How Pontiac Tried Not Once But Three Times To Make An El Camino

If you know anything about General Motors, you’re aware The General doesn’t like to build a vehicle that can only be sold under one badge. You won’t make dealers happy by reserving a certain kind of car to one nameplate, and it’s much easier to turn a profit when one set of tooling cab serve a bunch of models for different brands.

So, it shouldn’t surprise you that when GM decision makers decided to meet the challenge that Ford laid down by releasing a car-based “coupe ute” in 1957 called the Ranchero, they weren’t seeing it as a one-brand-and-done proposition.

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As the most popular nameplate, you know that Chevy was going to be first to get one, in this case called the El Camino.

A pickup-truck-like thing was too low class for Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac, but Pontiac could certainly make a case for this going-to-town work machine. To test the viability of the concept, GM commissioned a mocked-up Pontiac version of the El Camino that would be dubbed internally as the “El Catalina” for the full-sized Pontiac station wagon that it would share parts with.

We all know about the conversions that people do today, such as putting Mustang front clips onto a Fairmont sedan or installing the nose from a Buick Grand National onto a Century wagon. They’re relatively cut-and-dried projects. That wasn’t even remotely the case with the El Catalina. Starting with a 1959 Pontiac Catalina Safari wagon, the craftsman at GM removed the body and added a cab from the El Camino, plus the steel cargo bed. Rear quarter panels from a convertible were grafted on, as well as lights and the tailgate from the Pontiac wagon, which was much narrower than the Chevy’s rear gate.

The front clip from the Catalina was reinstalled, but now the door skins didn’t match, so those had to be culled from the Pontiac and put onto the El Camino doors. Finally, a Pontiac dashboard in interior components were installed. It was an immense amount of work, but the Pontiac execs who saw the finished product (including John Delorean, reportedly) were highly impressed by the workmanship and how well the design held together.

All of this turned out to be for naught. General Motors might have initially feared that the Ranchero would be The Next Big thing, but in 1959 the sum total of the Ford and Chevy ute sales was under 37,000 units. Despite low sales, GM decided not to kill this niche product for Chevy, but the idea of expanding it to other brands was suspended (though there was a GMC version introduced years later).

Now nothing but a dead concept, what happened to the El Catalina? Oddly enough, while most of these types of one-offs are either crushed or kept in deep storage like the Ark in Raiders, this sole Pontiac ute escaped into the wild. (By the way, I’ve read some reports that another El Catalina prototype was made, but I’ve seen no photographic evidence; even if it existed, all agree that it’s long gone.) Fittingly enough, Pontiac Retail Parts in Pontiac, Michigan, used it as a parts runner for ten years! With nearly 100,000 miles on it and rust setting in, it was parked behind the business and ultimately bought by car collector Darrel Lotridge in 1969.

If you’ve ever had a car restored, you know that it can be a long, drawn-out process. In the case of the El Catalina, that process took over thirty years. Darrel had several shops work on the coupe-ute, but you can imagine what body shops found when they started to tear into this handcrafted unicorn. Even the firewall had been heavily modified to fit the Pontiac dash parts; surely the unsuspecting shop guys had no idea what they were getting into. That didn’t stop Mr. Lotridge from imagining the day that this precious one-of-a-kind ute would be ready for the show circuit, however – and how he’d transport it.

Grand Amino

Some time back, General Motors sold off a large number of old concept cars, and in the process, we learned that they’d considered the idea of a Pontiac coupe-ute once again in the late seventies. GM started with the new-for-1978 G-Body Malibu wagon-based El Camino (actually, most reports say it was an identical GMC Caballero version).

Next, they removed and replaced the front clip and dash with components from Pontiac’s newest Grand Am.

Unlike the later mid-sized front driver, Pontiac’s first Grand Am debuted in 1973 as their idea of a post-muscle-car-era “European-inspired” coupe and sedan to complement the more basic LeMans. Yes, visually it was just a “Collonade” LeMans with different detailing, but it was a pretty clean and tasteful-looking ride. The “Radial Tuned Suspension” tried to tame typical Detroit road manners, and the interior came with a full set of instruments and a floor shift. Sales of this proto-BMW tanked, so Pontiac dropped the Grand Am in 1975 but reintroduced it for the “downsized” 1978 model year (it only lasted through 1980).

As with the El Catalina, the G-body Pontiac ute concept went nowhere at GM. Lotridge thought the unproduced “El Grand Am” would be an ideal vehicle for the unproduced El Catalina, but he couldn’t get his hands on the prototype when General Motors had it auctioned off – so he decided to build his own. After working with the virtually all-custom 1959 El Catalina, the creation of a Grand Am Camino must have been a bolt-on cakewalk.

Beginning with a 1979 “Royal Knight” El Camino, Lotridge added the front clip. dashboard, and to-die-for snowflake wheels from a 1980 Grand Am. The end result looks factory-built and was sold on Bring A Trailer in 2019 for a mere $7,685, seemingly a steal.

This wasn’t the end of Pontiac’s fascination with their big brother Chevy’s car-truck mix. As I’ve mentioned earlier, near the end of the brand’s life, Bob Lutz pushed to bring over not just the Holden Commodore ute as the G8 “ST” pickup. Not only did the GT ST not happen, but the entire G8 range and the very Pontiac brand itself that it was supposed to be sold under disappeared shortly after the concept debuted.

El Catalina Versus El Grande Am

So, did Darrel Lotridge ever tow the El Catalina with the El Grande Am? Sadly, no. He threw in the towel in 2008 and sold the unfinished project to  Tom Gerrard, who completed the restoration in 2011 to the magnificent award-winning status you see in the pictures of this article. Auctioned off at Mecum in 2012, the El Catalina sold for $352,000; not chump change, but it’s such a truly historic piece that it likely had more than that many dollars in labor and materials in the initial build, not to mention the later restoration.

Ah, but if something sells once, that means it could be for sale again at some point, so we won’t give up on the idea of the two ultra-rare Pontiac pickups being reunited. Considering that the older ute has more than twice the power of the newer one, whoever buys both might have a hard time deciding which should be the tow car.

Pontiac Points: 85/ 100

Verdict: A fun and unique off-brand slice of what could have been that’s thankfully been saved from the ravages of time.