"Oh little GTO. You know you're really fine; Three deuces and a four-speed; and a three-eighty-nine." --Ronny and the Daytonas Goodbye Pontiac. You were a good friend. Your passing is like a death in the family. I grew up around Pontiacs, I learned how to drive in one. There were so many 'Tin Indians' among my relatives that at family reunions, the parking lot of wherever we had gathered would resemble a Pontiac dealership. When you grow up in an environment like that, you develop a fondness and affinity for something. As a young man, in the car-crazy Midwest of the 1970s, your family's car 'brand' identified you among your peers, and each marque had its own ideology. GM guys hated Ford guys, and vice versa, and Chrysler guys were...well...Chrysler guys. In the GM fraternity being a Pontiac man was a good place to be. Pontiacs were cool. They were fast, sexy, stylish cars. They were so photogenic that they were prominently featured in a lot of the hit movies and tv shows of the era: The French Connection, Smokey and the Bandit. James Garner drove one on The Rockford Files for six seasons. Pontiacs were cool. Unfortunately, that was 30 years ago. The world changed and ultimately, GM (and to a large part, the entire American auto industry) did not. Pontiacs' once proud and distinctive image was frittered away as one of the few, occasionally stylish cookie-cutter non-entities in the GM stable, increasingly overrun with gas-guzzling SUVs. Obviously the first energy crisis taught this bloated bureaucracy nothing. And now they're paying the price for their own arrogance, stupidity, and obstinate refusal to innovate...or more correctly, their employees and former fans are. A bit of advice for the top brass at GM: Dinosaurs are extinct: take a lesson from that. This 1998 Pontiac Grand Am GT was photographed on Ardmore Street in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago on June 7th, 2009. Moderate postwork done in photoshop.