General Motors Sold Pontiacs In What Might Be The Last Place You’d Ever Suspect

Driving a Kei car or carved-panel Toyota Crown hearse attracts a lot of attention in America, but they likely don’t even get a second glance on the streets of Tokyo. No, to stand out there you’ll need something from the other side of the globe, like a car made in the United States. You can’t get much more all-American than the now-dead General Motors brand called Pontiac, but would there really have been that much of a market for cars designed for the people of Omaha rather than Osaka?

I wouldn’t think so, but that’s exactly what GM tried to do several times over nearly a century. Here’s the strange tale of Japanese-market Pontiacs.

Some Assembly Required

While Japan is now known as an auto-making powerhouse, in the years before and after World War II, they actually built a number of cars from so-called “knock down kits” of Western car brands. That means unassembled or partially sub-assembled autos were sent to the Land of the Rising Sun to have final assembly done there. The British did this a fair amount, and ironically the Japanese reportedly made some of their own parts for the UK cars domestically that were far better than the items imported from Old Blighty.

Oddly enough, Pontiacs were some of these “knocked down” imported cars. Starting in 1927, General Motors’ Osaka Assembly plant in Osaka, Japan built Pontiac sedans like this 1937 example:

Here’s a brochure from eBay showing the sales literature for this particular car as proof:

It’s unknown how many Japanese-assembled Pontiacs were shipped and sold, but this whole project ended in 1941 for reasons that might be rather obvious.

Really, Really Eastbound And Down

With Japanese cars of the eighties, you saw a lot of flashy tech and even flashier styling on things such as an AMG-bodied Mitsubishi Debonair.

General Motors must have looked at this scene, glanced at Pontiac, and then said, “hold my beer”. You want to stand out? The 6000STE should do the job:

How about a Grand Prix? Or better yet a Firebird with strange orange turn signals where the fog lights should be?

You’d think the Japanese buyers would swoon over those steering wheel buttons. Naturally, there was no effort made to convert the cars to Japan’s right-hand drive, but at the time, some saw owning a left-hand drive imported Western car as a sort of status symbol (in the way JDM people here today kind of consider a wrong-side steering wheel a badge of honor).

How about a Japanese-market Grand Am? Sure!

Even facelifted late third-generation Firebirds made their way across the ocean. Notice the big convex side marker/turn signals like pimples on the front fenders and incongruous flip-away mirrors (as required by Japanese law) to replace the standard Trans Am fare.

Sedans, however, seemed to be the mainstays of the Japanese Pontiac offerings:

Probably the car seemingly best suited to bubble-economy Japan was the one with the most buttons and wiz-bang tech inside which I’ve written about before: the Bonneville SSEi. With the fake AMG treatment, this first-generation car would be the ultimate ride for budding Yakuza to parade about it, complete with weird retrofitted rectangular headlights, fender-mounted side blinker repeaters, and flag-like flipper mirrors.

Despite the likely small number of takers, they doubled down and brought in the next-generation Bonneville, here with massive turn signals where the American car had low-beam headlights.

Sinister-looking in black, it does seem like it would fit into the movie Black Rain where they made Tokyo look like the set of Blade Runner.

The ad above supposedly says the Bonneville’s list price was 5.4m yen. A new R32 GT-R’s list price in 1989 was 4.45m; this was a little later, but still, it’s a pretty good indication that “being different” had to be pretty important for you to shell out serious cash for a Bonne.

So many different images of these Japanese Bonnevilles; my guess is that there were probably a lot more brochures printed than actual cars sold. Honestly, I can’t confirm figures anywhere, but most accounts claim that Pontiac sold fewer than 200 cars of any model during their push of the brand from the late eighties up until near the bitter end in 2010.

However, even if these didn’t sell, what about a Pontiac that was really a Toyota but came over to Japan essentially as a Pontiac but badged as a Toyota?

Matrix Reloaded

One of the hidden gems of the Pontiac line of the final years was, in most ways, not really a Pontiac at all. The subcompact Vibe hatchback was essentially a twin of the Toyota Matrix that was built in California’s NUMMI factory as part of a collaboration between GM and Toyota that began with the Corolla-based Chevy Nova in 1984.

Under the watchful eye of the Japanese, the products of the venture were deemed good enough for Toyota to sell it on their own soil. However, there was a bit of a twist. You would think that Toyota would choose to sell the more Toyota-like version of the Vibe/Matrix twins in their domestic market: they did not. Their Japanese-market version, named the Toyota Voltz, was in fact simply the Pontiac Vibe version with different badging and mirrors. Maybe that makes sense; with all of the JDM Toyota options to bring in something that looked like the Matrix might be a bit like taking a cheese sandwich to a banquet; at least the Voltz gave Japanese buyers a little taste of Michigan.

Even the interior was the same, albeit reversed for the Japanese right-hand drive market Voltz. That name makes it sound like it was an EV, which it most certainly was not.

It was keen! You got a little taste of America with this Pontiac/Toyota hybrid, as the adjective that hadn’t been used in the U.S. since the fifties implied.

Somehow the Voltz name implied an electric car, which it was not. But it was everywhere!

Actually, it wasn’t. Sadly, the Voltz was withdrawn from the Japanese market after only two years due to poor sales of only around 10,000 cars. Maybe it was the fact that the Japanese were spoiled for choice, or possibly it was the bad reputation of American-made cars from the malaise era. Regardless, it’s rather ironic and a shame that Japanese buyers rejected what many would argue was, at least in terms of quality and reliability, the best Pontiac-branded product built in the final era of the brand.

Hey, A Win Over Buick Is A Win

I’ve already mentioned that sales of Pontiacs in Japan were never that strong, but it’s worth noting that in 2022 the brand outsold GM’s rival Buick. This is a surprising figure, most notably because it meant a brand that ceased making cars in 2010 was even in the running.

According to GM Inside News, in March of 2022 Pontiac sold 3 cars in Japan against one Buick; the month before they moved 5 cars against a mere 4 from Buick. How did this happen? What kinds of Pontiacs were they? Some G8 in mothballs just sitting around for a dozen years waiting to hit the Wangan Expressway at midnight? I guess we’ll never know, but whoever you three or five Japanese buyers are out there we salute you.

It doesn’t matter what side of the globe you’re living on when you speak the universal language of Wide Track. Wherever you are, get on those Pontiacs and Ride, Pontiac, Ride!

Top graphic image: General Motors