A full-size 1970s Pontiac with fender skirts, wire wheels, Landau vinyl top, crushed velour upholstery, and … bucket seats? This rare buckets-and-console 1979 Bonneville coupe is the rolling embodiment of the Pontiac division’s ’70s identity crisis, offering the tiniest dash of sport in a sea of brougham-flavored luxury.
I was going to title this post “Bucket Seat Brougham,” but while this Bonneville certainly subscribed to the aesthetic trends of the Great Brougham Epoch, it’s actually a base Bonneville coupe, not a Bonneville Brougham, which was a distinct Pontiac model in 1979.
Pontiac was certainly not the only automaker to use the term “Brougham” as a trim level, but the fact that they did said a lot about the direction the division had taken in the ’70s. The days when Bunkie Knudsen had launched the limited-production, fuel-injected Bonneville convertible to signal Pontiac’s new, sportier, more vivacious direction were long gone.
The downsized 1977–1979 Bonneville was for all intents and purposes a Catalina with a different grille and taillights (newly refreshed for 1979), different wheel covers (replaced on this car with the optional wire wheel covers), and rear fender skirts.
It also had these curious sunburst medallion emblems, one of which served as the stand-up hood ornament.
I’m not going to mince words here: From a stylistic standpoint, I think the Bonneville was the least successful of the downsized GM B-bodies. It looked like Pontiac had campaigned unsuccessfully to build the Bonneville on the larger C-body platform (like the Olds Ninety-Eight and Buick Electra), and when that didn’t pan out, resentfully adapted the design proposals to the shorter B-body. The optional Landau roof treatment didn’t help, making the Bonneville look like it was wearing its hat pulled down over its ears, and, as on the earlier Colonnade Grand LeMans coupe, the Bonneville’s skirted rear wheels made the wheelbase look even shorter than it was. (It was 115.9 inches.)
The Catalina/Bonneville line was the slowest seller of the 1977–1979 GM full-size cars, and it’s not hard to see why. It was an awkward-looking beast.
If you love fender skirts, simulated wire wheels, and padded Landau tops, more power to you — Pontiac managed to sell 179,416 Bonnevilles for 1979, so there was still some market for this kind of thing. However, I can’t really see a good reason to choose this Bonneville over an Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale coupe, which was similarly priced and notably more tasteful.
I admit that part of my problem is that I still expect a Bonneville to look something like this. It was big, but it had some sporting verve, and it had that exquisite draftsmanship that was the signature of former Pontiac styling chief Jack Humbert (a quality that’s difficult to capture in photos, but very pleasing to the eye). To quote the late Brock Yates, “That, Bunkie me boy, was a Bonneville.”
Tastes change, of course, and there were 15 tough years between that ’64 and this ’79, but would it have been too much to ask for at least a little of the old pizzazz? Some hint of sportiness that offered a perceptible link to the popular Grand Prix and Trans Am, rather than rummaging through the Goodwill donations box of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville? I guess it was.
Which is why the interior of this car knocked me for a loop. Bucket seats and a center console in a Bonneville, maybe — but buckets and console In THIS Bonneville? An unexpected twist, to be sure.
For a car of this type and era, the Bonneville interior was inoffensive — I find it more tasteful than the exterior — but with its bright red velour trim and faux-leather door pull straps, it was anything but sporty.
Unlike many smaller Pontiac models of this era, the Catalina/Bonneville instrument panel didn’t even have an array of small, empty circular binnacles to suggest a vast bank of instruments. There was a “rally gage” option that replaced the warning lights in the right-hand binnacle with real instruments, but this car doesn’t have it.
The bucket seats themselves were shared with the LeMans, Grand Am, and Grand Prix, but unlike those cars, the Bonneville buckets were offered only in plush Lombardy velour, in your choice of Blue, Camel Tan, or this eye-popping Carmine. (The buckets in the Grand Prix were available in vinyl, leather, or Galante cloth, but none of those were offered on the Bonneville.)
Curiously, bucket seats were optional only on the base Bonneville coupe, not on the Catalina or the Bonneville Brougham. (The latter was offered only with an “loose-cushion look” 60/40 split bench upholstered in even more indulgent Dante cloth.) I much prefer buckets to bench seats, personally, and I like consoles, but I can’t see the point of them in a car like this — it’s like finding a gamer chair in London’s posh Reform Club.
In some other year, you might have been able to make this car into a nasty if rather perverse sleeper; being beaten in a street race by a car with fender skirts and simulated wire wheel covers would make many people reconsider their life choices. However, that sort of thing was no longer easy to accomplish, at least from the factory options list. The most powerful engine available in the full-size Pontiac line now had only 160 net horsepower.
This car has the L27 Pontiac 301-2V V-8, with 140 hp, which was the standard engine in the Bonneville. (The base engine in the Catalina was the Buick V-6.) The 301 was available only with 2.29 or 2.41 axle ratios, making its performance that much more lethargic, and it still wasn’t terribly economical — maybe 16 mpg overall.
Unfortunately, the presence of the L27 engine under the hood means the floor shifter is operating the unhappy TH200 automatic. Today, hot-rodders insist that the TH200 can be rebuilt into a reasonably sturdy and efficient transmission, but in original stock form, it was extremely troublesome for owners. The Federal Trade Commission received more than 1,500 complaints about TH200 failures requiring expensive repairs, sometimes after as little as 15,000 miles. In August 1980, the FTC filed a formal complaint against GM over those problems (and several others), which was eventually settled through a 1983 consent agreement.
It was possible to order a 1979 Bonneville on which the buckets were somewhat less incongruous. This coupe is more like it: Starlight Black paint, no Landau top, and cast aluminum “snowflake” alloys rather than wire wheel covers. It also has the L77 Buick 350 V-8, the sturdier TH350 transmission, and the Rally RTS suspension to tidy up its handling manners. You’ll forgive me if I still think it was beaten with at least one end of the ugly stick, but its aura of menace does offer some compensation.
Inside, the black car’s Camel Tan interior gives a more business-like atmosphere, although the contrast between the buckets and the velour upholstery is still somewhat jarring. This car even has the “rally gage” option, making it in many respects a very different sort of Bonneville than our featured car, despite the similarity in their furnishings.
The Platinum coupe has no performance features I can see, and no performance pretensions other than the outside sport mirrors and the buckets and console, which in context seem like the automotive equivalent of red velvet track shoes. Unsurprisingly, only 5,071 1979 Bonneville coupes (around 15 percent) had bucket seats. If ever there was a car that cried out for some kind of cushy split bench seat, this was it.
It’s not that every car needs to be sporty, or even that Pontiac always needed to be sporty, but a medium-priced car needed to be something, especially in a marketplace already crowded with mechanically similar GM siblings. This Bonneville looked like a car that didn’t know what it wanted to be — whose makers didn’t know what they wanted it to be, and were throwing everything at the wall in the hope that something would stick. It seems that nothing did: Catalina, Bonneville, and Bonneville Brougham coupe production totaled only 78,631 cars for 1979, grim numbers for a mainstream GM car line in a pretty good year for Detroit. Maybe Pontiac should have gone all the way and brought back the old “Silver Streaks” that Knudsen had removed 20-odd years earlier.
The four-door sedans did a little better, tallying 117,391 cars for the model year, but that was still nothing to write home about. Pontiac did quite well overall in 1979 — Firebird production totaled an outstanding 211,454 units, the Grand Prix another 210,050 — but the full-size line had lost its way, and wouldn’t find it again until the later FWD versions.
This Bonneville coupe will never be counted among the great Pontiacs, but thanks to its novelty, condition, and relatively low mileage (46,387 miles when these photos were taken), it has retained some surprisingly loyal fans. It sold for a healthy $24,200 at Mecum Kissimmee in January 2026.
Related Reading
CC Capsule: 1979 Pontiac Bonneville – A Doppelgänger If I’ve Ever Seen One (by Brendan Saur)
Curbside Classic: 1979 Pontiac Bonneville – Yacht Rock (by Joseph Dennis)
Curbside Classic: 1979 Pontiac Bonneville Brougham Coupe – Who Needs A Cadillac? (by Tom Kockau)
CC For Sale: 1979 Pontiac Bonneville – Minty, In More Ways Than One… (by Tom Klockau)
Curbside Classic: 1979 Pontiac Bonneville – Lime Sherbet (by Joseph Dennis)
eBay Find: 1979 Pontiac Bonneville Landau – Daddy’s Home (by Perry Shoar)
A reader’s comment in your article last week about the Olds Holiday coupe made me pay special attention to the console in these Pontiacs. The Olds console seems to have just jammed up against (that is, partially obstructed) the centre heater ducts. The Pontiac console is much less of an afterthought: here, the console is much higher, and each side has a heater vent directly into the footwell.
I’m still not convinced that bucket seats and a floor shifter are a good match for a B-body, but at least Pontiac was putting its heart into the idea. Possibly the experience of building all those gorgeous Colonnade Grand Prix interiors was paying off.
Yeah, I took notice of the heater ducts as well. It seems that Fisher Body belatedly sorted that out.
The console still doesn’t fit as neatly into the Bonneville as in the midsize cars. In those, the front of the console butts up directly against the dashboard, with the radio just above console level. The compartment at the front of the console houses the ashtray and lighter in the midsize cars. But in the Bonneville, the ashtray is in its usual spot as on bench-seat Bonnevilles, which winds up being between the console and dashboard. So instead of the usual ashtray at the front of the console, in the Bonneville there’s a curious little open tray to fill the space where it would have gone in the GP/LeMans. For toll-booth coins maybe? It just looks like an afterthought in the Bonneville, which it was.
The curious thing about GM offering bucket seats in their mid-sized or big cars was that they were almost always restricted to coupes. Why was that? Nowadays even the largest sedans have the buckets-and-console layout, and GM didn’t mind putting buckets and consoles in Nova sedans in the ’70s.
The regular 3 Speed 200/200c is hopeless. The one that can be built up is the 4 Speed 200-4R, that was used in the Grand National
Here are two differing contemporary takes on this point: https://www.hotrod.com/features/gms-turbo-200-slick-shift-or-short-shrift-june-1982-982-1583-29-1
Those cloth seats look so much more comfortable compared to today’s recycled plastic tread seating surfaces.
Also, you could pick the color of your interior. Today, it’s any color as long as its black.
Differing tastes, I guess. I’d pick a ’77-’79 Bonneville over any other B-body of those years, even though I love the backlight on the Chevy coupes, specifically because I like the instrument panel more than any of the others. Can’t say I love the fender skirts, but the one place you can’t see them is inside the car.
With only a couple of exceptions, during the Malaise Era, Pontiac had a very “meh” lineup. The only 2 standouts were the A-Special Grand Prix and the various flavors of F-body cars. Other than those two, everything else was a “me too” version of cars found elsewhere in the GM lineup.
Aaron, another fine, in-depth analysis. While I agree that this generation Bonneville is the worst, the Bonneville did bounce back with the front wheel drive generation starting in1987. These were attractive, fairly well regarded cars, especially in SE and SSE trim. Starting in 1996 you could even supercharge the 3800. Far preferable to their boring Olds 88 and Buick LeSabre cousins. They also sold decently In the marketplace.
Always found it odd that while Pontiac was emphasizing sportiness, they didn’t offer an H-body Bonneville coupe, leaving the Olds Delta 88 and Buick LeSabre the coupe for themselves. Although I find the LeSabre T-type coupe to have a sportier vibe than the Bonneville sedans.
This is a fair point. I was really thinking of the RWD cars — the Parisienne and the final B-body wagons, so I should add a qualifier to that effect.
I am not a fan of the FWD Bonnevilles, especially the overwrought SSEi, but I can’t say they didn’t have a clear idea what they wanted to be or that they lacked Pontiac brashness (or plastic cladding).
The supercharged 3800 was actually available on the Bonneville SSEi from 1992, and it became optional on the SSE in 1993.
Exterior wise I struggle to find a single interesting element. Quite bland from some angles, outright unattractive from others; the fender skirts are the worst offender.
The interior on the other hand is pleasant, the console looks nice, fake stitching and all, but I agree it is out of place on a car such as this
Agree on the fender skirts! They kill any visual appeal of the car…
Yeah, remove and keep for a show/cruise/meet or the like.
The ’77-79 Bonneville coupes looked best with a metal roof, the larger non-opera rear quarter window (shared with the LeSabre Limited and Sport Coupe) and the neat two-tone paint and stripe that wrapped around the rear section of the roof.
I’ve also come around to thinking the Bonneville had the best-looking dashboard amongst box B-bodies, and the nicest center console as well (compared to Olds’ and Buick’s). Too bad it only lasted through 1981.
Pontiac had a problem with the Bonneville. For most of its life, the model (and the later Grandville) got a stretched wheelbase, or at least a longer deck, to set it apart from lesser models. No such path was available with the new 1977 B/C body. Because Pontiac didn’t rate a C, it had to make do with the same B body as the Catalina. I think they did a decent job for the era and what they had to work with. It’s funny how the whole industry could go full Brougham in those years, but that Pontiac could fall so flat with that trend that paid such dividends elsewhere.
I like this car more than I should, though none of the engine choices is a favorite for me. I will confess that the buckets and console package is a curiosity in this car.
The front is fine, the midsection is fine to the end of the door (although not different enough from an Impala to make a difference), but then it all falls down with the combination of the landau top and those horrific fender skirts, either of which are bad but together just multiply the soggy diaper effect. And then it finishes with the Hannibal Lecter mask effect tail lights. Just trying way too hard with one or three too many passes down the GM / Pep Boys collaboration aisle. The fender skirts especially don’t work with the way the lower body trim line doesn’t quite match up, raise that line or lower the skirts even more if you must, it just looks like someone didn’t measure twice before stamping.
I do like the interior though, at least from afar, just not sure I can really afford to pay the madam the entry fee.
The basic body sans landau top isn’t bad, it’s basically the LeSabre profile which I personally find the best looking of the 77-79 B coupes, but where the Pontiac really loses me is the toothy grille and taillights that are both busy and boring somehow. The front end design, like the body, isn’t bad but basically looks like a refresh of the 76-77 Lemans design but clunkier and less distinctive. I think if the black one omitted the skirts it would be handsome though.
I actually like the interior, and I have no problem with velour as a “sporty” fabric, it’ll grip you better through a turn than slippery vinyl or leather and frankly from today’s point of view the exotic Alcantara used in supercars really isn’t all that different in look or feel from velour
…like in this Ferrari
Yes, the Pontiacs were the weakest of this generation of B Bodies, which of course explains why they dropped them totally in 1982 (only to regret that a few years later and import the Parisienne). And yes, buckets and a console with floor shifter is all wrong in these. That ship sailed a long time ago. That was not an option on the 1971-1976 B body cars at all, and I suspect not on the later years of its successor. So it seems odd to bring them back.
With all due respect, you’re all wrong. That car is gorgeous. Swap out the wires for PMD rally IIs and it’s almost perfect (better without the landau).
GM did offer bucket seats on some unlikely cars in the 1970s. My father ordered a 1976 Buick Century wagon with bucket seats – the reason he specified buckets is that he hated bench seats, and wanted to avoid anyone ever sitting next to him. Maybe this Bonneville’s original owner felt similarly.
Dad owned his Century wagon for 8 years, and never saw another one like it.
Amusingly, I have a truck now with a bench seat, and I love it. Lots of room to stretch out. People who’ve grown up in the Bucket-Seats-and-Console era don’t know what they’re missing!
My father bought a ’77 Bonneville after owning ’62, ’68 & ’71 Catalina’s. The pricing must have been close to a Catalina or he never would have sprung for it. He thought he was living large with the wire wheels and fender skirts. He was 70 years old that year.
At the time I thought he should have gone for the Caprice if only just for the styling. The Bonnie had the 301 engine as well. It truly was a tarted up Catalina.
the general manager of Pontiac who replaced DeLorean was not very good.
My older brother was and is a GM man to the core. In his world, GM could do no wrong. Well, he bought a used 1979 Parisienne in 1982, a very low km example. It was just like the one featured, right down to the bucket seats, except the colour was baby blue. Being a Canadian model, it had the SBC 305 and the Turbo 200.
Well, not long after he bought it the transmission went out of it. It was replace by a THM 350 and the car went on to give many years of good service.
If I had the $$ for things like this, it would be a contender.
Man you would have to be blind to buy this over a 2 door Caprice or Olds 88 if you wanted something plusher. 1970s full size Pontiacs really were lost in the weeds, they were fussier/uglier Chevrolets IMO.
I like this Bonneville with the bucket seats! It’s almost like a super-sized Grand Prix, but more luxury-minded. I remember reading / researching how the B-body Pontiacs of this generation were the slowest sellers among the four non-Cadillac GM brands, but it’s not for these cars lacking style. They were far away from the performance-leaning Pontiacs of a decade before – or even from the hot-selling, concurrent F-body Firebird / Trans Am, but these Bonnevilles had great style, IMO.
I may be partial to the B-Body Pontiacs of this era, as I had some of my first legal experiences driving on paved roads in a powder blue ’77 (?) Catalina coupe, but I really do think the Oldsmobiles were hands down the ugliest out of all of them, at least prior to the ’80 refresh. That blunt upright wall of grill and lights just doesn’t do it for me, especially on non-Custom Cruisers, where they just barely pull it off.
The Pontiacs at least have some style, a little more finesse and fluidity. I even like the ’80 Catalina restyle. Again I may be biased because my first girlfriend drove a powder blue ’80 Catalina sedan…
This brings back memories…my mother had one of these. White with blue landau top and interior. By the time my brother and I were in high school in the mid-late 80s the rust had set in but we got to drive it to school and some other places now and again.
We can personally attest that you could lay rubber with it and it was possible to get it airborne under the right circumstances.
Eventually the rot and a failing transmission brought an end to it, but it was a stout car that served our family well. To this day when we see one for sale, we send pics of it to each other and start looking at our bank balances 😉