Cars that could have been built, but they couldn't build (ex. 1990 Fiero)

NickD said:

Toyota had all the stuff to make a killer 2ZZ-powered MR2 Spyder from the factory, it's practically a bolt-together swap and I think that the car would have a bit stronger reputation if they had built it. But they never did. I've heard two theories; one was that people refrained from buying the 140hp 1ZZ version since a 180hp 2ZZ version seemed like a foregone conclusion, only for sales of the 1ZZ version to be so low that Toyota didn't think it made sense to produce a 2ZZ version. The other, and more relevant to this thread, was that Toyota was supplying 2ZZs to Lotus and had a non-compete agreement and felt that a 2ZZ Spyder would have been a little too close in terms of performance to the Lotus Elise/Exige and so they couldn't make it.

Then they should have stuffed the 2gr before Lotus got the idea. 

Nah. No universe contains that reality. But can you imagine? 

I have to question how accurate these stories are about GM canceling projects because they would be faster/better than the Corvette, and wonder how many of them were engineering exercises that ultimately contributed technology to later cars. There's good reason that people complain so much about these concept cars from GM, because they actually spent a lot of time and money building them, probably more than most manufacturers. 

Pontiac got the OK on the Fiero by calling it a commuter car and utilizing the substructures from existing GM models - Citation mostly, plus the Iron Puke engine.

They slowly improved it with the 2.8 V6 engine and finally, in 1988, the new suspension the car had always needed. 

They tested a turbo version with 190 bhp, but when that came to the attention of the Corvette people it was quickly nixed - the mid 80s Corvette ran an anemic V8 with only 230 bhp and weighed 3100 lbs. vs. the Fiero at under 2500 lbs.  You can see the problem with that.

FWIW I didn't like the 1990 Fiero prototype body as much as I did the original.  It looked too much like a tweaked Firebird.

It wasn't until 2009 that GM/Pontiac got around to making another sports car - my driveway back then:

wvumtnbkr said:

I WANT that camaro!

Call it a Chevelle and sell millions.

Cadillac 16. The prestige of ownership would have been stupendous.

When Pontiac started testing the Fiero, the press thought it was the new Corvette. It also had the highest side-impact crash safety rating of anything in 1984. They had to stop selling them to GM staffers in order to have enough to sell to the public.

The GN stomped on the Corvette and got killed.

The Sy/Ty twins suffered the same fate.

The 81 WS6 Turbo T/A beat the Corvette on the skidpad in spite of being heavier with two more seats. The 80/81 Turbo cars made more HP and torque than the Corvette, only 10hp less than the 400 that the 301T replaced, even with it's primitive turbo system. The 301 Turbo was slated to go into the third-gen cars but got axed. Imagine what they could have done with more development and the SFI system from Buick.

Pontiac stuffed the 3.8 Turbo into the F-body using Bonneville cylinder heads and made more power than Buick, bested the Corvette again and got the chop.

The Solstice should have had a V8 but didn't.

All the '59 cars are gorgeous, then when Chevrolet designers got to the back end they just gave up.

The other divisions had so much potential but the GM brass kept on eating crayons.

In reply to ShawnG :

Don't forget GM issuing an edict that only Corvettes could have factory-equipped multiple carburetion after 1967, forcing Pontiac and Olds to discontinue their Tri-Power options and preventing Tri-Power or dual quads on Camaros and Chevelles.

Also, in 1970, Chevy said the LT-1 in the Camaro made 10 less horespower than the mechanically-identical LT-1 in the Corvette strictly because they didn't want the lowly Camaro to match the 'Vette in horsepower.

Same thing with the LT4s in the ZL-1 Camaro and 3rd-gen CTS-V. Again, mechanically identical to the LT4 in the Corvette Z06, but rated at 10 less horespower than the 'Vette to keep the 'Vette on it's pedestal.

Not 'Vette related, but I remember reading that GM underrated the last of the supercharged 3800s because they didn't want them to be too close to the FWD Northstar in power, since the Northstar was supposed to be a premier engine.

Of course, not exclusively a GM thing. It was pretty much all but confirmed that for years Porsche hamstrung the Cayman so that it didn't upstage the 911.

There are lots of stories around the Fiero.  My understanding is it was designed as a high performance sports car.  Then the bean counters got a hold of it and the rest is history. 

There's a fantastic book about the development of the Fiero, really makes you cheer for them and really shows how much of GM's plastic fantastic body development was done on those cars.

Lets not forget that GM made an excellent EV which they bought back at great resistance from all of the testers.

If you read Lee Iacoccas book, he goes into a lot of detail on development processes at the big three. He sort of boiled it down to Ford uses design committees too much which results in lots of compromises, Chrysler tries too hard to be first to market with new stuff that doesn't really work yet and relies on buyers to do the beta testing and GM waits too long to release something new and misses the boat as a result. Seems pretty accurate to me.

SKJSS (formerly Klayfish) said:

There are lots of stories around the Fiero.  My understanding is it was designed as a high performance sports car.  Then the bean counters got a hold of it and the rest is history. 

Hey, there's a podcast about that!

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2100717/12468981-on-the-topic-of-big-threadlocker-and-machines-that-go-ping?t=0

IHC had big plans for the Scout III but the light line went out of business before it could become a reality.

I've seen the surviving one in person.

https://www.motortrend.com/features/1606-international-harvesters-corvette-a-future-scout-left-in-the-past/

I never understood why Nissan didn't build the Mid-4. It seemed like it was ready to go at the right time. Things might have gone south in 1988, but nobody saw that coming in 1986 and 1987. 

ShawnG said:

There's a fantastic book about the development of the Fiero, really makes you cheer for them and really shows how much of GM's plastic fantastic body development was done on those cars 

When I worked for the composites R&D company I bought some of the equipment from the Fiero body plant, rebuilt,  and retrofitted it for our application. It was primo stuff

With so much Fiero talk, people who want to know should check out Cammisa's Revelations video on youtube.

SKJSS (formerly Klayfish) said:

There are lots of stories around the Fiero.  My understanding is it was designed as a high performance sports car.  Then the bean counters got a hold of it and the rest is history. 

All of the early press releases at the time, said pontiac was building a small lightweight 2 seat commuter car. Small, low hp 4cyl, plastic body panels. 
All the magazines editors said "sure... nod nod, wink wink" despite GM sticking to there commuter car story. 
Then, when pontiac released a... wait for it... small lightweight 2 seat commuter car, with an anemic engine, the automotive community was surprised and outraged 

ever since then, I've heard a lot of "insider" storylines, but as a young car guy, hoping for a sporty car, I remember being disappointed, but not surprised. 

I always thought it was nuts that Yamaha abandoned the ox99-11. 
 

In reply to Woody (Forum Supportum) :

I like this story with the Nissan R390. They were supposed to make 20 for homologation in GT1. One of their Le Mans drivers, Erik Comas, liked the car enough that he asked to be paid in the form of the production car. Trouble is Nissan didn't make more than 1 product since no one else was bothering to. It wasn't until about 2020 before Nissan let him have a race car which he converted to road legal.

A slightly different spin on "Could have built X but didn't want to steal sales from Y" is "Could have built more of X but didn't want to steal sales from Y", and that was the '77 Pontiac Can Am. Despite being based on the LeMans, it used the dashboard from the '77 Grand Prix. According to Jim Wangers, the guys in management were against the Can Am from the start because the Grand Prix was on route to a record-setting sales year and they needed every Grand Prix dashboard they could get and didn't want to divert any to the Can Am. When the tooling for the rear spoiler broke after about 1300 were built, management put the brakes on further production of the Can Am over the dashboard issue.

You mean something like the last iteration of the Fiero should have been the first iteration of the Fiero and the base engine should have been the Quad 4.

ShawnG said:

When Pontiac started testing the Fiero, the press thought it was the new Corvette. It also had the highest side-impact crash safety rating of anything in 1984. They had to stop selling them to GM staffers in order to have enough to sell to the public.

The GN stomped on the Corvette and got killed.

The Sy/Ty twins suffered the same fate.

The 81 WS6 Turbo T/A beat the Corvette on the skidpad in spite of being heavier with two more seats. The 80/81 Turbo cars made more HP and torque than the Corvette, only 10hp less than the 400 that the 301T replaced, even with it's primitive turbo system. The 301 Turbo was slated to go into the third-gen cars but got axed. Imagine what they could have done with more development and the SFI system from Buick.

Pontiac stuffed the 3.8 Turbo into the F-body using Bonneville cylinder heads and made more power than Buick, bested the Corvette again and got the chop.

The Solstice should have had a V8 but didn't.

All the '59 cars are gorgeous, then when Chevrolet designers got to the back end they just gave up.

The other divisions had so much potential but the GM brass kept on eating crayons.

While we are crapping on GM, I would like to also expand on the Turbo 301 thing. 

The 3rd gen cars were in fact supposed to carry over the 301T. At the 11th hour, GM cancelled the engine's production and stuffed the 305 in there instead. The only thing that made it into production was the turbo bump hood.

Now, imagine if the 301T got the same development that the 3.8 V6 Turbo received. It's easy to forget in the wake of the legendary Grand National, but that engine in carbed form suffered from a lot of the same complaints people had of the 301T. Essentially, GM robbed us all of a cheap, turbocharged, MPFI, and intercooled V8 that would have made the Grand National a curious footnote in comparison. 

And on the hood thing: that wasn't the last time GM did that. 

In 2000, GM decided to slap a supercharger and a 5-speed manual in the 3.4L V6 in the Grand Am to create a concept called the SC/T. It made 265hp which was a decent amount at the time, and the thing was basically production ready. It was going to serve as an affordable performance car in their lineup slotted under the Grand Prix GTP, and I wanted one. Motor Trend in particular was enamored with it, and begged GM to build the thing. Only part that made it to production, again, was the hood. 


They still continue to trip over themselves. They are the grand masters of building something amazing and then either canceling it immediately or trotting it out half-baked as an appearance package no one wants. Such is the way of things. 

Noddaz said:

You mean something like the last iteration of the Fiero should have been the first iteration of the Fiero and the base engine should have been the Quad 4.

And speaking of the Quad4, if I recall, it was initially developed for RWD applications. I can't remember for what, though

ShawnG said:

The Solstice should have had a V8 but didn't.

It didn't really need it, although many owners have fitted them. The stock turbo model has tons of scope for tuning to V8 performance levels while keeping the 4 cylinder engine.  My daily driver has been modified conservatively (by me) to put out 375 bhp and 375 Tq out of the stock 2.0 engine.  One cn go much further than that with some strengthening mods.

In comparison, the 2009 Corvette with LS3 put out 420 bhp and 424 Tq, and weighs around 200 lbs. more. It will do the 1/4 in 12.6 secs. vs  Solstice GXP at 13.6 (or my lightly modified car at low 12 sec. range.  A nice bonus of having a turbo 4 cylinder is that when you are not in boost, which is most of the tie, you are getting excellent fuel mileage, while the Corvette is always hauling 6.4 l of gas sucking displacement.  Solstice = 19 mpg city, 29 mpg highway. Corvette = 16/26.

2 door JL gladiator (jeep pickup) 

Peabody said:

I have to question how accurate these stories are about GM canceling projects because they would be faster/better than the Corvette, and wonder how many of them were engineering exercises that ultimately contributed technology to later cars. There's good reason that people complain so much about these concept cars from GM, because they actually spent a lot of time and money building them, probably more than most manufacturers. 

considering i work at GM based on my experiences of the political mayham that is office politics, I would assume almost zero 

Noddaz said:

You mean something like the last iteration of the Fiero should have been the first iteration of the Fiero and the base engine should have been the Quad 4.

 

The Quad 4 was supposed to be the base engine in the 2nd gen Fiero.

There was also rumours of a turbocharged -something- being developed with Porsche.

There also must be some reason that the Northstar bolts up to the transaxle with only one bolt not accounted for.

GM also worked with Martin Turbo Systems to turbocharge the C3 Corvette but nothing ever came of it.