1980 Pontiac Grand Am Is a Noble Experiment

From the April 1980 issue of Car and Driver.

The Pontiac Grand Am is the Dr Pep­per of the whole General Motors inter­mediate fleet—so misunderstood. Ev­erybody knows the LeMans; that’s the main-line Pontiac A-body—sedans, coupes, and wagons for Americans who are a bit flashier than Chevy buyers, not so stuffy as those who belt themselves into Buicks and Oldsmobiles. Then there is the Grand Prix, a famous name in the “luxury-personal” class. The Grand Prix is a two-door coupe for the aggressive, successful, self-made man, the guy who is a bit too discerning for a Monte Carlo and wouldn’t be caught dead in a Thunderbird because it’s a Ford. At least, this is what it says in GM’s manual of strategy.

Okay, so much for the LeMans and the Grand Prix. But what’s a Grand Am? Apparently the customers don’t under­stand—never mind that they’ve had eight model years since the nameplate’s introduction to figure it out—because Grand Am buyers are lined up none deep at Pontiac dealers everywhere. (There is always the possibility that you folks out there know perfectly well what a Grand Am is and don’t want any part of it, but we’re discounting this scenar­io, not wanting to jerk the rug from un­der the rest of this road test.) As a re­sult, Grand Am sales amount to only about 2 percent of all Pontiac interme­diates. That’s a discouragingly small number for what seemed like such a good idea going in, and Pontiac is be­ginning to back out of the project: the Grand Am four-door was dropped for 1980, leaving only the two-door coupe.

Regardless of what ultimately hap­pens to the coupe, the Grand Am must be regarded as a noble experiment. It’s a sincere attempt on Pontiac’s part to make an American “road car,” a ma­chine that’s as responsive and satisfying to its driver as a BMW or Volvo. It’s an extra model added to the lineup beyond the basic LeMans and the obligatory luxury-personal derivative, the Grand Prix.

And Pontiac didn’t cheat on the specs, either; the Grand Am is not just a decal job. The car looks different and it drives different. The front-end appear­ance, with its wind-splitter beak and ver­tical grille openings, is unique to the Grand Am. So are the taillight treat­ments, body-side trim, and body-colored bumpers. The interior also has its own special look, a sort of international sporting motif if you pick up on the styl­ing cues as they were intended. The in­strument panel is faced in frosted metal rather than in the Grand Prix’s fake wood-grain, and the steering wheel has bare metal spokes instead of Detroit’s customary molded plastic. All of this is supposed to suggest hardware, machin­ery, equipment—serious business in­stead of frivolous furbelows aimed at the carriage trade.

So much for the visual details. The good stuff is not so readily visible. The Grand Am has as standard equipment a suspension package that’s not available, even as an option, on any other Pontiac intermediate. It has stiffer springs—440 pounds per inch in front and 139 rear, compared with 365 and 115 in the base LeMans and Grand Prix. It has huge anti-sway bars—32mm in front and 22mm at the rear, compared with a 28mm front bar and nothing at the rear on the base car. Moreover, the Grand Am has special mounting hardware for the front bar to make it even more effec­tive, specially calibrated shock absor­bers, and a quicker steering gear—14:1 ratio, compared with 15:1 on the Le­Mans. The Grand Am steering gear also has a stiffer torsion bar inside to boost steering effort about 18 percent.

There is an optional handling pack­age available for the LeMans and the Grand Prix that includes the massive anti-sway bars but not the stiffer springs and special shocks (which, in addition to having a unique calibration, also con­tain gas-filled bags to pressurize the fluid chamber and thereby reduce foam­ing, a different method of approximat­ing one of the features of the Bilstein).

The result of all this suspension tun­ing is a car that behaves altogether un­like the Volvo and BMW tourers that served as the original targets. The Grand Am ends up being what Pontiac thinks a Volvo or BMW should be, and it offers a fascinating glimpse at the American philosophy of car handling as opposed to the European way.

The Europeans tend to use relatively high-rate springs and soft anti-sway bars, or sometimes no anti-sway bars at all (Saab, for example). The springs are meant to do most of the work: hold the car up, keep the suspension from bot­toming, provide most of the roll stiff­ness. Since there is a practical limit to the amount of roll stiffness available from springs that are soft enough to provide decent ride, these European cars usually have a fair amount of body roll in turns.

Americans don’t like body roll in turns, or at least Detroit thinks they don’t: Good handling and flat cornering are assumed to be just different terms for the same thing. So the Grand Am is intended, first and foremost, to have ex­tremely high roll stiffness. The springs are chosen to hold the suspension up out of the bumpers most of the time—while simultaneously providing a rela­tively low ride frequency (how fast the car bounces up and down on its suspen­sion). Then all the rest of the roll stiff­ness deemed necessary is added with front and rear anti-sway bars.

Of course Detroit is not so simplistic as to think flat cornering is the only mea­sure of good handling. According to Norm Fugate, vehicle development en­gineer at Pontiac, the Grand Am was also intended to provide a crisp steering feel when driven straight down the road, and good directional stability. Overall, it was meant to be a quick, responsive handler, noticeably less lethar­gic than the usual Detroit sedan.

Okay, enough talk about what the Grand Am is supposed to be. Does it work? Yes, and exceptionally well under most conditions. First, the suspension almost never bottoms—a detail that’s essential to good handling, particularly over rough surfaces, but rarely achieved in American cars. Second, the steering is very accurate, as good as anything from Detroit and competitive on a world level. Third, the ride is pretty friendly, notably in its lack of harshness, softening those sharp impacts you feel when encountering expansion strips and small bumps.

Yes, you say, but what about han­dling? Handling is hard to quantify. We didn’t check the ultimate cornering lim­its on a skidpad, but they’re commend­ably high, enough to lay your head over like a willow tree in a windstorm when you groove through the expressway ramps. More important, though, is the feeling of control the Grand Am provides. The car goes where you point it and it’s quite stable over bumps—not as good in this category as the best for­eigners, but good nonetheless. You have the feeling of a precision instru­ment of travel, and that, we think, is more descriptive of good handling than raw skidpad numbers.

There is one aspect of the Grand Am’s dynamics that we disagree with, however, and that is its tendency to “waddle” on roads with piecrust edges or when one wheel hits a bump. Under these conditions the body rocks side­ways with vigor, playing crack-the-whip with your neck, and it’s uncomfortable. Normally, we’d blame this on the De­troit penchant for using thick anti-sway bars, but engineer Fugate points to cer­tain basic characteristics of the GM A-body instead. He says that the Trans Am has even stiffer anti-sway bars yet less waddle. Whatever the cause, this duck-walking is only a modest flaw in what is otherwise a truly nimble car.

In fact, if car shoppers took more test drives instead of judging the Grand Am by its sheetmetal cover, the car would probably be a raving success. Its ap­pearance doesn’t do a very good job of saying what the car is all about, in our opinion, and also in the opinion of a few “men on the street” that we polled dur­ing the course of the test. It’s interest­ing how we car enthusiasts get so used to certain styling cues that we never really question them. For example, the flat metal spokes in the Grand Am’s steering wheel say “sport” to us. A great deal of artistic license has been taken with the traditional sports-car theme—there are no holes in the spokes, for one thing—and this fuzzes up the message, but we still think “sport” when we see it. Others, less aware of tradition, see what they think is an unfinished wheel: somebody left the padding off the spokes. This failure to get the message across—and it occurs in the dashboard as well as on the exteri­or—is probably the reason for the Grand Am’s showroom malaise.

Because, if you just drive it, you can’t help being impressed. Somehow, the seats have the right firmness—not the park-bench solidity of Mercedes buck­ets, but just a nice amount of support. The $175 six-way power adjuster pro­vides almost any driving position you could ask. There is a gauge for every­thing, properly weighted resistance to motion in each control, and typical American silence around your ears. And you can have it all for $9729 list, not a bad price in a time when so-called economy cars are bumping $7000, and real, live BMWs of similar dimension are close to $20,000.

You even get exotic fuel-saving tech­nology conspicuously laboring away be­neath the floorboards. The test car was equipped with a 4.9-liter, four-barrel V-8 and an automatic transmission—­which means that a lockup torque con­verter is part of the package. The intent of this device is laudably simple and simultaneously high-minded. A torque converter gives wonderfully quick accel­eration at city-traffic speeds but slips at highway speeds, generating heat and wasting gas in the process. But a lockup converter, through the mystery of black­box science, knows when it should freeze solid to produce direct drive: not under full-throttle acceleration, not when you’re creeping through traffic, but, say, above 30 mph when you’re just cruising. You can feel it lock up, sort of like another shift in the automatic. But it’s surprising what an aesthetic nuisance this direct drive is: all the powertrain shudders and stumbles are sud­denly transmitted up into the passenger compartment. You wouldn’t think a sol­id drivetrain could produce such a ruck­us, but it does. Within a few years, De­troit will have this system all smoothed out, just as it’s managed to tame the shake of collapsible steering columns and take the stink out of (most) catalytic exhausts. But in the meantime, you’ll be aware of every gas-saving minute you drive with a locked-up torque converter.

That, however, is a quirk not exclu­sive to the Grand Am. But the quick­-response suspension tuning, Pontiac’s rendition of the Good-Handling Sedan, is not available elsewhere. We think it’s pretty special, and even if you’re not looking to buy a car of this description, we think it would be well worth your time to hunt one down for a test drive. Pontiac’s engineering department has gone to a lot of trouble to show us what it can do. At the very least, you should check its papers.

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com