You could say a lot about the 1959 Pontiac, especially the top-of-the-line Bonneville, but its most lasting legacy was introducing the trademark Pontiac split grille. Although Pontiac nearly abandoned the split grille theme after only one year, it was soon revived, and became Pontiac’s defining stylistic signature for the rest of the brand’s existence. Here’s how that happened.
Today, if an automaker has a distinctive or memorable grille theme — never mind if it’s good or bad — they will usually ride that theme into the ground, often exaggerating it to the point of absurdity.
A lot of modern high-end vehicles are now more grille than car — an array of black plastic Cheshire Cat grins that linger after the rest of the car has faded from memory. This seems to be by design.
If you want to be charitable, you could call it a throwback to the era of prewar Classics. In Days Gone By™, high-end automakers didn’t necessarily design or make their own bodies (wealthy customers ordered a rolling chassis and commissioned a bespoke body from a coachbuilder), so the radiator shell was the manufacturer’s principal visual trademark, and the surest way to distinguish a Rolls-Royce from a Peerless or a Packard. Today, we usually just call that “branding,” which is something that most automakers, even much less pricey ones, take very seriously.
Pontiac in the late ’50s was in the midst of the more difficult and complicated process we now call “rebranding.” It had never been a high-end marque, of course — Pontiac was introduced in 1926 as a cheaper companion make for Oakland, and was now second from the bottom on the GM brand/price ladder — but its image had gotten dangerously fusty, and its new general manager, Semon E. “Bunkie” Knudsen, was looking to shake things up.
From 1935 through the mid-’50s, Pontiac’s principal visual signifier was not its grille, but its “Silver Streak,” a band of chrome strips extending length-wise through the center of the hood and sometimes also the rear deck. These streaks began to split in two for 1953, and became two distinct strips for 1955–1956.
Knudsen thought the streaks “looked like a pair of suspenders.” They were certainly distinctive, but they were also strongly associated with the old, fusty Pontiac, so Knudsen had them removed from the 1957 models at the last minute.
The problem was that 1957–1958 Pontiac models now lacked visual identity. They had plenty of bling, especially in the pricier trim levels, but so did many mid-market cars of the time, and there wasn’t anything that screamed “This is a new PONTIAC!”
Even with a top-of-the-line Pontiac Bonneville, a careless observer might accidentally compliment the proud new owner on their new Chevrolet Impala, which shared the same Body by Fisher shell and looked quite similar except in detail. The horror!
That brings us to the 1959 Pontiac, which introduced this dramatic split grille. There’s some dispute about who actually came up with this grille concept: Historian Michael Lamm credits it to earlier Pontiac design studio chief Paul Gillan, noting that Gillan had proposed something similar in 1955 that then-VP of Styling Harley Earl hadn’t liked. Jack Humbert, who joined the Pontiac studio in fall 1958, attributed the twin grille design to his immediate predecessor, studio chief Jack Schmansky, whom Humbert succeeded in March 1959.
In any event, the split grille was a very good trick. It was at least as distinctive as the Silver Streaks, it made the front end look even wider than it was (1959 was the first year of Pontiac’s “Wide-Track” advertising theme, an idea proposed by ad agency MacManus, John and Adams that Knudsen initially thought “corny”), and it later proved to be adaptable to a wide range of body designs and shapes.
Surprisingly, Knudsen had no particular enthusiasm for the split grille theme, and the 1960 Pontiac — which was finished in all but minor details by the time the 1959 cars went on sale — had already dropped it, with the result seen above.
Recently promoted GM Styling VP Bill Mitchell was reportedly very enthusiastic about the 1960 grille, whose trapezoid-shaped center section was originally supposed to be a visual allusion to the front differential of the Miller FWD race cars of the 1920s.
Mitchell had a tendency to become fixated on these kinds of homages to famous prewar cars of his youth, which wasn’t necessarily to his credit. Not all of those designs translated easily to postwar styles or production methods, and while some of the results were impressive, others were regrettable, or just pointless. I’d put the 1960 Pontiac grille in the latter category: Even if someone was familiar with the Miller FWD racers of 35 years earlier, the visual resemblance was so watered-down as to be meaningless, and there was no real connection there. (The Bonneville wasn’t FWD, and wouldn’t be for another 25 years.) The 1960 grille didn’t look bad, but it didn’t look like anything in particular
I should emphasize that the ’59 split grille wasn’t dropped because Mitchell or Knudsen disliked it. Planned obsolescence was the name of the game in Detroit, and the lead times of design and tooling meant that any time a new model went on sale, the stylists were probably already working on the successor to its successor. Any number of features were tried and then swiftly discarded in this way. It usually didn’t pay to get too sentimental about such things, although it is surprising that neither Mitchell nor Knudsen recognized the split grille’s potential value as a brand-building element.
Nevertheless, the GM Styling Staff soon realized that the split grille had been too good an idea to simply abandon. “I’m not sure the public cared one way or another, as the ’60 Pontiac sold very well,” explained stylist Dave Holls. “But inside the company, we all lamented the loss of the twin grille. The styling studios felt that way to a man.” Once Humbert became Pontiac chief stylist, he said he “recognized it was such a strong mark that we took it again for 1961.”
So, the split grille reappeared on full-size Pontiacs a year after its disappearance, in new but obviously evolutionary form.
Pontiac also adapted the theme for the 1961 Tempest Y-body compact, and then repeated its previous pattern by dropping the split grille for 1962, only to restore it to the Tempest a year later.
After that, Pontiac stylists apparently decided that the split grille was an immutable point of Pontiac brand identity, and it was never really dropped again. It did eventually become more a theme than a specific design: By the late ’60s, for instance, it had evolved into a beak-like prow.
In the ’70s, the split grille on the full-size cars became a slightly V-shaped radiator shell, perhaps reflecting the decade’s fetish for neoclassical styling.
The now midsize Pontiac Grand Prix retained a more formal grille separation through 1977 before adopting a V-shaped grille like the big cars’ for 1978.
As Pontiac began to make concessions to the age of aerodynamic styling, the grilles sometimes became slots, or perhaps nostrils.
At times, the thread of styling continuity seemed to fray, but it never quite snapped.
If the twin-grille nose of the popular Grand Am looked more than a little BMW-like, that was fine with Pontiac (though not always with BMW).
As GM’s car divisions lost their autonomy and became little more than marketing entities in an increasingly centralized corporation, the split grille became that much more important for Pontiac. It was a recognizable, inexpensive design cue that could be easily added to give a dash of Pontiac identity to even unlikely products, like a Daewoo-built version of the Opel Kadett E, reviving the LeMans name …
… or a minivan with a notorious resemblance to the Black & Decker DustBuster vacuum cleaner.
At times, the split grille theme started to feel a little half-hearted. Bisecting the slot-like grille of a ’90s Bonneville SSE/SSEi with the Pontiac emblem always struck me as cheating, as if someone in the Pontiac studio had been pushing hard for a new direction, only to be shot down again late in the development process.
Pontiac doggedly retained the split grille all the way to the end of the line in 2010. (The last car off the line in January 2010 was a G6 sedan like the one above, though not this one particular car.)
Back in 1959, Pontiac did offer a few other features to help to justify its mid-price status — a Bonneville sport coupe like the Sienna Coral car pictured above started at $3,257, a whopping $540 more than a 1959 Impala. On the top-of-the-line Bonneville, these enticements included lots of extra chrome inside and out, bright aluminum seat frames, and additional sound insulation.
There was also flashy tri-color “Jeweltone Morrokide” upholstery that could make you feel like you were riding in a giant bucket of candy corn, plus a “star-flecked” headliner and carpeting and a fold-down rear armrest (in closed bodies only).
(The interior shots above are not of the car pictured in the exterior photos, but another in the same color scheme.)
Even base Catalina buyers got a standard Pontiac 389 V-8, bigger than any Chevrolet engine offered at the time, and only 1 cubic inch short of Cadillac.
This Bonneville also has Tri-Power carburetion, good for 315 gross horsepower and 0 to 60 times in the mid-8s, but you paid extra for that. (The nifty fender badge alone was worth about half the price premium, if you ask me.)
You also paid extra for the four-speed Super Hydra-Matic, although very few of these cars went without. Chevrolet still used the two-speed Powerglide, or the rarer and sometimes more troublesome triple-turbine Turboglide. Hydra-Matic was considerably more versatile, with multiple driving ranges that helped you stay in third or second for mountain driving — useful given that the brakes on these cars left much to be desired.
However, I think the most essential point was that the Pontiac now looked different from a Chevrolet, or an Oldsmobile, and the split grille had a lot to do with that. In later years, that and a lot of ribbed plastic body cladding were about all Pontiac still had to offer that you couldn’t get on other versions of the same shared GM platforms, but for a while, it was often enough. (The Grand Am used to be everywhere.)
My last experience with a newish Pontiac was a week in a late-model rental Grand Prix in 2006. It had the normally aspirated 3800 rather than the LS4 V-8 of the GXP pictured above, but the V-6 gave the GP impressively long legs and surprisingly good high-speed fuel economy, unfortunately combined with dishearteningly cheap furnishings and a who-cares casualness to every visible aspect of its design and finish, which would have put it near the bottom of my shopping list as a new car buyer. (My traveling companion was also none too pleased about the postage-stamp-size “GM” badges on the front fenders after noticing that they were also present on every rental Cobalt we saw, a self-defeating attempt at corporate identity that nobody asked for.)
However, that 2006 Grand Prix still had the familiar split grille, and if you squinted a bit, or gave it the spurs on a stretch of smooth Southern asphalt late in the evening, there was still the faintest trace of the old Bunkie Knudsen/Pete Estes/John DeLorean/Jack Humbert swagger that had once made Pontiac such a big deal, once upon a time.
Related Reading
Curbside Classic: 1959 Pontiac Catalina Sport Coupe – Lessons In Aging (by J P Cavanaugh)
Curbside Classic: 1959 Pontiac Catalina Vista Sedan – Wide-Tracking To Success (by Paul N)
1959 Pontiac Catalina: No Frills, Jet-Age Wide-Track Survivor – Options? I Hate Options (by Aaron65)
Car Show Classic: 1960 Pontiac Bonneville Vista Hardtop – A Few Extra Inches Of Prestige (by Aaron65)
Thanks Aaron!