Nearly Four Decades Ago, Pontiac Went After The Germans With Gadgets And Buttons Galore

“Fight the enemy where they aren’t.” That’s the often-recited line from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and it’s good advice to many car companies. General Motors in particular took these words of wisdom to heart in the eighties. With the platforms GM had on hand, there was no way it could compete with the sublime road manners of a contemporary 5- or 7-series BMW, and the vault-like build quality of the W126 Benz was beyond them. You know what they could offer that the Germans were too stuck up to do? Wiz-bang gadgets! Trick features! Buttons galore!

Silly as the gambit was, the 1988 Pontiac Bonneville SSE pulled it off, and it’s a fun one to revisit.

Lost In the Salt Flats

As head of the Pontiac division in the sixties, John DeLorean revitalized the brand as the last word in General Motors performance cars with products like the Tempest, GTO, and Firebird. However, these were all typically compact to mid-sized products, and sales of Pontiac’s big sedan offerings often trailed behind the similar cars from other GM brands. Big-car buyers typically wanted luxury machines – a Cadillac for less money – and had no interest in the hot-rodded, full-sized sedans they might hear revving on the streets of a Saturday night.

After the first energy crisis, sales of GM’s downsized-but-still-large B bodies stayed strong; understandable since these things offered ample interior space in a package that don’t even seem that large when you see a surviving one parked next to a modern SUV (and you’ll still see a surprising number around today since these were easily some of the most reliable and durable GM cars ever). Unfortunately, Pontiac’s version was not as popular, despite it being one of the coolest-looking ones with optional Trans Am wheels.

Sales dwindled to the point that Pontiac dropped their B-body Bonneville after the 1981 model year. Yes, there was even a V6 option to increase gas mileage figures, though I can guarantee I’d have my foot to the floor most of the time and would never equal those EPA estimates. Note that it was also available with the dreaded 5.7-liter diesel V8 in 1981; that motor had been largely fixed by then, but contemporary road tests showed a zero to sixty time of just under 20 seconds.

For 1982, Pontiac put the Bonneville name onto what was once the G-body LeMans; a good car in its own right, but a mid-sizer that really didn’t do justice to the big and bold Bonneville legacy.

In fact, with the drop in fuel prices and renewed demand for large cars, GM realized almost immediately that they’d made a mistake and brought in the Canadian-built Parisienne for 1983, a slightly-rebadged B-body Chevy Caprice, to top off the Pontiac lineup.

General Motors heavily downsized the larger Buick, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac cars for 1985 and 1986 as the C- and H-bodies. These drastically smaller cars were heavily criticized for being lookalike products with zero qualities to differentiate them. The top H-body below is the Oldsmobile, while the bottom one is a Buick.  At least I think so. Do we even care?

Thankfully, when Pontiac designers penned their version of the new H-body in 1987 as the Bonneville, they made it more than stand out. With cars like the Audi 5000 Turbo, BMW 7-series, and AMG Benzes, the era of big performance sedans was upon us, and GM gave us something that at least looked like one.

Bonnie Strikes Back

The new front-drive Bonneville might have shared much with the other GM brands, but Pontiac infused it with a unique sort of European character – a late-eighties Pontiac European character, at least. The top of the heap 1988 SSE edition was sort of like the car equivalent of the German-themed Frankenmuth resort in Michigan that the Bonneville below is parked in front of; a place that from a distance appears to be in the Black Forest but in actuality is not far from a Bob Evans restaurant.

Check out those body-colored wheels, the blacked-out trim, spoilers, and ground effects – somebody in the Pontiac design studio saw the AMG Mercedes 500SELs on Miami Vice, right? It’s so hokey but straight-up cool at the same time. If you wanted to “Ride Pontiac Ride” in full-sized luxury, the Excitement Division had your car.

Smoked out taillight covers? Oh yeah. Rear headrests and a lower bumper diffuser like you were about the hit the Autobahn? You bet. Headlamp washers on an American car? Yessir. The SSE had all the (superficial) trappings of something ready to make a run on the ‘Ring, people.

Meanwhile, the Bonneville SSE was bone stock under the hood. The Buick 3800 V6 was always a durable thing, and 165 horsepower from this multi-port injected mill wasn’t horrible for the time, but you were not about to make a run through the Dolomites chasing Alpinas. At least it had that sort of overdone throbby Pontiac exhaust note.

That’s fine; no one who wanted a straight-six Bimmer engine powering the rear wheels would ever set foot in a Pontiac showroom anyway. Even if they did, they’d die of visual overload.

Interior By Sci-Fi Movie Set Designers

To appreciate a German “luxury” car interior in the eighties, you had to sort of reframe your points of reference. The quality of materials was usually impeccable, and the seats could hold you in comfort all day long. At first glance though, these cabins had the austerity and warmth of an operating room, often lacking features that cars a third of their cost had.

No, if getting your money’s worth meant More Stuff to you, then the Bonneville SSE was your kind of car. Look at all of those buttons! Pontiac made you feel like you were getting a lot in terms of switches per dollar.

Being 1987, you might have expected a digital mess, but the primary instruments on the dashboard were indeed analog, including a tach. Stray even a little bit beyond these gauges, however, and you can forget about Munich simplicity. You naturally get the car-shaped schematic with the many “function monitors” in glowing green:

Check out the compass that looks straight out of an arcade game console. Sure, it would be more legible to just display “E” or “NW,” but where would the fun be in that? This gauge looks like it’s telling you where to drop the photon torpedos. So rad!

Today, many more functions than this would be combined into a single touchscreen. In 1987, if it was a standard feature, you saw all the buttons for it all the time in the SSE. I do have to say that if I got into this thing as a rental car at 11 PM on a rainy night, I’d know how to change stations immediately. I can’t do that with a new Camry.

If you grew up watching Speed Racer, you’d expect to see a button on the steering wheel below to launch the car with the hydraulic jacks. It’s not there, but at least these radio controls meant you didn’t have to go digging for those tiny ones on the dashboard. It also meant you were sure to turn up the volume or change stations when you hit the horn.

Those massive seats look like La-Z-Boy recliners done up as dentist’s chairs with scary headrests, and at first glance, they appear to be the world’s most comfortable thrones. Brochures claim “14-way adjustment,” which means most people probably got them into contorted settings that took an hour to put right.

In fact, if you look carefully, you’ll see that there are seat controls unintuitively across the front of the lower cushion and also another separate switch on the side of the seat:

But wait! There’s more! On the center console, you got another set of identical-looking buttons to make all sorts of adjustments to the seats that you probably shouldn’t, including what appear to be controls for decapitation. Man, that wood sure looks fake, but at least it really is fake, unlike the real stuff in a Mercedes that’s so polished and clinical that it looks fake.

It doesn’t end there! Even the trunk is fully trimmed out, and the standard self-leveling rear shocks mean you can dump in all the junk you want and the headlights won’t shine into the trees. I don’t know if that black bag is factory tools or a first aid kit, but it’s certainly More SSE Stuff.

That air compressor to raise the back of the car also has the option to let you stick on a hose and use it as an inflator.

There’s even an on/off switch, and I’m pretty sure they give the hose to attach as well, if it’s still in the car nearly forty years later that is (maybe in that mysterious bag?).

Could an $80,000 BMW 750iL let you pump up your kid’s basketball in the trunk? No, I don’t think so. German “luxury,” my ass.

I Was Hoping For A Glovebox Microwave

Enough about the toys! How did the Bonneville SSE drive? Motorweek was impressed enough with the mid-9-second to sixty acceleration and rather flat cornering from the upgraded springs and sway bars, though I’m sure the bumpy stuff would set it dancing. Naturally, they hated the interior and mentioned that you could get the same powerplant in the less glitzy rung-below SE model.

That’s kind of missing the point of the Bonneville SSE. This thing couldn’t touch an Audi 5000 Turbo on a run between Munich and Stuttgart, but last time I checked, there are no Alpine passes between Detroit and Chicago or Cleveland. The speed limit was usually still 55 then, so who needed a Bahn burner anyway? The 1988 SSE was the European performance-looking sedan that lacked nothing except for actual European performance. Thankfully, Pontiac would rectify at least the straight-line deficiencies with later models featuring supercharging and even extra cylinders that I was about to talk about today, but just flat ran out time wasting digital ink discussing the absurd KITT-like kit on this machine. I can promise you I’ll get to those hidden gems shortly.

The grey example above was listed for a mere $7800 a while back. That’s a lot of car for the money with that nearly bulletproof 3800 under the hood and an exterior as ironically fun as a Members Only jacket. They’ll likely never be worth anything, so just get in and enjoy those big lounge chairs for miles.

This H-body Bonneville didn’t change the doomed course of Pontiac’s big sedans, but it certainly kept them alive for more years than we thought they could with a product that was perfect for the go-go eighties. The SSE was the ultimate statement in putting the sizzle over the steak, and boy, did it sizzle.

Pontiac Points: 68 out of 100

Verdict: The ’88 Bonneville SSE is the glorious cartoon interpretation of what middle American thought that an Autobahn cruiser should be. It was deceptively durable and comfortable – just don’t expect to outrun a Bimmer (or even an Olds 88).