Vintage 🏁 1973-1974 Pontiac Grand Am Dealer Sales Brochure, Colonnade Sedan For Sale

Pontiac's "America's BMW," sold with the line "foreign intrigue...American ingenuity" and a European skid-warning sign on the cover, from the model year the oil embargo sank it. Original new old stock from Pontiac Motor Division in Pontiac, Michigan, a brand General Motors ended in 2010.

• Item: original Pontiac Motor Division dealer sales brochure
• Model year: 1974, stated in the text ("we call it the 1974 Grand Am") and on the back-page license plate
• Size: 12 x 10 1/2 inches (about 30.5 x 26.7 cm)
• Printing: full-color lithography on glossy coated paper, marked "Litho in U.S.A."
• Issued by: Pontiac Motor Division, General Motors Corporation, One Pontiac Plaza, Pontiac, Michigan 48053
• Cover: dark green 4-Door Colonnade Hardtop on cobblestones, tan interior, gold stripe
• Inside: Cameo White 2-Door Colonnade Hardtop across both pages; burgundy all-Morrokide interior; Pontiac's sales copy
• Back page: rally gauge instrument panel, Honduras Maroon 2-Door hardtop, Endura nose photos, Radial Tuned Suspension views, and full facts and figures (400 and 455 V-8s, 112.0 and 116.0-inch wheelbases, GR70-15 radials, options, safety and anti-theft features)

New old stock: original dealer literature that was never handed out. See the photos.

A BMW borrowed in Germany. Bill Collins was Pontiac's assistant chief engineer, the man who had already changed Pontiac once by suggesting the 389 V-8 for the 1964 Tempest and so starting the GTO. Evaluating a BMW borrowed from Opel in Europe convinced him a Pontiac could handle like the imports, and he later said that was how the Grand Am was born. John Seaton's chassis team built the Radial Tuned Suspension, Bill Porter's studio styled the car, and it launched for 1973 as one of only three GM cars on standard radials. Its name joined the Grand Prix and the Trans Am.

The 1974 model. A new nose and grille, vertical taillights, and a plate moved above the rear bumper. Mahogany left the dashboard but stayed on the console, as this brochure says, and the 4-speed manual was not offered in California, which the brochure also notes. Its safety list includes the seat-belt "starter interlock" that met federal Standard No. 208 for new cars from August 1973: the engine would not start until the front belts were buckled. Drivers revolted, and President Gerald Ford signed a law banning the requirement on October 27, 1974.

Wrong year for foreign intrigue. The Arab oil embargo began in October 1973, as these cars reached dealers. Grand Am production dropped from 43,137 for 1973 to 17,083 for 1974, only 3,122 of them four-doors like the cover car, then to 10,679 for 1975. After that the original Grand Am was done.

Pontiac, Michigan. Founded November 9, 1818 by the Detroit investors of the Pontiac Company and named for the Odawa war chief Pontiac, who besieged Fort Detroit in 1763 and whose war helped bring about the Proclamation of 1763. GM launched Pontiac the car in 1926 as a companion to Oakland, and every 1973 through 1975 Grand Am was built at Pontiac's main assembly plant in the city. That Baldwin Avenue plant, opened in 1927, closed in 1988. The city's population peaked at 85,279 in 1970.

The lore. Pontiac's ads for the Endura nose, first used on the 1968 GTO, showed it surviving crowbars and sledgehammers, and the story goes that a mother wrote asking Pontiac to pay after her child took a hammer to the family car. It didn't. Collins, who helped create the GTO, later proposed canceling it in 1974 and called himself both its father and its executioner; he moved on to the DeLorean Motor Company in 1977.

The end of the line. The Grand Am name returned for 1978 through 1980 and 1985 through 2005, and its successor, the G6, was named as the sixth Grand Am generation. A G6 was the last Pontiac ever built, shipped January 4, 2010, and Pontiac dealer franchises expired October 31, 2010.

• Pontiac and GM dealer literature collections, especially first-generation Grand Am material
• Owners and restorers of 1973 through 1975 Grand Ams who want Pontiac's own 1974 colors, options and specifications
• Michigan and Detroit automotive history collections
• Framing: the cobblestone cover or the Cameo White center spread
• A gift for anyone who drove, sold or built a Pontiac