Any auto company can make styling mistakes......... Bangle-ized BMW's, Toyota Echo, Mitsubishi Endeavor, etc..... But one of the most notable styling mistakes of modern times, at least in the U.S. market, was the Pontiac Aztek....in the opinions of many people a true automotive eye-sore.

http://www.familycar.com/RoadTests/P...photos2002.htm

It had the same mechanicals as the much more conventional Buick Rondevous....which, not surprisingly, out-sold it by a healthy margin.

Well, the Aztek, poor thing, is now automotive history as Pontiac is replacing it with the new Torrent...a rebadged version of the Chevy Equinox and a platform shared with the Saturn VUE, although the VUE has a notably different body and plastic panels.

http://www.pontiac.com/torrent/index.jsp?brand=home

Yes, the Aztek was ugly.......but under that surface ugliness was a rather versatile and useful vehicle with gobs of room inside, a fairly well-designed Versatrak AWD system, and low selling prices from lax demand. However, it DID have the usual GM cheapness of trim and assembly quality, and Consumer Reports, in spite of low sales, did have enough data in their records to rate it worse-than-average in reliability.

And...not everyone found the vehicle that objectionable. I distinctly remember a couple of years ago, after my former boss retired, when he was in the market for a new 2003 Suburban / Yukon XL, I met him at one of the local Pontiac / GMC dealerships ( they are often co-located) to check out, inspect, and test-drive a new Yukon XL for him. While we were looking his new vehicle over a fairly young couple arrived at the dealership, looked at a white Aztek parked a couple of spaces down from it, and almost immediately fell in love with it. They went home with it a short time later.
I told the Pontiac salesman he was lucky to make that sale........you won't see an Aztek sold THAT quickly very often. He nodded, smiled, and said " You got THAT right ".

 

I drove an Aztek a couple of times for a few days. It actually drove very nice and had very useful storage space. And ya know, owning one would present no worries about getting parking lot dings, or highway chips, etc.

 

They can't get worse than the Asstec, this one looks like a BMW SUV, & I won't be surprised some will confused the 2 front ends at a distance . . .

 

Yes, the Asstek was horrible, but this is actually very appealing. You are correct in that it strongly resembles the X5 especially with the Twin Kidney Grille Pontiacs of late have really been replicas of the new 5 series or is it vice versa??

 

It's about time the Aztek got taken out back and put out of my misery.

 

Is that an Equinox under that body?

I actually like it though, a new GM vehicle that finally has some style to it

 

Yes...it is a rebadged Equinox. Chevy and Pontiac have a history of using the same platforms for many of their products..

 

Yeah, I know

Here's how you get GM out of the downward spiral that they're in: get rid of GMC. Stop selling the same vehicles under 3 brands. That's what Plymouth/Dodge/Chrysler/Eagle/Mitsubishi did.

Yes, GMC makes some nice work trucks, but move anything you can get through GMC and not Chevy, over to Chevy. That'll cut some huge costs right there by closing a couple thousand dealerships that it's costing to keep open.

 

that front end looks like it should be on a new BMW???

 

Ford / Mercury / Lincoln also do the same thing....sell similiar vehicles under 2 or 3 different nameplates ( 4 in some cases if you include Mazda-derivitives ) . So do some foreign-nameplates.

Shutting down GMC would NOT necessarily close a lot of dealerships.....GMC vehicles are often sold at Pontiac dealerships. I don't think you will see GMC shut down, though.......GMC, like it or not, is a cash-cow division for GM. Good profits are made on almost every GMC vehicle sold ( even at employee pricing ) ....and especially so on the big trucks and SUV's like the Sierra and the Yukon / Yukon XL. Part of this profitability, unfortunately, is acheived by using sub-standard materials for their build quality....you will notice this especially in their interiors.

 

You left out one other thing...no worries about it getting stolen

 

That's one of those cars you could hang a sign saying "steal me" on it and it wouldn't matter.

 

I thought no more badge engineering. I see so much potential for Pontiac but they just are missing the point