(first posted 3/13/2013) It should not surprise you to know that I would never have stopped for a Grand Am of this vintage. And you would never have gotten a Niedermeyer CC on this car; at least not for another twenty years, if any survive that long. By that time it will be very worthy of my attention. But when I saw this one yesterday, I instantly pulled over and whipped out my jaded camera. Can you blame me?
I apologize about my Grand Am-nesia; it’s just a car that I’ve never paid a moment’s attention to once that shrunken little dwarf appeared in 1985 bearing the name. The original 1973 Grand Am was a bold stroke by Pontiac, with the most dramatic face of any of the new GM Colonnades. Just goes to show the that brand new five-mph bumpers didn’t have to look like battering rams.
Regardless of whether the gen1 Grand Am was your thing or not, it certainly left a lasting impression, despite its short run of three years. By 1975, folks were more interested in fuel economy than a 455 cubic inch mega-midsize-luxury-performance-mobile. The Grand Am lineage should have ended there forever: a unique attempt to re-create some of the old-time Pontiac excitement that just didn’t really catch on. But you just knew they couldn’t leave well enough alone.
Three years after its grand death, it was reincarnated, on the new down-sized platform that arrived in 1978. It turned out to be an even bigger dud. Whereas the ’73 sold some 45K before dropping off substantially in t1974 and 1975, the neo-GA never sold more than four figures per year; yes, they brought it back, but as a zombie.
True confession: I actually shot this gen3 GA a couple of years ago, probably for a GM Deadly Sin that I just couldn’t get inspired enough to write up. I would have preferred it be a bright red coupe with a spoiler, a vehicle that a TTAC commenter once described as inevitably belonging to a hair dresser with long nails who lives in a trailer with an out-of work boy friend. A little stereotyped, but what can I possibly add to that?
Ironically, this gen4 GA is (was) bright red with a spoiler, but its owner undoubtedly doesn’t fit the description above. The big question though: is his choice of a GA as his “blank canvas” intentional? Would he have done this to a Honda Civic? We’ll never know, but the odds lean somewhat in the direction of that speculation. Or maybe it was just really cheap. Well, that already is making a statement about it, isn’t it?
What do I know? And why speculate? Live in the moment, and just enjoy how artfully this GA has been..um..arted upon (click for larger view). One barely notices those sweet quad exhausts.
Those quads exhausts trumpet to the world that GM’s infamous 3100 V6 engine is under the hood; the one that was guaranteed to have a failed intake gasket within 90 days of the warranty expiring. Hopefully, one of the owners of this one got some benefit from the numerous class action suits against GM for this egregious little mistake. The EGR valves have an unfortunate attraction to carbon too, with the effect of increasing the consumption of more hydro-carbons. I don’t seem to see any messages on the hood regarding any engine issues, so maybe it was all taken care of earlier.
Such a unique and original vehicle deserves something from me that I almost never do: a shot from the other side. Yes; it is quite different. Now I do like the top carrier; Grand Ams are not the kind of car one typically sees with one.
It may not be apparent, but the new custom dash cover is mad from a mat of old paper maps, among other things. It appears they were all soaked first, so that they would conform to the dash’s contours. Success!
Well, I’ve shown you all my photographs, and I can’t really work myself up properly to denigrate this Grand Am. Conveniently, someone already did it for me. Feel free to whip out a marker and jump in too. You could even say something nice; I doubt anybody would too offended.
mn
This car makes that old blue ’72 Satellite look great by comparison. This is really a mess, and would make a better case for ‘taste police’ than the old Plymouth.
That was a pretty nice car many years ago.
Has to make you wonder why someone would want to do that to it..
Has anyone seen it move?
This strikes me as the kind of thing that happens when a car is already f***ed up enough that there’s not much reason to fix it properly. If the car were egged or tagged, the owner might not have had the cash to deal with it or decided there was no point in a $500+ paint job for a $250 car.
It’s on a main thoroughfare that I use very regularly. It must have appeared quite recently before I shot it a couple of days ago. I drove by it today, and it was still there, but no fresh tickets on the windshield. I suspect they’re visiting folks in one of the rental houses there. I’m going to keep a eye out for it, just out of curiosity.
As to why it’s like this: Eugene attracts a lot of the kind of folks that are likely to do this to a car. I’ve shot lots of cars with extreme “customizations” of all kinds. It’s a combination of art and political statement. BTW, Eugene is the US capital of the anarchists, although giving it that title is intrinsically in opposition to their creed.
To each their own.
I’d laugh out loud if I saw this on the road. But if someone wants to turn this 20 year old piece of shit into a rolling journal, good for them.
It always warms my heart when one of GM’s early 90s finest is put to its highest and best use. 🙂 Really, what better canvas to start with? I had better stop – when both PN and JPC start piling onto a car, things seem out of balance somehow.
Your interior shot shows something that I have not seen in years – a cracked dash pad. Those used to be everywhere, but they seem to have found the secret formula (everywhere but at GM maybe?)
Its 20 years old…I have a very hard time believeing that a similar vintage Chrysler/Ford or (insert foreign make here) would be in any better shape than this given its probable 17 years of neglect and abuse.
You’re right – I don’t see many cracked dash pads on newer cars (including GMs) though it is common around here to see them fading from the sun, or warping from the heat. We’ve traded one malady for another; as much as I don’t care for hard plastics, they make sense in some places.
On a related note, I actually wouldn’t mind finding a decent N-body Grand Am like that ’89-’91 in the fourth photo.
Actually 92-93 N-bodies had the Buick 3300 V6 which was near bullet proof. This car looks to be a 1994 with the airbag so indeed would have the 3100. A simple intake manifold gasket swap to the newer style improved material gasket makes these engines pretty long lasting solid smooth performers. I know because I have owned many examples along with nearly everybody in the family. None had the EGR issue but then we kept ours cleaned out with frequent high RPM use. Dad just last year traded his 202K mile 1999 Lumina 3100 for a 2008 Impala. Both 3100 and 4T60 were original to the car and never rebuilt.
That little ‘X’ concerns me. I’d hate to see this interesting ride impounded…
That yellow X on the RR tire does seem to indicate that it has been marked for impounding.
It takes much more than that here. That’s just a mark to show it hasn’t been moved in 24 hrs, because someone probably called to complain. But there have to be a series of warnings stuck to the windshield before it can be towed off. This isn’t San Francisco!
I would say that nobody would notice another sticker on that car but for some reason, the windshield has nary a sticker on it! Perhaps it has been replaced or there’s some state law prohibiting stuff on the front glass.
I like it. great car for Colorado or Vermont.
You say Pontiac Grand Am that little bomb is not what appears in my mind, Interesting to look at though I remember a VW beetle in Sydney I saw regularly so completely covered over in stickers it was impossible to determine a colour.
Some people think…
Pontiac covered with stickers = trouble
VW Bus covered with stickers = quaint
Neither makes sense to me.
First thought…modern day micro bus graffiti.
Second thought…bumper stickers cover rust for a while.
Third thought…call cops to see if plates match car registration.
I hope this does not turn into a N-car bash again as I think the bigger story is not the specific car but how all that decoration got on there. The plates say COLORADO but Paul lives in OREGON?
Speaking of decorated cars, we have one of these…
We do get out of state visitors here.
Yea but Google Maps tells me that Denver to Portland is like 19 hours so apparently the car runs ok. 😉
If I recall, it’s pretty damn expensive to register a car in Oregon. Whereas in Colorado (as of fifteen years ago) it was under $100.
Smog regulations might enter into it, also. Don’t know where the X plate is coded from; but if it’s away from Denver or the Springs, there’s likely no emissions check.
So…just register it using a relative’s Grand Junction address!
NC has an HUT tax upon registration which can be a pricey one time thing for an expensive vehicle. But for a cheapo car like that shouldn’t be too bad. The biggest issue with NC is that most larger municipalities are emissions checked so if you go out of state you have to come back in 12 months. 1996 and newer are full checks, 1995 and older just safety (lights, horns, etc…)
Still, CO to OR is a minute on the road.
$77 for two year registration. Can you beat that? Also, no sales tax, no smog check (except in Portland), no safety check….why do you think there are so many old cars on the road here?
Oops!
I knew it was killer in Washington State; and California is legendary. I thought someone had told me it was as bad in Oregon.
Guess not. It’s amazing how wide the cost varies…from Ohio’s ultra-cheapo $40 (as of three years ago) to Washington’s sliding scale – where the price of registration is so great it has to be included in the car note.
$36 a year here in PA. But… then there’s the privatized state safety (and emissions inspections for the Philadelphia region) at $75 to $100 at private garages / dealerships that go over your car with a fine tooth comb looking for problems that they then offer to fix. Kind of a fox guarding the hen-house scenario. Just got done spending hundreds more than it’s present value getting my well worn 92 Ford Explorer through such an inspection, mainly due to my needing to replace the rusty spring perches and rocker panels. Another reason why we have few curbside classics around here.
The car says this guy has an identity crisis and few friends.
A more appropriate left coast graffiti car…
It’s too bad, I think the N-car could have been a decent enough car. But……
You want how much to replace the water pump on my Quad 4 Grand Am….again?
Anything this owner has done to the interior must be an improvement. The interior on my car was the most astounding collection of fragile, cheap, failure prone rubbish I have seen on any car. Ever. And I bought it new back when I still had an ounce of faith in GM. The interior of my 2001 S10 is way better ( I know, it’s not saying much but it’s relative). In fact, I would say the the interior of these Grand Ams were so bad as to qualify as a Deadly Sin.
Otherwise, a decent car.
That plate (Colorado starting with X letter) would have been issued late in 2012. Makes you wonder if they bought the car that way or if they did the “decorating” themselves over the last year…Or I suppose they could have moved to CO and changed plates then…Like they say, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the american public…
The 78 Grand Am is a car I completely forgot existed, the few I’ve come across I’ve just written off as LeManses. That front end is eerily similar to the XJ Cherokee.
The 3rd and especially 4th generation like this are what killed Pontiac. The wal-mart BMW grille design, the gratuitous overuse of honeycomb, the big clunky plastic cladding, and the glossy fisher-price interiors all started here and went on to plague this once great division nearly to it’s demise, where it was too late.
That RR tire’s a bit low . . .
Other than that, the one thing that grabs me is the sticker informing the cop what will happen to him/her if the vehicle is pulled over – that is got to be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen on the back of a vehicle, and could result in some needless cop-on-civilian violence!
needless?
This car might look like a mess, but its clearly designed as a big FUCK YOU to society – check the CRASS and G.B.H. stickers adorning it’s rear end, amongst other things. As a rolling tribute to anarchism, I actually think it’s pretty well done! The choice of a General Motors N-Body is probably coincidental, but I don’t think there are many better canvasses than a flashy, red, plastic-clad Grand Am if you’re trying to make a statement about the failures of capitalism.
As far as the car underneath all that graffiti… blughhhh. OK, actually – I don’t completely hate them. I actually kinda like the earlier N-Body Pontiac, and I love that these had GM’s crazy, self-destructing Quad4… but they just looked so cheesy with all the ribbed plastic and spoilers. I’d actually feel kinda dorky driving one of the really decked out examples.
I’m glad someone here gets it 🙂
Clearly the owner of this car is having some, uh, issues with society… But the underlying car is/was actually a pretty decent model in the hierarchy. I never owned one of these N-bodies, and the only ones of this generation that I interacted with were rentals, of course. To my back, the cheap seats in the rental versions were mobile pain delivery devices. I can remember several trips in these cars where I could not get out of the car fast enough once the trip was completed. They hurt that much!
I understand Paul’s gripe with GM about the naming convention, but in a way, the car fit into the model hierarchy just fine. Maybe they should have named the base N body “Tempest” or “Ventura” and the full bore spoilers and V6 option “Grand Am”. But by the 1990’s no one was using the old base model/high end model with different names strategy any longer. Grand Am it is.
But, ~20 years on, I’m digging their outré style. I already have a Sunfire GT, which at 18 years old is a rolling antique. I’ve rehabbed mine to the point that it’s an excellent daily driver, and the old girl really stands out on the road. I have to admit that I get a certain kind of perverse pleasure driving the car, because I know it pisses off a certain (snobbish, IMO) segment of the motorhead population…
If I had the storage capacity that junqueboi seems to have (lucky dog), I’d be buying up whole used car lots of early 90’s to early 00’s Pontiacs. The more side cladding and spoilers, the better!
Oh, crap! Maybe I have, uh, issues with society…
Here’s the pix I was looking for!
Don’t do drugs, kids.
I went through three of these trash heaps. THREE. And, four engines. The one I had with the 3300 literally fell apart like some Soviet horror show.
They made the W-body looks like a W123.
And I’m so stupid that I’ll probably buy another one someday.
don’t worry about it because you are not alone. Why do you think the big three are still in business? Because Americans buy their junk.
I can go check it out and make an offer on it for you. 😀
I read somewhere that people who slap lots of bumper stickers on their cars tend to be aggressive drivers. I think there was actually a semi-scientific study done. IIRC, political orientation made no difference. I wonder how many moving violations the owner of this Lesser Am has accumulated!
Probably should be more like “PETITE AM” or maybe that sounds too French…
I agree with you, people that overtly display opinions tend to be aggressive across the board. Mostly because it is fresh in their minds where as the average American is ignorant or indifferent.
Pretty obvious why.
Loud people, pushy people, people who think they hold exclusivity on the truth…tend to get into others’ faces.
And what IS that car, if not in-your-face? People with respect for the opinions of others…tend to be a bit more restrained. And tend not to try to spike other drivers’ blood-pressure and road-rage tendencies by tweaking them in stressful settings…like, say, traffic jams.
PETITE AM…sounds like something that belongs in the brassiere section. Just the thing for a Junior Miss.
Hey…on second thought, maybe it IS a good name for this thing!
Um, wow.
Ah, youth. When you feel no cognitive dissonance in painting an anarchy ‘A’ and a peace sign on the same hood. Whichever, it made you look! Good times.
The featured Grand Am looks like something out of Mad Max. But as an adolescent in the ’90s, I remember thinking these were hot cars, and suggesting my parents buy one. My Dad, presciently, told me they were ridiculous.
Not only does having an anarchy “A” and a peace sign on the same hood of the same car show a complete lack of cognitive dissonance, it also creates a superb visual oxymoron for passers by that know the meaning and associations that the two symbols have.
Workers of the World Unite!!!
What is this, a car or some starving artist’s rolling canvas?
The “if you pull me over I’ll kill you” sticker must go over really well with the cops…….
This is a car that inspires safe driving, no crossing a double line, strick observance of the speed limit, no blowing an “orange” light….its the perfect car for a first driver.
I sold tons of these Grand Ams, they may have been cheesy to some, but they hit the mark with people that were willing sign the contract. It was the hit of the Grand Am nameplate, it lived through 4 generations from 1985 to 2004, so “deadly sin” or not, they sold plenty of them.
I think it would be funny to redo this car under cover of darkness. Metallic walnut glow paint to cover all the psychological excreta, a gold pinstripe, wire wheel covers, whitewalls…
You’ve been Broughamed! How do you like those apples?
LOL. That is a great idea! The Brougham police strike again!
The Pontiac Grand Am rubbed me wrong from the start…not the car, but the name. It sounded like what it most probably was: the creation of a committee that merged two fine Pontiac names, dropping the “Prix” and the “Trans” to create “Grand Am.”
Committees never brought us anything outstandingly good. They are better at teetering-on-the-brink sub-mediocrity. Look at Amtrak, for another example.
This particular example wouldn’t have done all that well at testing out its “IF YOU PULL ME OVER” threat. One of its tires is flat. WHERE, you ask? Where else? ON THE BOTTOM.
This car probably didn’t stay long at this location anyway. It’s already been marked as abandoned, with chalk on one tire, and its appointment with the tow truck–destination: car crusher– is not far off.
Im shocked at the amount of haters on this (1995) im sure GA. My mom bought a brand new 1995 Pontiac Grand Am SE with the 4 cyl base model with a spoiler (these cars looked incomplete w/o one lol) and with reg oil changes and a couple of not so big issues she drove that car for 7 years and finally traded it in at 168,000 miles. To this day she will vow it was one of her best cars ever owned, at least not all of them were lemons imo. I miss it, it was a typical for your mid nineties car with a beautiful hunter green met paint. Memory lane lol
Back in the 80’s my friend Chris had a 2dr Damned Am he bought new with the “DUKE”. We timed it to 60 one night with the two of us and it took 20 full seconds! It was actually a nice car we thought. Many trips to Dallas/Ft Worth metroplex and it rode quietly and relatively smooth. Three years later he moved from Wichita Falls to San Antonio and then it started falling apart. Kept it for one more year than had to get rid of it. But while it was here, he and I liked it. I thought it was a nice car.
At least my Grand Am GT doesn’t look like that
“I’m glad someone here gets it ” .
More than you think I imagine =8-) .
I have no beef with ‘art cars’ but covering the taillights should *instantly* attract the ticket monster and rightly so .
-Nate
Counterpoint to Paul’s opinion of the Grand Am as a lineage; I was 11 in ’85 so that to me was the start of the “real” Grand Am. When the name revived it became a model line in full, as well-differentiated as anything else GM made at the time (more on that in a moment). Everything that came before was a precursor, and just a trim level in the “older midsize Pontiac” bucket.
The original (FWD N-body) Grand Am strikes me though as the sort of car that would’ve been much better if Pontiac had been given exclusive reign over the car’s design in return for Buick and Olds each having a larger sedan to themselves. The formal roofline certainly clashed with the rest of the car’s styling, and its’ market positioning.
That must be how one empties the residue of the aerosol paint cans after a morning of huffing.
Good environmental practice there.
To be fair the Photo appears to be Self Inflicted by the owner themselves, driving around in a Grand Am wannabe, akin to driving around in a Cadillac Cimarron…
Those ashes do actually crack. Right around the screw holes that keep it installed. The fastener clips seem to stand up better due to available movements of extreme temperature change. Either way, I probably already spent more time looking at this malady than when these were new cars. AT least the art looks somewhat creative.
> is his choice of a GA as his “blank canvas” intentional?
I think yes, so he could quickly clean most of it up for a new buyer simply by removing the cladding…
Hmm, that bumper sticker on the lower right side of the rear window is interesting.
“If you pull me over I will fucking kill you.”
Suffice it to say usually the only people who pull drivers over tend to be police officers. If this driver gets pulled over will the officer have a sense of humor or will the officer take it on the more serious side?
I really dont think the “cop kill” sticker is funny.
Lame at best.
I used to work with a guy who had a tongue “stud”.
When he talked he used to clank and clunk it around his teeth and stick his tongue out here and there.
I eventually figured out that I was supposed to notice and comment on it, because if it was interesting to him it is supposed to be interesting to me to.
So I made sure to never look at it, and never comment on the clanking and clunking sounds.
This reminds me of that.
Except that I just admitted that I noticed it.
Um, okay then.
Dammit.
This heap is(was?) a rolling representation of the average Twitter addict
@ Matt ~
Does this mean I can begin ranting about ‘those gol durn _KIDS_ ~’ ? .
You’re making another old man very happy =8-) .
-Nate