When most people argue about Pontiac, they argue about how it was killed in the best years of its life. How in 2008, everything was getting better. Everything was going great. Pontiac had never done it better. Well, except for its advertising.
Pontiac's golden era of advertising, at least for me, came in the late 1990s. Mostly because it had that certain je ne sais quoi of being so late 1990s. Whether it was the font that looked like it had been ripped from the Jurassic Park logo, which was still going strong as a franchise, or the music vaguely reminiscent of The Bangles' Walk Like An Egyptian, this ad for the Pontiac "Wide Track" Grand Prix had it all.
The sixth-generation Grand Prix itself didn't really have it all. The father of my girlfriend in high school had one, and I recall the interior being fairly dingy, but it had a sweet exhaust note. How they managed to get only 240 horses from a supercharged 3.8L V6 in the top-of-the-line GTP version I'll never know, but it had a wider track, I suppose, so that's something.
But then again, was the "wide-track" that wide, really? The Hummer H1 was a contemporary, and I don't recall the Pontiac being wider than one of those. If you're going to call it a "wide-track" Grand Prix, I want to be hogging 12 lanes of traffic with my one ridiculously-proportioned Pontiac.
Just saying.
Pontiac Had The Right Idea All Those Years Ago