I have to apologize to my fellow Autopians. When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong.
A little while back, I lambasted the poor Daewoo-made 1988 LeMans, calling it likely the worst vehicle ever to wear the Pontiac badge. I did a similar sort of hit piece on the Vega-based Astre. Both of these were indeed rather poor vehicles, but at least they had some redeeming characteristics; each of them featured rather attractive styling and offered at least relatively competitive performance for the time.
The real Worst Pontiac Ever had no such values; it was pure, unadulterated crap foisted on the public at a time when the brand had no excuses to offer such garbage. My friends, it’s time to look at the T1000.
This Was The Best The World’s Biggest Car Maker Could Do?
As I often do in these posts, when we’re talking about any car, I like to set the stage for the automotive environment at the time. During the weeks that K.C. and the Sunshine Band were insisting you get down on AM radio (tonight, specifically, and also do a little dance), General Motors was about to release a new subcompact car for Chevy to combat the import onslaught. Boy, did those Europeans ever have some good ones.
In late 1975, European carmakers had started the transition into producing rather advanced, space-efficient, front-wheel-drive cars. The soon-to-be-a-Yugo Fiat 128 debuted in 1969, while Renault followed up with the 5/Le Car in 1972. By far the most popular in the United States was Volkswagen’s new-for-1975 Rabbit, the Giugiaro-designed Mark I Golf that would form the template for modern small vehicles.
General Motors had just put the Toronado mechanicals into a front-drive, six-wheeled motor home, so they were poised to take on this challenge: offer the latest technology to the American people at a great price. Did they do it?
Absolutely not. The new 1976 Chevette subcompact featured mechanical specifications that could have been on a car from the fifties. An inline four (at least it was SOHC) sat longitudinally in front, powering the rear wheels connected to a live axle; at least it had coil springs in back instead of leafs. Naturally, the driveshaft passed through a large tunnel that ate into the meager interior space.
Now, basic specifications aren’t everything. The Chevette could have been styled by Bill Mitchell’s team to be a small car icon inside and out, plus the mechanical components might have been massaged to create a fun-to-drive product.
Again, not the story. The GM “T” platform actually began in late 1973 as the new German Opel Kadett. In this form, with small bumpers and unrestricted powertrains, the “T” car wasn’t cutting edge but not that bad. You can see they even got a four-door notchback sedan that looked rather nice with its composite headlights.
Even the two-door hatch base model had nice detailing, like those thin bumpers, and offered reasonable enough performance.
As with many European cars that made the trip over the pond, a lot got lost in the translation. Five-mile-per-hour bumpers and strangling emissions controls limited the 1.6-liter carbureted four in the Chevette to a mere 60 horsepower. Many were bought with the optional automatic transmission and air conditioning, which likely lowered the already glacial 16.9-second zero to sixty time that Road & Track recorded for a manual four-speed car. Don’t even ask about a fifth gear.
The best part was that GM provided an even more soul-sucking version of this true penalty box of a car. Chevy offered a bargain-basement “Scooter” version with argent grey bumpers instead of chrome, and omitted the glovebox door, carpeting, and back seat.
Now, after the second gas crisis in 1979 and the crippling interest rates and inflation of the time, every division of General Motors cried out for an economical small car with a bargain-basement price. Pontiac wanted something a notch below the J-Car 2000/Sunbird to attract entry-level buyers. In 1979, GM’s Opel launched a new Kadett with a transverse front-wheel-drive powertrain and more modern if not earth-shaking looks. This might have been ideal as a little Pontiac, especially when we saw their later 1983 GTE model designed to compete with the VW GTI.
So, when did GM start selling this new, updated Opel in federalized form? They didn’t; the rear-drive Chevy shove-it lived on, and The General offered this now-five-year-old version of a car that was dated when launched in 1975 to Pontiac for the 1981 model year. See? I told you this would be bad.
The T Stood For Terrible
The very least GM could have done to transform Chevette into a Pontiac is swap in a different grille, and that’s exactly what they did to create the T1000. Just the bare minimum.
Eventually, they did replace the Chevette’s cubic taillights with horizontally ribbed units that added the raciness of a Trans Am to your entry-level subcompact. Behold:
Fully reclining seats were a lavish feature that I’m sure were added only because they were omnipresent on any Japanese cheap car. You also got full instrumentation with a speedometer and a tachometer-style gas gauge. Nothing else.
By 1983, Pontiac had dropped the letter prefixes on their cars, so Pontiac’s version of the Chevette was merely the 1000. At least there was some weight savings for losing a letter off the badge, right?
When people talk about the shame of driving an entry-level car, the T1000 is the perfect case study. Don’t take my word for it, though. How about the opinions of the most positive and nicest guy in the whole world? Yeah, even he hated it.
I Did Send Letters To Owings Mills, Maryland
As a twelve-year-old, you likely couldn’t wait to switch on PBS at least one night a week. No, it wasn’t to watch some snooze-inducing “masterpiece” about nineteenth-century British poets that your snotty parents pretended to like; it was to watch crappy early eighties cars getting beat apart by the greatest personality in automotive history: John Davis. I know that I’m not the only Autopian who would weep uncontrollably if ever put face-to-face with the man who put cars ON OUR TELEVISION SETS for God’s sake. You laugh, but this was a big deal to Stranger Things era kids like us.
John Davis was an honest journalist, but he usually tried to find something (I mean anything) positive to say about even the most miserable sleds his team was given to test. You’ll see from this video that he struggled very hard to do that with the Pontiac T-1000 in 1982.
He starts by complementing the deep chin spoiler and “Euro style” black trim.
However, you just know Honest John can’t lie to us, and things go south very fast. This automatic-equipped 1.6-liter T1000 recorded Motorweek’s slowest zero to sixty time in the admittedly rather short history of the show to that point; it was even slower than the five-speed-equipped, Isuzu-diesel-powered Chevette they’d tested a little bit before. Actually, considering how cars in general got faster during the eighties, I bet that Worst Acceleration Record still stands. By the way, Benzheads: they tested a stick 240D that year, and it still beat that T1000’s 30-second time by eight seconds.
Passing times were also record-breakingly bad. They did mention that up to around 50MPH it wasn’t horrendous, but after that, the three-speed slushbox refused to downshift and the anchor came out.
Wait, it gets worse! Look at the recorded highway miles per gallon. Twenty-five is pathetic, and John is quick to note that cars much larger had generated better figures.
He wasn’t kidding: in ’82 you could have bought a massive palace-on-wheels near-limousine Oldsmobile 98 with the diesel V8 that was rated at 33 MPG highway. We had friends with a similar big diesel Olds, and I can confirm that they regularly got over 25 MPG at a steady 55 in button-tufted opulence. Until the head bolts blew, of course.
The crowning achievement of the little Pontiac Chevette was the price. At the T1000’s base sticker of $5540, you could have bought a number of other cars like a front-drive Tercel (which would be replaced in late 1982 with an all-new but similarly priced car):
Or maybe a twin stick Mitsubishi “Imported for Dodge” Colt:
How about a Mazda GLC, which became a front-drive proto-Golf in 1981?
Any of these would be cool cars to have even today: lots of fun to drive, super reliable, and an order of magnitude better than the T1000. So, you’d think nobody would have bought this little “Pontiac” or its identical Chevy twin, right?
Wrong. Admittedly, the T1000 (later 1000) never sold in big numbers; over 60,000 moved in 1981 but sales quickly dropped. The Chevette, however, found 233,000 homes and was the second-best-selling small car of 1982, just behind the Escort. That’s a drop from the year before, when Chevy sold 433,000 of these clunky old subcompacts. Why did people buy them? That’s a question for the ages, but I think there are a few reasons. First of all, they probably got deals on the Chevette while the Japanese cars sold at a take-it-or-leave-it sticker (or, in the case of Hondas, at thousands of precious dollars above). More importantly, I think more buyers back then insisted on American-made products and never considered imports. Such loyalty should have been rewarded with something other than a car with virtually no redeeming qualities. The fact that people purchased a car that was already dated half a decade before it was introduced gave GM little incentive to spend money to find a better product.
The ‘Vette You Don’t Want
Today, it might be easier to find a coach built Hispano Suiza than a decent-condition Pontiac T1000 or 1000. They were used up and very happily sent to the crusher. When they do appear, like the one below that popped up on Craigslist a while back, they don’t go for much. This 1986 Texas car with 60,000 miles was offered at under $5000.
Even at that low mileage on smooth Texas roads, you can see that the front suspension is shot. But hey, at least it has the one saving grace of any American car: a solid air conditioning system complete with “ball cooler” vents. Switching on the A/C must have made that thirty-second zero to sixty “sprint” even worse, if that’s even possible. At least the 1000 has a glove box door, unlike the Chevette Scooter model, but I’m told the latch is so big that it eats up much of the space inside when shut.
Look at that half-arc sweep on the door panel to match the window winder’s path; that’s almost a styling element. Note that by the time of this late model 1000, any chrome-plated metal had been replaced by plastic.
This thing should be in a museum as a warning to future generations, and to make twentysomething car bloggers who think a Nissan Versa is a “piece of crap” shut the hell up. These kids don’t know pain.
We Never Saw The Vibe Coming, Did We?
Hard to believe as it is, the Chevette and 1000 soldiered on until 1987 with very few changes, finally being replaced as the bottom rungs in the lineups with imported cars like the Suzuki Chevy Sprint and Isuzu Chevy Spectrum. Of course, we never received the German version of the front-drive T-Car; Pontiac got the Daewoo edition of the Kadett at a time when cars from the Korean auto industry were still a bit subpar. I reported on that disgrace to the LeMans name a little while back.
Still, I need to apologize to that car, as well as the diesel 6000LE and an Iron-Duke-powered Firebird. Those underwhelming cars don’t have what it takes to claim the title. There can be only one True Worst Pontiac, and the T-1000 is it. Congratulations, you miserable piece of crap.
Pontiac Points: 20 out of 100
Verdict: There’s a reason the antagonist in Terminator 2 was called T-1000; it’s the worst thing you can imagine on earth.
Watched video, talk about damning with faint praise.
Fun Chevette fact: Bill Bryson did 14,000 miles of driving in an “ageing” red Chevette he borrowed from his mother to write his book “The Lost Continent”. I don’t recall ever discussing much about the car in the book, but it also didn’t let him down.
I would daily-drive the 5-speed version all summer long. See letter C in the image below:
https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/pontiac_85pontiac_33.jpg
If it was too slow, a 4.3L V6 drops right in. Or like another commentator suggested, a Solstice GXP powertrain would make it really fun.
I really like a basic car with crank windows. My 2010 GMC Canyon that I drive daily has a regular-cab, a 4-cyl., a 5-speed, and crank windows. My previous truck was a regular-cab S-10 configured the same way.
Before that, I had a 2-door Geo Metro 5-speed with crank windows.
I wish they still made small, cheap cars like this.
Was wondering when the Terminator 2 reference would appear.
Fun to see the dogpile from a decade ago in the YT comments. My favorite so far:
From that Motorweek script: “Under the hood lies the rest of a sadder story.”
Nice read, I smiled and laughed 😀
As European myself, I had to see if “1000” had anything to do with engine size, as I have driven many 1000cc cars, that weren’t slow at all. But I guess you can kill anything, with weight, emissions, automatic, and a general lack of lust.
Always nice with an excuse to show some John Davis clips. We also need more with Bob Mayer 🙂
Wow. I had no idea the Chevette soldiered on for 12 very long years.
Just two more years, and it would’ve hit 60 mph.
It did get a 5-speed manual, in ’82 according to the small picture in the illustration. It was only offered on the 2-door, though.
The Scooter el-cheapo version did not even have a door on the glove box, or sun visors, and the passenger’s seat did not move forwards or backwards.
I worked with a young lady in the mid-’80’s who had one, bought for her by her parents to go to college. She hated it.
GM should have rebadged the European version. It would have sold many, many more units. They could have just done final assembly on the mostly imported parts to keep the costs down. That was typical of GM, though – keep selling profitable junk instead of competitive, modern models. It’s as if they did not want to have repeat customers.
My best friend and room mate had a Scooter given to him by his mother. It was a piece of shite that would not quit.
Id still take it over the POS Lemans.
This car is was the darling of the Barker era of The Price Is Right. Automatic transmission, steel belted radials, and California emission, it can be yours if the price is right!
In the T car’s defense, it maintained the live axle & mechanical simplicity as GM knew it was aimed for emerging market countries and and basic commuter duty here in US. Still – wow what a glacier slow car.
Did GM actually export this car to emerging markets?
A lot in Latin America and South America probably others I’m forgetting
It was sold as a Vauxhall in Europe, an Isuzu in Japan, a Holden in Australia, and naturally a Daewoo in Korea. And of course a ton of sales in South America where it was produced locally. So, a pretty even mix of developed and undeveloped countries.
The T-car was not just simple for market placement, it was simple because of the hot mess that was the preceding Vega.
Cant forget the Vega situation, good call
I know that in practice the Chevette and T1000 were not very good cars. However, I kinda am a fan of them. My dad had one in high school and he absolutely loved it. Never had any issues with it at all. 25 years later, my high school shop teacher daily’ed one that was the most perfect ‘70s orange color I’ve ever seen. I’d love to own one now but repowered with a LNF 2.0 Turbo from a Pontiac Solstice. 260hp in a car that light would be absolutely hilarious.
“Rally 1.6” eh?
Is that its rating on the 0 to 10 fun scale?
Some friends had one.
Yeah.
They had it cuz it was cheap and they were a poor struggling couple with two kids to feed.
Not the “worst” Pontiac. If a gun was put to my head I’d probably pick a T-1000 vs. an Astre. At least with the Pontivette you’d have a chance of making it to your destination, eventually. I’m a GenX kid and even by the mid-80’s most Vegas had already disappeared, whereas Chevettes (and J-cars) soldiered on for *decades* afterwards.
I’d have to agree, although I have driven both versions in Chevy form and the Chevette is for sure far less pleasant to drive. But, yeah, you’d get there.
Buddy in University had one, would mention his ‘vette in conversation
My college roommates’ Dad bought him a brand new 1983(?) Chevette for grad school,. It was as base as could be, but with AC and Auto. Coming out of a 70’s land yacht Caprice, he thought it was the best thing he had ever had to drive.
“You laugh, but this was a big deal to Stranger Things era kids like us.”
I was still getting a microdoses of pleasure and relief into the 2000s when my cars would start on the first try with the key.
I still don’t understand how or why the Big 3 just rolled over and let the Japanese brands swipe the passenger car market out from under them, not just for a few years but decade after decade.
Because they knew what they had!
They never care, and still don’t care, because they keep getting bailed out LOL
The mindset was different back then. They didn’t think they had anything to learn from the Japanese. By the time they pulled their heads out of their a$$es it was too late.
Same thing in the UK, where they saw “foreign” cars as less, too late realizing the opposite was the case.
At least the US still has SOME domestic brands.
To be fair, I still think the 2-door T1000 was the best looking of the T platform cars. Beyond that they were pure crap, but I do get a bit of excitement when I see one on the road or rotting in someone’s yard.
Remember, the Izuzu Impulse/Piazza was also on the T-platform.
I grew up in one of the decaying GM towns, and I can tell you how they sold so many of them. Their employees bought them out of desperation. in 1980 GM had nearly a million employees worldwide, so that’s probably a big dent in total sales. I know everyone I grew up with that had one, had gotten it passed down from their GM employed relative who would never buy “Foreign Junk”
Friends in college has rusty, beat-up Corolla wagons and Pintos. We still preferred riding in those than in one guy’s new Chevette. Does anyone else think it looks like an aborted Suburban fetus?
You’re so poor, we know you can’t even afford gloves!
In the 1979-81 era Chevrolet ran ads showing what a popular fleet car the Chevette was. Well, yeah, they probably had the lowest total-cost-of-ownership of anything on the road at that point and if you’re a fleet manager at a company big enough that you personally don’t have to go on the road…
I almost bought a Pontiac 1000 used, it looked to be in great shape and was probably the nicest $500 car in the state at the time, but this was before cell phones (or at least before a 19-year-old in the market for a $500 car would have one) and I couldn’t find anything to write down the contact number on the FOR SALE sign with.
Yeah, to watch Doctor Who on Saturdays in the odd full story movie-like format. WHYY in Philly and WNJT Trenton rocked.
Well, personally, I really dug I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theatre. What a fantastic cast.
“I really dug I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theatre. What a fantastic cast”
I have that on DVD for rewatching every few years
I can’t remember which night of the week it was, but I do recall watching KSPS Spokane for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Bullshit. The T1000 was the epitome of Pontiac excitement!
To quote a letter to Car and Driver from may years ago: “Pontiac builds excrement”.
Let’s see…Smokey and the Bandit 1, Buford drove an A-Body LeMans, in 2, he drove a B-Body Bonneville, and 3, he drove a G-Body Bonneville…so in the hypothetical Smokey and the Bandit 4, he would either have driven a 6000 or a 1000…given the trajectory of the movies, I totally think he would have been in the 1000.