​GM first attached the name to one of their automobiles in 1954, when they debuted the Bonneville Special concept at the Motorama show at the New York City’s Waldorf Astoria. Designer Harley J. Earl had been inspired by a recent trip to the Salt Flats to check out the speed trials, and he was keen to find new ways to frame Pontiac as GM’s premiere high-performance brand.
While the concept car shared much of its underpinnings with the two-seater Corvette, the vehicle that would actually go into production in 1958 was a different animal entirely. The Bonneville helped establish the muscle car formula that Pontiac would use to great effect just a few years down the road with the GTO: Build a coupe that could be optioned with minimal frills, stuff the most potent engine your company builds into the engine bay, and offer it at a price that folks can afford.

​The result was the 1958 Pontiac Bonneville. Produced to celebrate both GM’s 50th anniversary and Earl’s forthcoming retirement, the Bonneville was based on the luxury-focused Star Chief (which itself was a derivative of Chevrolet’s 210/Bel Air coupe), but its more performance-focused design would help put the Pontiac brand on enthusiasts’ radar in the late 50s. While the vehicles that the nameplate was attached to would change dramatically over the subsequent decades, the original Bonneville spawned a production legacy that spanned nearly half a century across ten different generations.

Development and Specifications

For the 1958 model year, General Motors introduced new bodies and chassis for all of its passenger cars, and this major shake-up of the model portfolio gave Pontiac some room to reposition the brand with a more sporting, youthful vibe. The Bonneville went from being a trim package on the Star Chief the previous year to its own stand-alone model. Positioned as a direct response to Chrysler’s letter-series Chrysler 300 and the DeSoto Golden Adventurer – two Mopar models which were built on a similar concept of placing high performance near the top of the list of priorities – the Bonneville scored the high-performance powerplants of the Star Chief, but it rode on the shorter, 122-inch wheelbase of the Chieftan. While the Chieftan wasn’t exactly svelte, this shorter wheelbase provided a tangible performance advantage over the larger Star Chief chassis.

​At the same time, engine design was evolving at a rapid pace. Pontiac had put their straight-six and straight-eight powerplants out to pasture at the end of 1954 to make room for a new overhead-valve V8 design that shared its core architecture with Chevrolet’s new small-block. Over the next few years, the displacement numbers would increase, along with the horsepower. By the time the engine found its way into the new Bonneville, it had ballooned to 370 cubic inches. Depending on the options selected, that mill’s output ranged from 255 horsepower all the way up to 310 ponies, the latter outfitted with GM’s new Rochester fuel-injection system that had debuted on the Corvette “Fuelie” the year prior.
Because of the fuel-injection system’s high price tag and reputation for temperamental behavior, most Bonneville buyers opted for the trio of two-barrel carburetors offered in the Tri-Power setup, which dropped the horsepower to an even 300 but offered better tunability and a more attractive bottom line.
Although a column-shifted, three-speed manual was the standard gearbox on the Bonneville, few buyers settled for it. Most instead, sprung the extra coin to get GM’s four-speed, Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic automatic, which featured a low 3.97:1 first-gear ratio for the better pull from a standstill. Also giving the big Bonneville some extra punch out of the hole was the availability of the Safe-T-Track limited-slip differential, which debuted in 1958 as well.

​The Bonneville’s suspension setup consisted of unequal length A-arms and shocks with coil springs up front, and coil springs also made their way to the rear in lieu of the leaf springs that Pontiac normally outfitted its cars with. An Ever-Level air suspension was also on the options list. Drum brakes were installed at all four corners as standard, measuring 12 inches in diameter up front and 11 at the rear.
Two body styles were offered for 1958 – Sport Coupe and Convertible. Hemmings reports that Pontiac would end up selling 12,240 Bonnevilles in total that year, with 9,144 customers opting for the coupe, while the remaining 3096 buyers chose the drop top.
The Strategy ChangesWith the debut of the second-generation Bonneville in 1959, the model lineup grew to five distinct configurations – coupe, convertible, four-door sedan, four-door hard top, and a wagon. The car’s appearance was a dramatic departure from its predecessor, not only due to a deliberate move away from the rocket-inspired aesthetic of the 1950s toward a more streamlined look that would typify early 1960s vehicle design, but also because of Pontiac engineer’s decision to push the wheels further out toward the fenders to create what would become known as the Pontiac Wide Track design.

​While the Bonneville continued to evolve as the 1960s progressed, intermediate-bodied cars like the GTO became the models synonymous with street performance. As a result, the larger Bonneville began to take on a more luxury-focused role in the Pontiac lineup.
By the early 1970s, the model’s connection to high performance was largely in name only, as Pontiac’s focus for the Bonneville became more specifically aimed at personal luxury.

The model regained some of its performance credibility decades later with the addition of the 3.8-liter Eaton M90-supercharged L67 V6 to the engine lineup, which was good for 240 horsepower by 1996, and later with the addition of a 4.6-liter, 275 horsepower V8 to the options list, which had been plucked from the Cadillac parts bin for the debut of Bonneville GXP in 2004. However, the GXP’s production would prove to be short lived, as Pontiac would discontinue the Bonneville model entirely just a year later.
Ultimately, it’s the first-year cars that would endure in the hearts and minds of performance enthusiasts. Due to the car’s significance and scarcity, the 1958 Bonneville is now a highly-sought-after commodity in the collector car market. Well sorted examples can usually be had for around $50,000, though some Bonnevilles have commanded sums well into six-figure territory at auction.

Article courtesy of Street Muscle Magazine, written by Bradley Iger.

Here’s an entertaining and educational little video history of Lincoln, one of the oldest and most distinguished names in the Motor City. 

Ford’s Lincoln brand has been marketed and managed under a number of different divisional titles over the years, but when in 2012 the name was changed back to the original—the Lincoln Motor Company—it gave us a smile. Note the name: Motor Company. When Henry and Wilfred Leland founded the company in 1917, it was to build Liberty V12 aircraft engines for the American war effort. Cars for the consumer market would come a few years later. Personally, we think the whole retro-tradition trend in automotive marketing has been overdone, but here the tribute is fitting. Lincoln has a long, proud history, as this brief historical video demonstrates.

Produced for Ford in the early ’90s, the video has a number of nice moments, but our favorites are those that include some wonderful home movie footage of Edsel Ford and family. The only son of Henry Ford and the father of Henry Ford II, Edsel died in 1943 at the age of only 49. But more than any other single person, he was responsible for the survival and success of Lincoln—and he was also the creative force behind one of America’s most distinctive cars, the Lincoln Continental. Edsel Ford is as essential to the story of Lincoln as the company’s founders, Henry and Wilfred Leland, and it’s wonderful to have this rare personal glimpse of him here. Video below.

​Not long after Glenn Pray started building his fiberglass-bodied Auburn 866 boattail speedsters, dozens of companies around the country copied the design with their own fiberglass replicas. However, Pray’s son, Doug, maintains his father’s cars had a special provenance because they had the stamp of the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg company on them, the same provenance he intends his steel-bodied third-generation speedsters to benefit from.
“This will be an Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg factory upgrade of original cars,” Doug Pray said, referencing the company he inherited from his father, who in turn resurrected it from the ashes of E.L. Cord’s original Auburn, Indiana-based company when he bought its inventory in 1960 and moved it all to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. “You could say it’s a factory re-body, but it’s way more than that.”
Pray’s plans, suggested by former Broken Arrow Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg factory worker Dale Adams, start with original 1935 Auburn frames, around which he will build and trim new speedster bodies according to the original Gordon Buehrig design using some of the 30,000 pounds of NOS parts still in Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg’s inventory. “What we don’t have, we’ll make new,” he said.

​The drivetrains, however, will start with original Lycoming 279.9-cu.in. straight-eight blocks and Schwitzer-Cummins centrifugal superchargers but go on to incorporate a host of changes, including newly cast heads redesigned to increase the compression ratio from its stock 6.2:1, new aluminum pistons and connecting rods, a redesigned camshaft, and a redesigned impeller for the supercharger intended to increase boost from 3.5 pounds to 13.5 pounds. With all of those changes, Pray anticipates an output bump from the original 150 horsepower to about 250 horsepower.
While the 150hp supercharged eight-cylinders were good for 100 MPH in the original speedsters, Pray said he intends the new 250hp versions not only to be good for 100 MPH but also to “feel like a modern car in traffic.”
He said he and Adams, who is engineering the changes for Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg, have yet to agree on a transmission to back the upgraded engines, but either way it will have a modern overdrive package. As for the remainder of the chassis, it will largely retain the 1935 specifications. “The original drivetrain will hold up, it was built heavy duty,” Pray said. “It would be good to upgrade to discs, but we can’t hide those, so we will upgrade the drum brakes.”
Ultimately, Pray said, he intends the finished cars to be concours-worthy, with all of its upgrades hidden.

​To avoid any confusion with the 115 Auburn-built speedsters, Pray said he will append a G3 – for third-generation – to the cars’ original frame and serial numbers.
“We’re not going to be claiming they’re original, which I think is the big complaint a lot of people have about rebodied Full Classics,” he said. “So far I haven’t heard of any pushback to our plans.”
The G3 designation also pays homage to his father’s Auburn 866 boattail speedster. As Josh Malks wrote in “Glenn Pray: The Man Who Brought Legends to Life,” the Auburn project grew out of Glenn Pray’s disappointment over his split from the company he created to build the Cord 8/10. After taking molds from an original 1935 Auburn 851 speedster, Glenn Pray built 138 fiberglass speedsters atop modified Ford Galaxie chassis from 1966 to 1981.

“Although no one recognized it then, Glenn Pray had kicked off the replica car industry,” Malks wrote. “Over the coming decades, creating new cars that looked like old ones would become a huge business and a popular hobby.”
However, Pray preferred the term “second generation” rather than replica car, as does his son.
“When I took the company over after dad died, I went from revitalizing the parts business to rebuilding engines and restoration, and now with production, I’m going full circle, I’m doing everything my dad did,” Doug Pray said.
As for the Auburn trademarks, which the elder Pray sold off in 2005 for $500,000, Doug Pray said the buyer licensed the name back to Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg, but even without such a licensing agreement, he sees no problem to simply selling an Auburn boattail speedster based on an original Auburn frame with an original Auburn serial number.
“It was an Auburn when it was born, and it’s still an Auburn,” he said.
Pray said he anticipates selling a half-dozen of the cars for $750,000 each, a relative bargain given some recent seven-figure selling prices for original 851 speedsters. While he has floated the possibility of having the first finished car at this year’s Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival over Labor Day weekend, he said he has a few other cars to finish before then as well.
For more information about the G3 Auburn boattail speedsters, visit ACDfactory.com.

Article courtesy of Hemmings Daily, written by Daniel Strohl.

Pontiac was red hot in 1968 with a full lineup of popular models, from Firebird to GTO to Bonneville. Watch the division proudly boost its product line in this short GM promotional film.

​REVISED AND EXPANDED: With sharp management by a succession of savvy, enthusiastic car guys, including Bunkie Knudsen, Pete Estes, and John DeLorean, Pontiac was on a roll in the 1960s. Knudsen laid the course for Pontiac when he took over the struggling GM division back in 1956: youth, performance, and style. “You can sell a young man’s car to an old man,” Knudsen famously said, “but you can’t sell an old man’s car to a young man.” It was a powerful insight on the postwar American car market we’ve repeated often.

By 1968, Pontiac had securely staked out the number three slot in the sales charts, trailing only market leaders Chevrolet and Ford. With red hot performance models like the GTO, Firebird, and Grand Prix, and popular family haulers including the Catalina and the Le Mans, the Pontiac brand nudged hard up against the million-unit sales mark that year. In this four-minute promotional clip entitled Off and Running, the ’68 model lineup is given a surprisingly low-key sales pitch. Low key for Pontiac, anyway—which just goes to show what confidence can do. Video follows.

For 1963, Oldsmobile sailed perilously close to Cadillac waters with a new flagship model, the 98 Luxury Sedan.  

This is not the typical ’60s car commercial: No brass bands, straw hats, or striped blazers. Oldsmobile took a decidedly low-key approach in this 1963 campaign, relying on understated black-and-white still photography and museum-guide narration to tell the story of the new Lansing flagship that season, the 98 Luxury Sedan.

Note also the posh setting: the Orpheus Fountain at the Cranbrook Institute of Art in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. Motor City carmakers—Olds, Buick, Lincoln, Packard, and Hudson, to name a few—have often employed Cranbrook as a backdrop in their ad campaigns, especially when the themes include luxury and exclusivity, and the practice continues to this day.

Just one body style was offered for the 98 Luxury Sedan, also marketed as the LS: a six-window, four-door hardtop that shared its basic C-body shell with Cadillac and Buick Electra. At $4,300, the LS was solidly in the Buick price range, and with its long list of optional equipment and premium features, the new Olds was edging close to Cadillac territory as well. Sales were brisk at nearly 20,000 units, as fully loaded models in the near-luxury class continued to erode the exclusive market niche once enjoyed by the traditional luxury brands. Buyers discovered they could now obtain the same comfort and features in the lower-priced models, and this clip plays to that angle with its depictions of “the ultimate in limousine comfort” and “lush, deep-pile carpeting.” Video below.