If Toyota Is The Bread, Pontiac Is The Butter; That's The Vibe
It doesn’t matter if you’re an enthusiast or my dad reading this post, everyone has that one car they always like, they always wanted, and likely would never own. Sometimes dreams come true but not all people associate it with wheels.
As this is a growing car blog, I wish to share one of my earliest and longest infatuations with a mighty small hatchback from childhood. It’s not heart-racing or anything special really. But it comes in at a time when the backing company took a hit thanks to the Great Recession and its success was short-lived.
This is the Pontiac Vibe. But as the headline suggests, it’s really a Toyota underneath. Scratch the surface and it reveals the innards of a Corolla. Everything from the engine to interior parts are derived from Toyota. The most freedom Pontiac had in the end was styling.
Still, the American-marketed Pontiac had a saving grace: reliability. It was as durable as any Japanese car on the road in the late 2000s. In fact, any Vibe that hasn’t been totaled yet is likely still on the road. Browsing through the classifieds show examples with anywhere from 150,000 to more than 300,000 miles.
Power stats are whatever and usability is ample thanks to the hatchback design. What’s important to note is that you can still find one with a 5-speed manual even with the slightly nicer GT edition. It’s always better to go slow car fast than fast car slow. And when it comes to brooding shitboxes on the road for cheap, a stickshift is always going to enliven the experience. If there were an overlooked small car, the Vibe is it.
Pontiac revealed it in December 2007 and announced it was shuttering company doors in 2009, only the Vibe’s second year in production. Mind you, this is not the first Vibe to come out of Japan, but a redesign after a successful initial production run that began in 2002 and ended in 2008.
Although short-lived, the marketing department certainly spared no expense in hyping it up:
Shwayze did his best to make people forget there was a Recession going on but Pontiac didn’t. And so, the Vibe was gone. Yet it stays. Beside my coworker, if anyone is still driving a Vibe, comment and tell me about it! Come on nerds, let’s band together.
The infatuation continues. Long live the Vibe.
-TA
+++
(Photo Credits: Pontiac)