For Pontiac Pthursday, I consciously avoid the usual GTO Judges and Fiero GTs to find overlooked examples of GM’s excitement division that could be had for minimal cash today. Naturally, our friend “AI Overview” is not much help in these searches.
Last week, I did what some might call a “hit” piece on Pontiac’s first subcompact, the notorious and bog-slow Vega-based Astre. To give equal time, I decided to find a later small Pontiac that had some serious period style and, more importantly, packed a serious punch.
I had the perfect one in mind, though the AI search I put my query into had different ideas and claimed that I was incorrect:
Well, you’re in error there again, computer! I can see how your little digital mind would see a little Cavalier Z24 with a 150-horsepower V6 as the ultimate GM subcompact, but that’s flat-out wrong. No, that Chevy would have been hole-shot by the little Pontiac appearing in many Autopian’s favorite car commercial that I’ll run here for the umpteenth time. Sound up!
That’s right; you can laugh at the flashy little Sunbird GT Turbo all you want, but performance numbers don’t lie. It might not have been built with Swiss watch precision, but it’s one of– if not the – quickest subcompact cars Pontiac ever made and worth a revisit. Can you feel the thunder? The call of the road? Let’s ride.
This ‘Bird Started As A Turd
Admittedly, the bar had been set pretty low. General Motors’ subcompact J-car might have been a better design than the lambasted Vega derivatives that it replaced for 1982, but it certainly didn’t start out as a stellar product when introduced as the J2000 for the Pontiac brand.
First, the J-platform was a derivative of the earlier front-drive X-cars like the Chevy Citation and Pontiac Phoenix; revolutionary machines for GM that quickly turned into the most recalled cars of all time. The J-cars addressed some of its predecessors’ quality, development, and reliability issues, but not all of them.
Worse than that, the J-cars might have been a little smaller than the X-body with which they shared much of the front mechanical structure, but they weren’t really much (if any) lighter in weight. The X-cars with a standard “Iron Duke” 2.5 liter four were hardly rocket ships, so the 1.8 liter motors put into the J-bodies struggled to motivate them.
The alphanumerically named J2000 was Pontiac’s entry of the J-platform, and it featured a rather adorably shrunken nose off of a 1977 Firebird and ribbed smoked-out taillights from the ’79 ‘Bird. You could even get aluminum wheels that looked the bowling ball covers on the also-new-for-’82 Trans Am.
Of course, the 84 horsepower on tap couldn’t match the mini-Trans Am looks; zero to sixty took a dismal 16 seconds with the automatic transmission! Imagine how dull a drag race would be with, say, a Diesel VW Rabbit? Inside, you at least got an available full set of gauges to monitor your overstressed motor, and the upper-level SE models got a “nifty Viscount” interior with “donut hole” headrests and seats from KITT, the Knight Rider.
This might have been the malaise era, but that’s no excuse for such lackluster performance figures as those. Thankfully, Pontiac wasn’t content with the situation and implemented improvements like fuel injection and an optional two-liter motor. The rather sterile “J2000” moniker first changed to just “2000” and finally the “2000 Sunbird” in 1984 to give the little J-car a more approachable name.
But the biggest news for ’84 was an optional turbocharged version of the 1.8-liter motor that packed an impressive 150 horsepower. You could get a manual transmission or a three-speed automatic, but the stick shift had a mere four gears (likely the 5-speed on lower-level Sunbirds couldn’t handle the power). To say that this motor transformed the car would be a massive understatement.
Car and Driver, which in the David E. Davis era had no problems calling a turd a turd, was rather dumbfounded by this thing:
Despite some early praise from us and the best efforts from Pontiac’s copywriters, this car has eluded detection better than late night lovers at the local motel. In fact, it’s the best-kept performance secret in Detroit…The thing no one seems to have noticed yet about the 2000 Sunbird Turbo is that it goes like the dickens..it now owns the kind of speed that can embarrass a lot of today’s hot iron- domestic or imported. Numbers? How about zero to sixty blasts of just 8.3 seconds (with the automatic)?
…you should know that it’s more than just a tire-squealing specialist. This once-lowly J-car now actually has the kind of moves that an enthusiast can relate to on his favorite stretch of country road.
We can’t ignore what John Davis had to say about this new and improved Sunbird, can we?
Those aren’t blistering performance figures for today, but it’s tough to think of many cars out there where within two years of their launch, the maker was able to nearly double its horsepower and cut zero to sixty acceleration times almost in half.
You could apparently get the turbo engine in any 2000 Sunbird, but the S/E model had it as standard (I get conflicting information on whether or not you could have a Turbo wagon, but most sources say no). The S/E’s mandatory WS6 performance suspension was matched with 14-inch Goodyear Eagles on alloys. Also, you can see that the S/E has the integral fog lights in the nose, giving it effectively six headlights and upstaging the headlamp count of any other subcompact.
Pretty impressive for 1980s GM. How do you top a subcompact coupe that was capable of beating many contemporary pony cars and had six freaking headlights? In Pontiac’s case, you give it more power. For 1986, the Sunbird added a new GT model with the 1.8-liter turbo motor bored out to two full liters and making a total of 165 horsepower, pumping through the same four-on-the-floor or three-speed slushbox. Also part of the GT package were fender flares (even though the tires were no wider than the ones available on some lesser models) and a sinister-looking “squinty” front end with electric pop-up lids over the headlights.
Inside, you get a great sampling of 1980s General Motors cockpit design with things like exposed screws and optional power windows featuring switches perched in very plastered-on boxes.
But what about performance? That extra fifteen horsepower doesn’t seem like much today, but in a lightweight malaise-era car, it was enough to push the zero to sixty time of the Sunbird GT Turbo down to the very low seven-second range with the stick. Yep, this little J-car could have possibly shown its new smoked-out “grid” taillights to the likes of a Mustang GT.
The GT Turbo was not available as a station wagon, but besides the two-door notch- and hatchback coupe, there was a GT Turbo four-door on offer, likely making it the fastest compact or sub-compact sedan money could buy in the years it was available. A blower-equipped GT convertible was also on the books, but these uncommon body styles of this sleeper fell under the radar. Based on the sales figures I could find, only 2,802 sedans found buyers, along with a mere 1,268 convertibles.
A word of note: the Sunbird’s Buick cousin, the Skyhawk, was also available with the turbo motor from ’84 to ’87, but only in 2-door T-Type form. I don’t have production figures, but that has to be a rare bird indeed.
If this GT Turbo sounds like something that would make VW and Honda just stop sending boats full of hot hatches here to the US, you might have to think again. See, General Motors used to be an expert in getting dreaded torque steer even in 60-horsepower cars. You can imagine that nailing the gas pedal in a 165-horsepower car with the same different-length front half shafts as run-of-the-mill J-cars would have you yanking the wheel to keep your Sunbird out of the gutter or the other lane. Oh, but it gets worse: do you need to know what “turbo lag” is? This Sunbird would illustrate that affliction readily to you. There was a standard turbo boost gauge, but you didn’t need it: you knew when it kicked in. Basically, under acceleration, you’d get next to nothing until BOOM the whole powerplant would just explode with power and forward motion, at the same throwing the car dramatically off course. Yeow!
I’m not going to beat a dead horse and start talking about GM’s assembly and materials quality standards of the eighties; the trim pieces that fall off, the cloth seat fabric that looks like the stuff at a Build-A-Bear workshop, and doesn’t come close to matching the color of the dashboard. It’s so well known and documented that it’s not even worth getting into at this point.
I’m sure that the steering wheel in that Turbo convertible above will bounce up and down with the lack of structural integrity from sawing off the roof. You know what? Who cares! Going into a Schwarzenegger movie in the eighties, were you expecting an Oscar-winning epic? No, you wanted big, loud, stupid fun. Hopping into a turbocharged Pontiac J-Body is certainly the automotive equivalent of that.
The Sunbird GT for 1988 ditched the sedan plus the hatchback and added a sharply raked backlight to the coupe, but the mighty turbo stuck around through 1990 when it was supplanted by a bigger, heavier, and less powerful V6. No versions of the later Sunfire and G5 models that replaced the J-body subcompact ever approached the acceleration high-water mark set by the Sunbird GT Turbo, the subcompact that made a ’64 GTO smile down from heaven.
Let’s Go Embarrass That Dude With The Base Model Z28
Starting out as the relatively rare cars that were, by nature, throwaway vehicles means that a Sunbird GT Turbo in any condition whatsoever will be tough to find today. The question really is, if you did happen upon one, would it be worth taking a look? Well, if you’re a VW Jetta GLI or Civic Si person, forget it. Comparing those European and Japanese cars to this boosted Sunbird would be like pitting a Datsun 280Z or Porsche 924 against a Trans Am; they’re cheese and chalk, as the British might say. You want some flashiness with your subcompact? Got it in spades. You want to get from Point A to Point B the quickest, don’t care how refined the ride that gets you there is? You can’t beat the Sunbird GT Turbo.
More importantly, the obvious flaws don’t mean that people haven’t owned and loved their J-cars for long periods of time; the statement that “GM car’s run badly longer than most cars run at all” could easily apply to the Sunbird.
Find your old Members Only jacket, pop Duran Duran’s Rio into the cassette deck, punch the gas, and WHOOOA which way are we going? This Sunbird will certainly live up to Pontiac’s promise of “excitement”, even if that excitement might occasionally be in ways that you didn’t bargain on.
Pontiac Points: 75/ 100
Verdict: Who needs build quality when you have pop-up headlight covers and a better power-to-weight ratio than a Trans Am?
I HAD THIS! Convertible, turbo, auto. Red out and in, black top. Oh, the memories this brings back.
My sister had the Cavalier Z24 V6 convertible mentioned, and the Sunbird was more fun to drive than that heavy, less lively six.
Buddy of mine had a naturally aspirated automatic convertible as his first car. I remember it was dog slow and you could watch the chassis flex. His dad bought it for $500 at a police auction and told him he had to find a weekend job and pay him back. My friend hated that car. About 6 months in we were riding around town at 25 mph and he popped the transmission into neutral redlined the engine and slammed it into gear. I remember seeing the dashboard shudder. He did it a second time and we heard a bang. The motor mount broke the engine slapped the firewall and a good part of the dash fell into our laps. He ended up with an older Camaro rs that he totaled that next summer.
A guy on reddit has stuffed a Saab 93x engine 6speed and 4wd into the platform mate olds omega. Genuinely cool car worth looking up.
The olds omega was an x car, like the citation.
Youd be thinking of the firenza, olds j car version.
But yeah, that car is gonna be wild when done.
Yeah I caught that after I posted but left it up because that car is going to be awesome and more people should see it.
Ohh absolutely
Mine doesn’t have a turbo as it is a base 1990 LE that was owned by an old lady all of its life. But, it’s still fun to bop around it and it even wins the occasional car show trophy. Such a commonplace car 30+ years ago is shockingly rare nowadays, because these were all bought up and used/abused in various ways. They’re way more interesting to me than the countless muscle and super cars that I see at shows, but that’s just me. I’m a self-confessed automotive weirdo. Which is why I like this site.
Recent photos of mine for your time:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XWbkmJf5HgSOYqap6rMPdGOXrLEUDzyh/view?usp=drivesdk
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17GB95U0EzuMYp9bjBZX66K5rSEHDx470/view?usp=drivesdk
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14fPl6hzhlGj21e98R_92PhiosDboBiif/view?usp=drivesdk
I barely remember these things.
I had an ’86 Accord LX-i and apparently the Pontiac would have smoked it from a stop light, but I was happy with its 0-60 time of 10 seconds. The same as my parents’ ’65 Olds 88. And it’s 33 mpg fuel economy on the freeway was appreciated during that particular oil crisis. More than double what my parents’ car could achieve.
And it had torque steer well-controlled. And it could pull off cornering speeds that would have sent the Olds into a barrier or a ditch.
My ’17 Accord V6 would smoke both in pretty much every way. Depending on where you read, 0-60 is now 5.6 seconds. From a standstill, it lights up both front tires, and when its automatic shifts to second, lights them up again for a bit and even gets a chirp out of at least one of them shifting to third. But there is no steering drama. Granted, this is with just average all-season tires and not anything particularly grippy. And I only did this a couple of times once it was broken in and don’t do it at all anymore, trying to take it easy on it. Otherwise, it’s just a very competent sedan.
Fun fact: the GMC Syclone was built using a lot of parts bun scrounging. The instrument cluster was based on a part originally intended for third gen f bodies.
Oops. I had F bodies open on another screen while I typed. The Syclone instrumentation came from the turbo Sunbird, not Firebird. Sorry for the error.
My friend in high school (class of ‘87) had a red Sunbird coupe with the pop-up headlights. It was considered a cool car in the day. I was rocking a 1948 P-15 Plymouth sedan at the time, which made me kind of the opposite of cool. (Unless you’re Mercedes, or me.)
8.6 seconds 0-60 was hot stuff back then. A few years later, I had a 1987 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe with the 5-speed manual. It as considered one of the hotter grand touring cars of the era… and it notched 8-dot-something 0-60. My car with its 2.3 intercooled turbo 4 totally trounced my brother’s Firebird GTA with the 5.7 V8, which was tragically embarrassing for him.
I never drove one of these, but I remember hearing about the torque steer in an almost legendary manner.
I have to admit – I always thought the six headlight setup looked odd, in a bad way.
I never knew about these and a 1985 Sunbird (purchased in 1984 brand new) was vital to my very existence!
My Dad was graduating high school and was offered any car he wanted: a Camaro Z28, a Mustang GT, even a gently used late 70s Corvette was an option for him. He picked a red Sunbird convertible with a white top. The Sunbird GT would have been significantly cooler, but the drop top was key here.
Long story short: he took the Sunbird up the road to college. His buddy set him up with his date’s roommate so that he would drive since he was the only guy in the fraternity with a convertible. The roommate was my mom and the rest was history.
Sunbird got totaled in a wreck a few years later and was quickly replaced by a 1987 Saab 900 Turbo.
Geez – Your Dad is younger then me….
An engine swapped Sunbird wagon would be great. The Jetta Sportwagon of its time.
This is epic! I didn’t even know these little motors ever existed. I was gonna say Mercedes Vibe GT article earlier this week was Pontiac Pthursday early but since that was really a Toyota and this thing is a hidden gem, well, not a valuable one, but a gem nonetheless-the-less! Hunk of rough quartz maybe?
Not a Pontiac, but back in 1989, a girl I knew picked up a 1986 Cavalier Z24 hatchback with the multi-port EFI 2.8L V6. It was an automatic, but was quite fast for the time.
Plus it had a digital dash which was super-cool back in the ’80s. Changing the rear spark plugs sucked, though, as did changing the water pump.
Those photos of the later, squinty-eyed versions take me straight back to 1986, when I was about 11, because they made me immediately remember how cool I thought they looked then, and that I did one of my orthographic side-view drawings (inspired by the drawings in R&T road tests and in Consumer Reports) of them.
They whiffed bigtime on that ad copy. It should have stated “Here it is! The new J-eneration!”
I always thought these were attractive when they were out. Ironically, I’m watching old episodes of The Price is Right this afternoon and on one of the episodes a contestant almost one a 2000 wagon. On the next episode a contestant did win a 2000 Sunbird coupe. With optional auto transmission and CA emissions it was a whopping $7,400!
First off, I will ALWAYS listen to that Pontiac song. Second, my friend in high school was related to the GM at the local Pontiac dealership, Diguilio Pontiac of Fremont, and he drove a red vert Sunbird. It looked great and he got a lot of girls to go for a ride. Pretty fetching car.
I remember back in the early 2000’s during the tuner days, everyone was looking around for a suitable generic MAP sensor that could sense boost. And these Sunbird/Skyhawks happened to have the right generic 2 bar sensors. (3 bar would work too but the resolution would be worse)
We Brits had this car as the mk2 Vauxhall Cavalier and it was a great car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_J_platform
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauxhall_Cavalier
We never had a turbo model, but the 130bhp SRi model was a cracker.
I like the looks out front.
I drove a few of these new while working at a Pontiac dealer.
They were actually fun (for 1984-85) and pretty fast for what they were, and the times.
I’m surprised the 4-door turbo didn’t sell better. Not mainstream better but maybe an 8-10k-a-year niche. The 6000STE had considerable buzz so you’d think a smaller, cheaper, nimbler version you could get with three pedals and real round gauges would’ve done as well.
That’s the thing about Americans
They’d rather have a basic version of the larger car than the deluxe version of the smaller car.
My dad had a 1983 Opel Ascona 1.6, 90hp wasn’t bad. Later he got an ’88 Ascona 2.0 with 115hp and that thing felt seriously fast for the time.
The Ascona was also available with a 54hp, 1.6 diesel and a 60hp 1.3-liter engine…
Had an 87 non-turbo for a first car. It wasn’t my choice….. I grew to love it. Now, I wish I could find a coupe again, I would try hard to get it. All I ever see are convertibles that are outrageously priced. I don’t understand the pricing of the cars……
Fascinated to learn about the tiny production quantity GM hot rods of the 80s that weren’t the quad4 or the Grand National/GNX!
Thanks Bishop!
After a series of used turds, my dad’s first new car was the J-body Buick Skyhawk wagon. We had that thing for what seemed like forever and it did everything from Sam’s club runs to 8-hour road trips up to Yosemite multiple times. Not a lot of issues other than the usual American car BS of the era, and it got to well over 100k relatively reliable miles before it started to fall apart.
That car is probably why I have an affection for small, but sporty wagons and hatchbacks to this day.
Can confirm everything The Bishop said about the Sunbird. Our Mom bought a new Sunbird Turbo in ’85, I bought a new GLH Turbo in ’86, and my brother bought a new Grand National in ’87. Mom’s Sunbird was two-tone blue like the car in the lead photo. To squeeze a bit more boost out of the turbo on the GLH (I think on the Sunbird, too), we would drill a .035″ – .040″ pin hole in a plastic connector and place that inline on the vacuum line that ran to the wastegate actuator. Once Mopar Performance came out with the logic module that increased boost, and adjusted the timing and fuel curve, we removed the drilled connector. Yes, torque steer and smoky burnouts were a hoot with those two cars, especially with a couple extra PSI of boost. 🙂
This is the first I’ve ever heard that the J-body was X-body derived.
I believe that the J-Body (much like Ford’s Erika / Escort platform) was developed alongside / derived from Opel/Vauxhall models.
I had to inform you but the J-car was another failed World Car; not identical to the European models. The US models received X-car front suspension pieces but a unique rear axle.
My apologies if I came across as snooty, I was more interested to hear that tidbit, as it was the first time I had heard of the cross-pollination from the X-body. And the reason I mention the Erika project is exactly as you state, a “failed” “World-Car” platform. Although, now that I am thinking about it, I believe the Erika project donated suspension grubby-bits to the Tempo/Topaz twins. I wonder why they didn’t get a neat name like Fox, Panther or Erika?