The Fiero is a polarizing subject. I obviously see mainly its negatives, as brought forth in my DS. The 149 comments there attest to that quite colorfully. But I can also see why journalists were mostly positive about it at its introduction. It was the summer of 1983, and everyone’s attitude was still mired in the tail end of the Malaise Era. The first green shoots of the new era of performance were just appearing. So naturally a mid-engine sports car—even if dubbed a “commuter car”—was going to raise high hopes and expectations. And its performance was going to be judged to the standards of the near past and present, not the rapidly changing future.
And therein is the crux of the Fiero’s Deadly Sin: it might have been just sort of good enough in 1983, but even then there was hedging, as in dangling a future V6 instead of offering it from the get go. And certain limitations in its suspension were already making itself known, if in a modest way as of yet.
The Fiero was another great GM missed opportunity. Once again they pulled their punches, which quickly became obvious. Buyers of exciting and sporty cars want to sense that they’re the creations of unbridled passion and risk-taking. Dropping in the Iron Duke (with an undersized oil pan) pretty much insured that wasn’t going to be the case.
My apologies, but I’m a bit distracted with other things to be able to add any commentary, so here’s your chance to relive the Fiero’s introduction and a road test and do the commentary yourselves.
CC 1984 Pontiac Fiero: GM DS #19 – Give Us Five Years To Get It Almost Right And Then We’ll Kill It
I have a vivid memory of test driving one in Fall of 83. Dealer was at the base of long hill on Highway 46 East in Little Falls NJ. It was a red one with an automatic. Nailed it pulling out of their drive and it struggled to make the 1/2 mile climb, the Iron Duke screaming all the way. Very disappointing after all the hype. I remarked to the salesgirl that it felt like a low slung Chevette.
I bought my son a used ’86 Fiero (wheezy) 4; he loved it. Of cour$e, he wasn’t the one who kept DUMPING $$$ into it so it would run. Looked nice, performed uhh…what performance?
It was finally totaled by a fine young fellow (how’s that for PC?), sans license or insurance, who ran a stop sign. Structurally the car was still fine, but visually it was toast….therefore the insurance Co. totaled it. That most likely ended up saving me money. DFO
Even though the Fiero came almost 15 years later, I always felt that there was a valid comparison to be made with the FIAT X1/9. It’s a very similar formula about taking the front subframe from a FWD car and shoving it in the middle of a bespoke 2-seater body.
Aside from the production issues that plagued all FIATs from the 70s, the X1/9 was a brilliant car. It did all of the things a 2-seat sports car ought to do, and it did them pretty darn well. Whereas the Fiero did none of the things a 2-seat sports car ought to do even remotely well.
The FIAT X1/9 was priced 66% higher than the Pontiac and almost 50% higher than a Mazda RX-7. This was even apparently before Malcolm Bricklin took ever distribution of the Italian sports cars as Bertone X1/9s and Pininfarina Azzurras. The $15,800 X1/9 works out to about $41K adjusted for inflation, which means people really had to want one. A Porsche 944 started at $18,600. The E30 BMW 318i arrived about the same time as this article, for a similar price to the X1/9.
The Fiero looked great when it was introduced. That’s what many 2-seaters have been purchased to do though the years. I do recall that they had problems with everything from rain and ice preventing starting to engine fires, but their drivers weren’t objects of ridicule early on. My opinion was that the original 2M4 was the best looking one, but the mechanical package improved with every piece of gingerbread GM fouled it with. I wouldn’t mind a runout V6/Getrag 5-speed, improved suspension Fiero dressed as a 2M4, but there are a million other cars I’d probably buy instead if given the choice.
Proving that life is more like a CVT – infinitely variable – than anyone ever thought (or probably will again), I agree with everything you said here.
Little mid-engined cars should be on the final exam in any car design school, as they seem to be one of the hardest things to do well. GM passed with really good marks in this Fiero, but only as it was as it’s pictured here: the later ones that actually had some power become both blander and awkwarder.
Where the unravelling is revealed is in the R&T sentence:
“Without achieving the excellence of, say, the Fiat X1/9…”
I mean, why? Biggest car company in the world can’t use a clean sheet to so much as match a design that’s at least ten years older from some Euro outfit? Sure, GM had tighter cost considerations, though Fiat was hardly selling exclusive-market stuff in Europe (and elsewhere) either, whatever pricing it chose to apply in the US. In any event, the Fiero should have been at least 44% as good as some old Italian that was 66% dearer, and, styling apart, this report (and others) feintly suggest it was something quite a bit less than that.
Practically a comedy when the actual GM product turned out to have reliability issues nearly always considered the province of Italian stuff of the period! Quite the replicar.
At least the outer panels didn’t rust, I guess.
It’s a fairly common thing to do. The MGF used a Metro subframe.
Photo shows the Mule they ran disguised as a Metro van. Does nothing to prove the above statement but is always a good photo to show.
It IS a good pic, especially if one is not a fan of indifferent-quality jellybeans, from whence perspective this Metro mule is better-looking than the car beneath it which they went on to produce.
I was the exact right age (and lived in import-starved rural midwest) to totally want one of these. I was too young to actually afford one, and when I talked to my insurance guy he just laughed at me (“Do I even have to say it? NO.”) A friend’s dad had one (a black V6 GT) and I thought it was just about the coolest car ever. By 88 they made it about as good as they were going to (why didn’t they put the Quad 4 in it, that made my mother’s Grand Am so much better than the Duke?) I still want one, maybe with the 3.6 V6 out of an Impala or something….
Oh yeah, if imports had better penetration/presence in the Midwest much earlier, GM would have gone bankrupt WAY sooner-I get that CRX/MR-2 were much better cars, I just never saw them where I lived unless someone drove one from Chicago or Minneapolis….
It has been noted time and time again how GM does things too little to late, or pinches the pennies so much that it spoils the results. That was the issue with this poor little car. Too much dipping into the shared parts bin, and reaching into the cheap parts rather than the good ones. With a bit of thought, there were many other choices GM could have made that would have made this a great car. But, again, there was a deference to the Corvette, and heaven forbid you offer something as good or better for less money from another brand. Imagine how a mid engined car could have evolved over time and what it might have been 5-10 years into production.
While everyone always talks about how a good V6 would have been the savior of this car, from what I have seen, the really good packaging option for it did not exist at the time, but does now. The Northstar V8 seems to be small enough to fit, and had transverse applications from the get-go. With care to ensure that the two halves of the block are sealed, and good head bolts, many of the problems associated with the Northstar are handled. Light weight, still heavier than the 4, but the power output would make up for it. It just came too late to the party to be a possibility from the factory.
When Car & Driver did a comparison test between the Fiero, Miata and (I think) the Honda del Sol, IIRC, they made the statement that the Fiero was very much like the attractive girl in high school who was terrific until she spoke. IOW, like so many of GM’s efforts, just another pretty face, but not much else.
I guess that’s to be expected, though, since the Fiero got green-lit by the 14th floor for not technically being a sports car, but a ‘commuter’ car. There’s only so much you can do with an X-body FWD engine, transaxle, and suspension mounted midships, and a Chevette front suspension, no matter how good-looking the body might be that’s wrapped around them.
OTOH, the later V6 versions with the nice looking 308 body kit would seem to have been a great way to get most of the Ferrari experience, without all the maintenance heachaches.
I don’t think there was a comparison amongst those three since the Miata and the Del Sol were introduced one and four(or five) years after the last year of the Fiero.
You’re right. But what would the Fiero’s primary competition have been? The Escort EXP? Was the Capri convertible around at the time, or maybe the Honda CRX?
The MR2, which was superior in EVERY way.
I imagine the Fiero predated the Ford Probe by a few years as well.
A Bimbo car.
It looked great, and was about as good as a car as a roller skate. I remember these sad little kit cars sitting in the Pontiac showroom, attracting attention from dreamers. I sensed it was too good to be true, and got into it to discover that the car was definitely a GM kit car. That interior! Lord almighty, it looked like a recycled boom box strapped to a Chevette interior. The PARKING BRAKE was put on the LEFT side of the driver, so you couldn’t set it until you got out of the car! A cheesy kit car.
I had just got rid of the Chevy Citation a year earlier, so I was not willing to give GM another try until I saw what I experienced in the X Car not in a new GM car. So, due to the GM Deadly Sin #1 – I was not willing to trust GM again. So I didn’t want to give the Cavalier a try, or an Omega, or any of the GM cars derived from the X car – even the ones that ended up being long lived – the A bodies. So with the Fiero, I was waiting for the snake oil in the brown bottle, and the Fiero didn’t fail to expose itself as another GM Deadly Sin.
A few years later on, I became friends with a co-worker who had a Fiero he had babied as his first new car. So I had a chance once again to see first hand the experience of a Fiero owner. Brad kept his first new ride partly because he couldn’t sell it for what he had put into it. He had also received an enormous white rectangular WARNING sticker sent to him by GM lawyers that he was to apply to the DASHBOARD of the Fiero. It was a warning sticker notifying the reader that they were in a car that could cause fires. Brad wouldn’t apply it to the dashboard because it was an ugly insult, but instead, applied the enormous warning sticker to the underhood. “How could I sell this with this giant warning sticker about it being a firetrap?”, he asked.
So the Fiero stayed in his garage unsold and unused.
Worse, since its introduction, I had the chance to live with a new MR2. It was a perfect little fun go kart car, addictive to drive. A outstanding stick shift that made driving it a fantastic experience. It was what the Fiero should have been, or attempted to be. My experience is that Fiero advocates have zero experience with either the MR2 or the CRV. So they have no idea of how short the Fiero falls in comparison to either car. I knew. So, by the time I hung around the 4 year old Fiero my buddy owned, I was already very cynical about the car, and his experience confirmed by cynicism.
I know the Fiero got better as it was fixed, so that by 1988, it was a real contender. However, I have to write off the entire model line as something to own and enjoy.
“Fiero” is the Italian word for “mullet”, in my opinion.
Fiero actually is an Italian word for “cruel”
My sister bought a new one of these as her first new car in 1984. It actually did quite well for her, with only the usual service items. It never blew up or caught fire! But she always kept up on oil changes and fluid levels.
She finally traded it in on her next new car, a first year Saturn. It also was a dependable , if uninspired car.
Somewhere in an alternate timeline GM left Pontiac alone and allowed them to build the car as they saw fit with any “parts bin” sharing either being by the explicit design of the engineering team or with substantial reworking to fit the mission of the Fiero. In that alternate universe GM DID NOT protect the Corvette at all costs.
I would not mind living in that timeline.
Growing up as a kid in the 80’s, the Fiero was an exciting, awesome car to look at. It was like a mini Trans Am, but somehow different. The interior–despite the quality control issues–still has a futuristic, exciting design. And to this day, I still consider it to be an innovative car, but the more knowledge that I’d got through the years has taken some of the lustre off of it.
It sounds as if GM had spent so much on the construction of it that it didn’t leave a lot of money left over for the rest of it. The bespoke panels and body undoubtedly cost a lot, and the Iron Duke just wasn’t a good enough engine for anything beyond commuting. I have a feeling that if it was introduced maybe 5-7 years later, when fuel injection was more common and when the computer control systems in the cars were smarter and more efficient, that it would have fared better.
But then again, GM would have likely fitted it with a high output and complicated, but low reliability DOHC nightmare that would have rivaled the Northstar’s plagues.
Regardless of the outcome, for me, the Fiero still exists as one of the all time “what if?” stories in the automotive world. And for some reason, when newer generations discover them, I’m rejuvenated by their enthusiasm for these cars.
X1/9 for the win!
I want everyone to go get. A 84 corvette then go get a 88 corvette. See a difference? Now let’s add a new car entirely and see what ya get. The Fiero’s were the first daily driver that was economical 45 mpg and fun. It’s wasn’t about the performance or the track but the fun. My wife had. a 84 in college and we currently have a 87 GT. They are retro when retro was cool.
It was reported by inside Gm sources I believe that the reason these had the fire issues was that certain Tech 4 engines had poor metal used for the rods and they got mixed in with the good ones. After some owner neglect or abuse these rods would eventually fail and punch through the block and oil would splash on the catalytic converter and catch fire. Leaky valve cover gaskets could also cause this and was an issue on many inline engines during the 70’s and 80’s. Not sure how long this was an issue but I have personally seen numerous Dukes with as many as 400k miles on them and there are still a few old mail trucks driving around with them on the original engine
I had a friend years ago that converted one of these Fiero’s over to a 3800 SC and it was a bonefied rocket. Some even stuck Northstar V8’s in them. An interesting if flawed little car!