBaron, as it was the first, new car I remember my grandparents purchasing (I think theirs was an ’80).
Stylistically, I think the ’80 LeBaron sedans were an improvement, but the coupes (lovely looking cars from 1977 through ’79) were a step backwards.
This is a 1985. The CHMSL is a hokey incorrect add-on, so it can’t be an ’86, and 82-84 had Chevy rear quarters, not the pulled-out-of-mothballs ’80-’81 Bonneville ones.
I cannot tell you how much I resonate with your struggle to pronounce Parisienne (and I had 3 years of French!). It was only recently this summer when I asked my father “Hey Dad, how would you pronounce this?” that I was swiftly shown my ignorance, lol. That said, these shots must be off the Red Line Jarvis, correct? I miss my old neighborhood :/
You nailed the locale. :). I love Rogers Park.
I lived right off Morse this past year, so the setting was obvious. If you remember your tweety bird post, that literally inspired me to give Chicago another go, and I chose to stay back that same trip. As is life, it didn’t work out as I wanted. I will say I do appreciate your conformation I’m not crazy (yet) regarding my observations of the beautiful North Side 🙂 It is insanely underrated.
I’m still not sure I pronounce it right. Pa ree zee enne? My dad wasn’t the language whiz yours was. He said Parisssssenne, and I was sure that wasn’t it!
Your dad and I would have a lot in common, it seems lol.
But you left us hanging there, Joseph. Did he take American dolla?
Great post!
LOL – He did. 🙂 And we got to L’Hôtel Du Roi in one piece.
I love your stories But only like the Parisienne. I had seen the model name on a trip to Canada around 1973. “Para-seen” was the best I could manage then and I was glad I would never have to deal with that crazy name after returning to my side of the border. Wrong.
Pontiac actually did what all of the US manufacturers said they were going to do – kill the big ones. I have to give them points for resourcefulness in finding a way to bring the car back from the dead, but the car never seemed “right” to me under this nameplate.
It really only ever existed because Pontiac dealers simply could not sell the A/G body Bonneville to their old B body customers. Pontiac dealers told GM that they’d be willing to sell new Chevrolet Caprices if that was all that GM could give them.
I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one that has struggled with the pronunciation of this car! Short story: I never thought to ask someone as a child how to pronounce the name so I just called it a “Pair-a-sheen” to myself. Fast forward to about 2002, and I had a police scanner in my truck that I liked to listen to when I was driving around. One day I heard an officer reading off a tag and vehicle description to dispatch of a car he pulled over. It was a Pontiac “Pair-i-shun. I remember thinking, “huh, is that how you say it, or is this South Georgia officer just doing the best he can with the name too?” To this day I’m still not 100% positive of the correct way to say it. And at 38 years old, and after being labeled “the car guy” among family and friends, I guess I’ve been to embarrassed to ask! Think I’ll try and look up an old TV commercial now and see!
Update: well I just YouTubed it… wow was I off! So was that police officer! Per-easy-ann! 30 year mystery solved today!
“Per-easy-ann” – that is a brilliant phonetic adaptation, one that I am going to reuse!
I put some extra “zh” into it… “Pah-REE-zhee-enn”. 🙂
I also put an extra “zh” into Parisienne. And now that I read all of these comments, I wonder why I ever did. After all, Per-easy-ann seems so… well… easy.
I also used to put an extra “k” in Scion (i.e., pronounced “Skion”). Again, I have no idea why. Maybe I invented my own dialect.
A lot of strange regional pronunciations can probably be traced back to one person attempting to pronounce a word they’ve only read and never heard.
Yeah you got it right Joe. As always, great article.
For me, the biggest failing of the Parisienne was the use of the cheap-looking and relatively info-free Caprice dashboard rather than Pontiac’s which was better looking and offered more gauges (“gages” in GM’s weird parlance) as an option.
This might be an urban legend but here it goes: ‘GAGES’ was purportedly used in lieu of ‘GAUGES’ because shortening the word allows the font size to be larger and more readable for the senior citizens…
The other story goes that GM was able to save $0.01 on each ‘U’ not printed on the car.
I totally agree with you on that! The Parisienne’s Caprice instrument panel looked less impressive than the 77-81 B body Pontiac dash…and gave away its Chevy origins right away.
Gages isn’t just a GM thing. It’s an SAE term as well.
I read somewhere that it goes back to some newspaper editor in the 20s/30s (IIRC) who wanted to reform American spelling and make it more logical, by deleting silent letters and repeated letters, among other changes. Some of his spellings stuck, and are responsible for the differences from rest-of-the-world spelling. Others, like ‘GAGES’, just merits a ‘Huh?’
Pontiac in Canada was a “low price” brand, so it was a Chevy clone for decades. No ‘Wide Track’, performance image, or even GTO’s [in the 60’s].
So, the 1983 “all new” Parisienne was just a re-direct of extra Canadian products. Quickest way to get ‘real big cars’ back in showrooms, when gas prices stabilized.
For a moment after reading the taxi story I had to stop and ask what car you were writing about; the story was so good it totally distracted me.
Long ago, in 1986, when I was coercing my parents into buying a car bigger than their dining room table, I remember there being a 1986 Pontiac Para-zane in the mall in Cape Girardeau. Other than the fender skirts and wire hubcaps, I was rather intrigued. Then I saw the window sticker. What it cost, I do not know, but it stated the engine was a 4.3 liter V6. My interest experienced a quick and painful death.
Oldcarbrochures confirms this possibility and I would love to know what percentage were built like this. Few, undoubtedly.
In its defense, the 4.3 was 3/4 of a SBC… but I think ’86 was too early for the TBI, so it would have definitely been a slug on the order of the ’76 LeSabre V6.
I’m sure some of the other Canucks can spot me on this but the way I always heard it pronounced and use to this day is
Pa-ree-zee-en.
I had an 84(last year for the Caprice butt) and thought it was much classier car than the 80 or 89 Caprice I owned.
My mother’s first car was a Parisienne. I think it was a 70’s model of some sort, but she couldn’t remember. She got it from her father, and took to calling it the Starship Enterprise, “because it fit the whole crew and used as much gas as the space shuttle”.
Bill, you’re the only one so far that seems to know how to pronounce Parsienne. I grew up in a part of Ontario with lots of French-Canadians. My home town even has small communities outside it that are primarily French. There are lots of French surnames and family’s who’s first language is French (although everyone also speaks English for the most part). As a result, I have never had any difficulty with French names.
Really, if you sit down and break the word down Pa – ri -si -enne, it’s not that hard to say.
Here is a video with the correct pronunciation.
There’s nothing French about this car at all. And the French never had Pontiacs officially. So, what exactly had GM in mind when using the name? It’s as misleading as the “international” Oldsmobiles with the multi-flag badges. Nobody in Italy, France or Germany was roving around in a Cutlass Calais.
GM had been putting the Parisienne badge on Canadian Pontiacs since 1958. Perhaps a nod to the French-speaking populace in Canada?
And a bit before that, the first use of the Parisienne name came from this 1953 show car. http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/1953-pontiac-parisienne-motorama-elegance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLWrvOO-yaM
Another nod to the French-speaking populace in Canada would had been the Laurentian name from a Quebec mountain range who’s part of the Canadian Shield.
And interesting to note then in the 1960s and 1970s, Pontiac was #1 in Canada.
Of course a French name would work in Canada. Also, really exactly what was Spanish about the Cordoba? Naming cars for places that make no sense is a fine North American tradition! Low end Plymouth — Name it for a high end hotel! And while the founder of Detroit was French, Nothing is more ‘Murican than Cadillac DeVille! And my Buick Lucerne is not a misspelling of a Pennsylvania county – Although I’d like to think it is! ??
Cadillac was bold enough to condense El Dorado into one word, Eldorado.
Cadillac is the name of a village in the south west of France, how about that.- and for the pronounciation of the village name, at least, you don’t pronounce the two “ll” s together.
And Calais is a sea port on the north coast.
ps. We enjoy the website, thank you ! there is so much information and especially from the comments section of people’s knowledge of and experiences with the automobiles.
In the same way we got the Mercury Meteor Montcalm.
There is worse name like Buick LaCrosse which in Québec means 2 things to be fooled or …
masturbate
All they did was bring in CDN market Pontiacs, so many forget and go “whats the deal with the name?”
Sure, could have brought back Catalina or something, but this is Roger Smith’s GM era.
“Go practice your scales.” Oooh… now that’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a few decades.
Like you, I associate my piano lessons with my instructor’s car — probably because I’d rather do anything other than play the piano. Mrs. Harrell and her husband both had A-body Buick Centurys — Mr. Harrell’s was a bare-bones base model, while Mrs. Harrell’s was a fully-loaded Limited with wire wheels and pillowed upholstery. The only reason I remotely looked forward to piano lessons was that while my sister had her lesson, I would usually sit in the basement with Mr. Harrell and talk about cars and baseball. A few times he took me outside to sit in the Century and pretend to drive. I never did master those dog-gone scales, though.
Eric, those key signatures other than C-Major, with all their black keys!! Those were my bane. The sad thing now is that I haven’t played anything in over ten years, and can’t remember much of it. I suppose that years of playing the piano helped me become a much more proficient typist (which I do a lot of in a typical work day).
I’m just glad my grandfather videoed so many of my performance in recitals and things.
My mom would get locked in the room to practice (we’re talking ’20s here), but she’d climb out the window and hide in the hedge with a book.
It’s funny how Brits and Americans have their own unique wrong pronunciations of French & Spanish words, which they both insist are correct.
I had to laugh at the cab driver incident. It reminded me of a colleague who has a special, hilarious, unidentifiable accent he uses with non-native English speakers. And he’s a tour guide!
I have enough memory of high school French to pronounce “Parisienne” properly, but ironically I am unable to convincingly pronounce “Pontiac” without adopting an American accent. It just sounds wrong in Scottish.
I too have a fake accent story, but it worked out differently. My mother’s family is of Swedish descent. When I was a kid some distant relatives visited the family. Their English was decent (certainly better than our non existent Swedish) but for some reason they had some difficulty understanding my father – until he put on a fake Swedish accent and started sing-songing as he talked. (Think the Muppets Swedish Chef, minus the nonsense words.) My mother was initially mortified -is he making fun of them? – until she realized it actually worked. It became one of the classic family stories, told annually over a round (or three) of martinis (or perhaps acquavit).
(The CC connection is that the Swedish heritage led my parents to buy a Volvo PV44 as their first car (I came home it), followed by a Saab 95 3 cyl. wagon. The short life of the transmission in that car led them into the hands of American cars – a Vega wagon. Talk about frying pan into the fire…)
LOL that’s brilliant. I can see how his Swedish chef routine would work though. I worked in Vietnam and poor English pronunciation was so ingrained that sometimes foreign workers adopted local mispronunciation of certain words in order to be understood.
I had a similar experience in India. I was sharing a cab with an American in Kolkata, and the driver – while he obviously spoke English – didn’t seem to be understanding us very clearly. My cab-mate had spent a lot of time in India and proceeded to speak to him in what seemed to me an outrageously cliched ‘Indian accent’, which I found acutely embarrassing. But of course he was speaking English closer to the way that the driver spoke it – almost a dialect – and the driver understood him clearly. It was one of those memorable travel moments.
(Craig, that story is great!!)
Tonito, the funny thing is that my mom’s “accent” was just getting warmed up in that cab. Everywhere we went. Today, I can’t read “Palais-Royal” without hearing my mom’s pronunciation of it in my head.
(Mom, if you’re reading this, I love you!)
My submission for last car made with separate fender skirts is the 1993 Cadillac Sixty Special. I think the 86 Parisienne may be the last non-Cadillac to have them.
I always appreciated the Parisienne for what it was, a throwback and death sentence commutation for the full size Pontiac. The caveat being that it wasn’t a real Pontiac. The interiors were a major part of the diffentiation between GM brands in that era. A Pontiac with a Chevy interior, Chevy body and Chevy engine is not much of a Pontiac. The addition of the 81 Bonneville rear end helped, as did the seldom – seen optional Rally II wheels.
This example looks pretty nice apart from missing hubcaps. Love those Chicago classic cars! With no vinyl roof, it would look great with the Rally II’s.
Gotta like that steering wheel, in tonyola’s photo . . . ?
Nice find and I always enjoy how you relate life experiences to the cars you write about!
Looks straight, clean, no vinyl top and black to boot. I’ll take it!
I’ll circumvent the pronunciation issue by proclaiming it as a Pontiac sedan.
Haven’t seen one of these since the mid nineties living in WI, and that example was a unappealing two tone brown.
Very nice find and great story as always.
Great story about your mom in the taxi. Maybe her explanation should just be “jet lag”. 🙂
When people are suddenly (and for the first time) dropped in a totally new cultural environment, they will do and say things out of the ordinary. Seen it a number of times.
Surprisingly, examples of those ’83-’86 Parisienne sedans continue to pop up periodically here in western New York, an area whose climate is very unkind to older cars. Typically, they’re in nice original condition to start but if subjected to a winter or two quickly become rusty rats. They generally fall into two categories for source: one being one-owner originals where the current owner has inherited it and the other being purchased cheaply in the south or west where rust isn’t such as issue. The ’85-’86 MY are the more appealing but still have the “I’m mostly a Chevy aura about them”….Pontiac-lite.
The Parisienne name, goes back to the 1953 Motorama show car, then successfully marketed in Canada for decades so had plenty of currency when brought to the U.S. for a short run. Pontiac’s evocative model names generally had little to do with the locale in which they were sold…no “Catalina” or “Bonneville” here in WNY.
My uncultured self always pronounced it pare-e-seen, it’s one of those words (and cars) that so rarely comes up in casual conversation I could never find reason to refine it!
The name never seemed fit for a post-Delorean Pontiac, I know Parisienne dated back to the 50s in Canada but it reeked of faux fancy 70s Brougham type names, which by the 80s were well out of fashion, if anything it should have been the ideal decade for Pontiac to reinvigorate their 60s excitement and shake the ill fitting brougham treatments that erodeded it in the 70s. Unfortunately the Parisienne was not it and the commitment to reserving larger car segments for retirees meant cheesy name, cheesy badge engineering, and cheesy driving dynamics. Just a weird old codger in the showroom with cladded up N-body Grand Ams, 6000, and Trans Ams trying to win an entirely different image(Wal Mart BMW) nearby.
The early US Parisiennes with the full Chevy sheetmetal have a Dodge Custom 880 vibe, in both execution and origin.
My grandmother used to have a Parisienne. The same color as this one, in fact, except on hers the area where those chrome panels along the bottom are were painted white (at least it looks like chrome to me; it’s kind of hard to tell). Hers was an older one, with the more Chevy-like taillights, and yeah, I pretty much thought of it as a “Pontiac Caprice”. Looking back now it was kind of an interesting car, though, if just for being the least common of the GM B-bodies in the US (although I understand they were more common in Canada).
And I was never able to figure out how to pronounce it, either.
“Parisienne” was probably chosen because like all decisions made by GM in that era, it was the bean-counters’ choice, the cheap way out when they found old parts stock of 325,946 “Parisienne” badges in a warehouse in Ste-Foy, Québec (at least we don’t have to try to pronounce THAT!)
Great story, love the family anecdotes! Dealing with French cabbies can cut both ways: I speak French well, but have had Parisian taxi drivers pretend they couldn’t understand me or my pronunciation, simply to snub l’Américain.
I also enjoy the Americanized pronunciation of French names, abundant in New Orleans, like Chartres Street (shar-treh in French, ChartERS in NOLA), Freret Street (frer-ray in French, fur-RET in NOLA), and Carondelet Street (Caron-du-lay in French, Carron-deLET in NOLA).
Sadly, I have never remotely enjoyed the Parisienne. To me, it was a horrible badge-engineered slap in Pontiac’s face. Was it really that hard/expensive to dust off the ’80-’81 B-Body Bonneville sheetmetal and interior trim? I know it was already built that way in Canada, so easy to “import” but wow, really reinforced the notion that everything from GM could simply be minimally reworked Chevrolets with different price points.
Well in Southern California, the locals pronounce some local Spanish named locations in an Americanized way.
San Pedro is San PEE-dro, rather than San PAY-dro.
Sepulveda Boulevard is Seh PUL veh-da.
Santa Ana is pronounced almost like a run-on sentence by the locals – “SanTana” (and it is a majority Latino community).
I love reading the discussion here about how to pronounce the model name… It made me think of something. I’m a fan of Joni Mitchell, and am one of a gajillion people with a copy of her “Court And Spark” album from ’74 (on CD, of course). When the lead-off track, “Free Man In Paris” gets to about the 1:50 mark, I cringe just a little when she sings “Champs-Elysees”. Still love her though!
I cringe when I listen to “Raised on Robbery” from the same album and hear the line about the ’57 Biscayne that landed in a ditch. Biscaynes weren’t built until 1958. I thought perhaps in Canada, with its penchant for low-end cars not sold in the US (like the Bel Air well into the ’80s when it was dropped after ’75 in America) the Biscayne may have been introduced sooner, but no, they didn’t start selling Biscaynes in Canada until ’58 either.
Still an awesome song (and album). Luv Joni.
Ah, yes… the mythical ’57 Biscayne!
I referenced it here, in a piece from a couple of years ago 🙂 :
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/in-motion-classic-1957-chevrolet-bel-air-raised-on-robbery/
It’s possible Joni didn’t know Biscaynes weren’t made until ’58, but I prefer to think she was just taking artistic license since everyone knows ’57 Chevys are just so much cooler than ’58s 🙂
My friend in 8th grade, who was #1 fan of Ms. Mitchell, refused to believe that there was no such car as a “57 Biscayne”.
A lot of people give the 1982(3)-86 Parisienne a lot of heat on this site for being a badge engineered Chevy. It’s just of GM’s half-assed efforts of the 80’s. There is a whole lot more to it than that. First off, the Parisienne name had a ton of cachet in Canada. While American’s had the Bonneville from the late 50’s to the 80’s, Canadians had the Parisienne. It was the top of the line model for Pontiac for many years. This gave this name with a lot of clout in a brand that was consistently one of Canada’s favourites.
And the French connection? Well, maybe not back to France, but let’s not forget that a large percentage of the Canadian population is French Canadian, and/or have some French in their background. Much of Canadian history is tied to French Quebec and even many of our political leaders have strong French backgrounds. So, maybe GM of Canada picking a French name is a smart marketing move. To me it makes a whole lot more sense than a Cadillac Calais, or D’elegance? Why pick on the poor Parisienne but not Cadillac?
While it’s easy to pick on the 1982(3)-86 Parisienne as a badge engineered Pontiac, lets bring a little context into this. For 1981, the American market top line Pontiac was the Bonneville. Canada had the Parisienne, which was essentially identical to the Bonneville, other than minor trim details and of course Chevrolet drivetrains. This meant the 1981 Parisienne had the same Pontiac dashboard and Pontiac interior as the US Bonneville. Park them side by side, most will think they are the same car.
Now come 1982, GM decides to drop the Pontiac B-body in the US market. This leaves poor little GM of Canada in the cold. In Canada, Pontiac’s have traditionally been popular and the fullsize model is still a big seller. So what are they to do? Of course GM of Canada does not have the resources to produce a new car, and they can’t override Detroit. So, with their limited resources, they take a Chevrolet B-body which they are already producing in Canada, make changes to differentiate the car and produce their own car. Keep in mind, they are limited to using Chevrolet sheet metal and major interior parts. Considering all that, they did an okay job if you ask me.
Partway through the 1983 model year when the Parisienne is “rushed” over to the US market, the American’s get this Canadian car. Since it was a rush job, they were basically identical to the Candadian market cars, except the US market cars would meet the stricter at the time EPA standards. A Pontiac that looks like a Chevy and has a Chevy engine?? No biggie to us Canadians.
By 1985 there had been some time to put some more thought into the car. Production for the Pontiac B moved back to the US and the old 1981 sheet metal stampings were brought back into production. To be honest, with that dying market, and Pontiac’s new direction, I am not sure why GM even bothered to go that far. I guess they wanted to keep the dealers and traditional Pontiac buyers happy.
So please keep this history in mind as to why the Parisienne is a badge engineered Chevy. At least GM of Canada had the foresight to see that the cancellation of the traditional fullsize car was premature.
It was a roundabout way of badge engineering but it was definitely that nonetheless, the 82-84s with the Chevy body are less different from a Caprice than a Caprice was from an Impala. Using Parisienne in the US simply seemed to be an effort to not admit defeat with the downsized Bonneville and not have to come up with a new name or the tooling for the new emblems, so we got a Canadian market name that meant absolutely nothing to the average US citizen buying a Pontiac.
That said, if GMs badge engineering of the Parisienne is to be forgiven, the badge engineering of the LeMans as Bonneville is still difficult to swallow. These kinds of “transfer the names down a segment” downsizing efforts seemed below GM, who proudly rolled out waves starting with the B body, followed by the A body and the X-body. Then arbitrarily they renamed the A-body G-body(code engineered?) after the FWD transition and the wheels figuratively came off of the whole remaining transition – example: Why if the A-body became G-body for the new FWD A-Body, did the B-body not get redisignated as something else after the full size FWD H-body debuted? For that matter, why was H, the previous classification of subcompact cars, used for the new fullsize??? -. Chrysler was doing this sort of thing (shuffling model names, creating arbitrary new codes for existing platforms) at their most desperate, and even their efforts sometimes brought fresh sheetmetal.
Matt, you’re missing the point. I am not say these cars weren’t badge engineer jobs, I am just trying to share some history of how that actually came about. In my mind it makes a big difference that the 1982 Parisienne was GM of Canada with it’s limited resources trying to create an important car for their markets that Detroit took away from them. By the time they realized dropping the Pontiac B was a mistake, the only quick solution was to import the Parisienne from Canada.
Compare this to the 1982 A-bodies which are heavily criticized as badge engineering jobs. They were the future of GM, and had all of GM’s resources behind them to make these the backbone of GM in the 1980’s. This is definitely a deadly sin in the grand scheme, while the Parisienne is a blip on the RADAR.
You opened a big can of worms with your comment, but lets just say GM’s plans for the 1980’s were completely different than the execution. GM originally planned to do a second wave of downsizing and basically switch to FWD exclusively. The plan was supposed to be, 1982 FWD A-bodies replace the 1981 RWD A-bodies. For 1982, the B-bodies were supposed to be “downsized” temporarily to the A/G-body platform for 1982 (like the Bonneville), dropping the old 1977 B-bodies all together. The new FWD H-body was to be the new “B-body” and would replace the temporary downsized cars (ie 1982 Bonneville). Obviously didn’t work out that way, but that might give some clarity.
I do understand that aspect, and agree that it was a drop in the bucket compared to GM’s 80s decisions. I do concede GM of Canada shouldn’t be faulted for their desperate effort to create their Parisienne, but it was a problem caused by GM USA and solved half assidly by them by way of importing it here, and for the end user, it is just a rebadged Chevy, and therefore is open to some heat. That’s my main thing, you can be conscious of the history and still be critical.
The lack of commitment to the way forward, whether right or wrong(I’m not exactly a fan of FWD myself), was the GM sin the Parisienne is caught up in. The continued commitment to building the A/Gs was more egregious. They ended up with a bloated and confusing model lineup that later even demanded successors to models that should have, and at one point were, the same basic cars – the most extreme example being Oldsmobile with the Cutlass. The Cutlass “Ceira” on the A-body, the natural successor to the original Cutlass line. The Cutlass “Supreme” on the G-body, the old Cutlass line, which would then see a successor on the W-body. And the Cutlass Calais, which, as I understand it, was set to replace the G-body. All of these should have been based on a single model/platform in any given year. – The Parisienne/Bonneville shuffle was tame in comparison, but with the 6000 now in the lineup (to replace the LeMans), that lineup bloat was happening at Pontiac too.
It must be noted that GM was hardly alone in making this mistake. Ford was evidently ready to ditch the Panther full-sizers when they restyled the Granada and Monarch (themselves restyled Fairmonts) and moved the names of their big cars, LTD and Marquis to these cars in 1983. They also moved Continental from the stretched Panther to a Fox-platform car a year earlier. I assume they originally thought the big cars would be gone by ’83, or at least wouldn’t hang on much longer so they all got awkward double or triple names like LTD Crown Victoria to set them apart. Instead, the Fox LTD, Marquis, and Continental were dropped when the Taurus and derivatives arrived, and the Panther survived well into the 2010s!
Meanwhile, Chrysler did this *twice*. The big R-body was discontinued after less than 3 years, and big-car names like New Yorker and Gran Fury were moved to what was previously the LeBaron and Diplomat/Caravelle (all which were restyled Aspen/Volares). Then the New Yorker name was again downsized and moved to a stretched K-car and the previous NYer became the New Yorker Fifth Avenue. Chrysler soon realized their mistake, but the R body was gone by then so they were stuck pretending the RWD Fifth Avenue was a full-size car. I have to believe had they stuck it out with the R body, sales would have picked up around ’82-’83 just as with GM and Ford’s biggies.
And I acknowledge that, but the point is Chrysler and Ford were either financially in bad shape or in rebuilding stages when they were doing it, and both Ford and Chrysler actually were killing off the platform previously above them, they truly were downsizing, not keeping redundant models. And yes, I know the Panther was supposed to die, but even with keeping it around there was no actual redundancy, there was a subcompact, compact, midsize and full size, and nothing in between. Ford’s plan was to scale back their model lineup before deciding to keep the Panther, while GM planned to retain a full lineup, just downsized.
GM had the resources to downsize/FWD their entire lineup, and did, by 1985 every FWD platform they had should have replaced every RWD platform they had. They had no good reason to simultaneously downsize onto all new platforms and keep the predecessors alive, – imagine if they had decided to keep the 76 B bodies in production along side the all new 77s.
Good points. The worst mistake GM made was rashly discontinuing the full size Pontiacs, though it didn’t seem as foolish at the time as it does in hindsight. The fortunes of large cars improved considerably after the gas panic of the turn of the decade, but there was no way to know that at the time of their decision. I guess Pontiac of Canada made the best of a bad situation, and when U.S. Pontiac realized their mistake, they took the quickest way they could to get a big car into the U.S. market. Buick and Pontiac both quit making their own V8 engines in the 80’s, so they can’t be faulted for putting the Chevy engines in it. I still think that they erred in using the Parisienne name, which may have cachet in Canada, but was unknown and too foreignish to that conservative market in the U.S. I’ve always thought they would have done better calling it Grand Ville or Executive or something new. Better still would be admitting that part of their original fiasco in cancelling B-bodies was trying to fool what was left of that market by renaming the facelifted midsizer Bonneville, and give the name back to its rightful recipient. I think they also lost customers by keeping the Chevy dashboard, as that made it too transparently badge engineered. GM historically built their success on having at least some perceived value in each step up the brand ladder. But that wasn’t the only time they lost sight of their traditional formulas for success in the 80’s
Vince, thank you, as always, for sharing your thoughtful perspectives. Some great points. I had no idea that Parisienne production had been moved back to the U.S. concurrent with the ’85 restyle.
Back when Parisienne was first used in CDN, Montreal was its most populous city.
My later father owned one but I believe it had the Olds 307 V8; while buying filters one always had to pay attention to the VIN engine code. Was there much of a real world difference betwwn the Chevy and Olds V8?
Joseph
Great write-up and pictures, as usual. These are really getting scarce on the ground around here, along with their box Chevy counterparts. Attached is a ’84 that followed me home a couple of years ago with 60k miles on it.
Interior is mostly Chevy, with Pontiac wheel and Oldsmobile seats!
The Parisienne Brougham got Delta 88 Royale Brougham seats; the base model had Chevy seats. The tail clip was from the Impala rather than the Caprice, with Pontiac-specific taillight lenses. When the ’80-’81 Bonneville rear sheetmetal and trim reappeared, so did something similar to the ’81 Bonneville Brougham seats and door trim, but unfortunately not the dash. I recall someone online who worked in the assembly plant explaning why they were able to resuscitate the rear sheetmetal but not the front end or the dashboard, but I can’t remember why.
Dean, that’s a beauty!! I especially like the color combo. Very, very nice.
Wow that’s a nice car Dean! Nice two tone paint and interior too. So many cars used to have wire wheel covers but I can’t remember the last time I saw a car with them.
Sweet car! That does look nicer than a regular Caprice, with the two tone paint, chrome pedals and Pontiac steering wheel.
I had an 84 Olds 88 with that same upholstery. It wasn’t very durable.
I bought a 1977 Pontiac Bonneville Landau Coupe non brougham last year. All original 8K miles brown/cream landau top with beige cloth interior. 350 4B , Tilt sterring , power windows , Factory AC , Factory AM/FM radio , original turbine wheel caps . I love the first generation of downsized full size 77 to 81.
Attached is a picture of the new ’82 Pontiac taken at a local dealer. I would take any of the cars on that lot, including the Phoenix in the back row!
This is a photo of my 77 Bonneville!
Very nice!
Dean;
Love the pics of your lost puppy that followed you home!
My 84 was a Brougham to and I still think it was much more upscale than a Caprice.
As VinceC alluded to, that was the idea here in Canada.
The “real” Pontiacs imported from the States were much to expensive so they created the Chevy/Pontiacs to give us an affordable upgrade from the real Chevs.
It did seem to work in all sizes of cars as I remember people swearing they would never “settle” for a Chev in 2009 when Pontiac closed it’s doors and that was from G5 drivers up.
Bill
Great Pontiac memories up here in the Great White North. The old man bought a ’57 Pathfinder “Deluxe” that was armstrong everything. I think the only option that I can recall was an AM radio. I can’t imagine what the regular Pathfinder offered, other than a plainer interior and no carpet on the floor. The second was a ’65 Strato Chief 2dr post. It seemed plain, but had the 283, automatic, power steering and a radio. That was fairly loaded by Canadian standards! At least the Pontiac’s looked different enough to appear upmarket considering the Chevy underpinnings and driveline. Attached is the ’57 with mom looking like she wasn’t quite enjoying having her picture taken. I like the ’62 Laurentian in the background.
Really nice 84 Dean. We had an ’84 Parisienne in our family for many years. Just a base model, but with an LG4 305 and a TH700-R4. I preferred the non-skirted cars to the 1985 models, even if they were less distinctive from the Chevrolets. I am glad someone is preserving these cars.
My Uncle had a ’58 Pathfinder with the 261 Big six, that he still talks about to this day. When growing up, I have found memories of a ’62 Parisienne in the junk yard. It was a nearly complete car, and me and my brother used to play in it when my dad when searching for parts. I even convinced him to by a few parts off the car for “my collection”, One of my dad’s best friend’s had a ’62 Parisienne 4-door sedan too, with a 283-2bbl. I desperately wanted to buy it when he was selling, but my dad wouldn’t let me because he knew that car was a rust bucket.
Great story! My Step-Sister has pointed out I tend to speak with a Spanish accent if that’s is a Server’s first language. Maybe it’s a Midwest thing?
My Dad purchased an ’84 “Caprice in drag” two-tone blues Parisienne around ’86, it replaced his black ’77 Olds 88. He drove a lot of interstate miles at this time ultimately putting on over 200,000 + on an odometer which stopped working. I was in Seattle when my younger brother received Dad’s Pontiac Caprice when he replaced it for a new ’92 grill-less Ford Crown Vic. My brother had moved to Chicago at that time, so the Parisienne was used only on weekends. One day he went to the car only to find that it was missing. The Chicago Police where not very helpful, about five months later he spotted it (with replacement bumper stickers) and the Parisienne served him for several more years with ‘The Club’ on its steering wheel and a tiny scissor used as the key to start it.
Joseph,
I just hope your mother didn’t sound like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnlIWpZSPXU
Peter Sellers claimed he modeled Clouseau’s fractured French accent on that of a concierge he knew in Paris.
Warren, if only she sounded like that! LOL. It might have been an improvement. ☺
Chicago area was a huge market for Pontiacs, so the local dealers ran ads promoting return of ‘full size Pontiac’.
In spring 1986, Bears player William “Refrigerator” Perry did local TV ads for Parisiennes. Tag was “Big enough for the Fridge!”; Riding the Super Bowl win that winter.
And, ironically, Pontiac’s B body was again dropped for a ‘smaller car’, the H body that fall.
Growing up in Ontario, even though it was an English speaking environment, I had a lot of exposure to French, so knowing how to pronounce French words is not a problem. On the other hand I generally have no idea how to pronounce Spanish words. French is much easier than English as it has rules that are almost always followed. They are different from English rules but once you know them you are set. My problem is that I have trouble making some of the sounds that are required. In particular I cannot roll an “R” as it is done in French.
I was thinking about this and one anomaly came to mind. I think that every English speaking person in North America can pronounce Chevrolet correctly as a French name, but no one (including French speakers) will pronounce Cadillac as a French name, or even realize that it is French. I suspect the reason is that Louis Chevrolet was living when he started the company and Cadillac was a historical figure (founder of Detroit). Cadillac-sur-Garonne is a city in southwest France. Cadillac was from this area.
Was all “Mikan Pontiac” in my wstrn PA town.
I absolutely loathe this car, because of the travesty of the mis-matched bumpers. So if I’m understanding the history correctly, U.S. buyers did not get the 1980/1981 full-size Pontiacs we got here in Canada — which were actually very nicely designed cars, with the bumper sides tucked in flush against the body front and back (see photo). But the car in your post — with the tucked rear tail design awkwardly mated to the outrigger-style Caprice front bumper design… it’s so unbalanced looking, and just a testament to typical General Motors laziness. Butt-ugly… or more accurately, I suppose: front ugly.