The Pontiac Fiero; An American Experiment

The 1980s brought us fleets of boxy, slow, and exceptionally boring cars. GM’s stable was filled to the brim with them, and Chrysler’s new “K” car ensured that nearly every Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth shared parts with each other. It shows how boring 80s cars were because we remember the platform, not the cars themselves. It was becoming much harder, likewise, to tell the difference between GM’s considerable makes. Everything looked the same, drove the same, and felt the same. Pontiac had built an identity as GM’s performance brand, offering fast and fun to drive cars. However, the oil crisis of the 1970s and growing government emission standards together spelled the abrupt end of high performance at Pontiac. Pontiac instead was forced to make commuter cars that oozed boring, like the Ventura II, a compact that offered about as much performance and excitement as a modern Smart Fortwo. Even Pontiac’s noteworthy exception to this trend, the Firebird, was all bark and no bite. The car’s biggest available engine option was a 6.6 LT V8, making a pitiful 185 HP. Pontiac’s sales were also slipping overall, with Oldsmobile and Buick catching and surpassing Pontiac’s in the late 70s. Pontiac was in desperate need of a hit to get the company back on track, and they finally found that hit in 1984, with the Fiero.

The engineers at Pontiac were in a bind. GM wanted more cars in the mold of Chrysler’s successful “K” platform, something that would be cheap and efficient to manufacture, while Pontiac wanted to make a fun, fast, mid-engine sports car. This idea was given form in the Fiero concept: a mid-engine V6, two-seater sports car that would deliver on performance, handling, and styling. It was a car aimed to revitalize both public and critical interest in the struggling brand, in much the same manner as the revolutionary GTO of the early 1960s. However, the concept didn’t fly with GM executives, mainly because they saw issue with another 2-seater sports car competing with, and possibly stealing sales from, GMs darling, the Chevrolet Corvette. However, GM did like the idea of marketing the Fiero concept as a “sporty” fuel efficient commuter car that just happened to have 2 seats. So, with this in mind, the Fiero was sent back to the drawing board where the designers reluctantly axed the all-aluminum V6, and replaced it with GMs “Iron Duke” inline 4 mated to a 4-speed manual transmission. The suspension was also redesigned to increase efficiency and reduce cost. Thus, instead of a car competing with the Corvette, GM created the Fiero seemingly intended to fill a small niche market for people who wanted a sports car, but without the exciting gas guzzling V8 of the Corvette. Which left many Fiero owners, by which I mean 99% of them, wanting more power.

Another selling point of the Fiero was supposed to be sporty handling and performance. The mid-engine layout, with its lower center of gravity, was designed around increasing performance and handling. However, because GM decided to cut costs, they forced the Fiero to share parts with the GM X and T platforms. If you’re wondering, these are the storied platforms that undergirded such “classics” as the Chevy Citation: a small, stubby compact which was exactly as sporty as a small, stubby compact. This meant that the Fiero’s tires, brakes, and other important suspension components all came from the GM parts bin, rather than being designed specify for a sports car. While this did keep production costs low, it also meant that the Fiero handled essentially like every other similarly sized GM product. Instead of competing or passing competing cars from other brands in handling and performance, the Fiero fell short, and was only average in the segment. Another major problem was, of course, the lethargic engine. The Fiero looked sporty, which encouraged owners to drive them hard, which means revving the engine to high RPMs. Unfortunately, the Fiero’s old “Iron Duke” preferred low RPMs and wasn’t meant to be driven hard. This inevitably caused reliability issues, and gave the car a bad reputation.

Worse still, because the engine was sourced from the GM parts bin, engineers had to design the car around the existing engine without altering the engineering, rather than design an engine optimized for the mid-engine layout. To accomplish this, they altered the design of the oil pan, which resulted in it always running a quart low. This blunder was combined with a misprint in the owners manual and on the oil dipstick itself, which incorrectly stated that the Fiero only had a 3 quart oil capacity, when in fact it could hold 4.5 quarts. This can cause engine damage at best, active fires at worst, and owners of 1984 Fieros had to pull a page out of the Ferrari ownership playbook and keep an extinguisher in their car (something Doug Demuro did, and Tyler “Hoovie” Hoover should have done). To add insult to injury, a batch of connecting rods were found to be defective and would break if the oil level was too low. The already low oil ensured at manufacture, misprint in the owners manual and on the dipstick, and the defective connecting rods altogether meant that some Fieros experienced complete engine failure, where the connecting rod broke, punched a hole in the engine block, and put the oil in contact with the hot exhaust components— and caught fire. In all, around 260, or 0.007%, of all Fieros caught fire and at least 6 people were injured. While GM mostly denied that anything was wrong, they did fix the engine problem, but the damage was already done. The Fiero had gained a reputation for not only being unreliable, but also as a machine that might try to kill you. It would seem that GM had birthed a Ford Pinto on steroids.

The one and only shining point of the Fiero was the exterior styling. The car was undeniably visually striking: it was sleek and smooth with flowing lines, yet still retained the hard edges seen in 80s cars. But unlike other 80s cars, this design looked very good. The Fiero also had popup headlights, a staple of 80s sports cars, and even vaguely resembled a Ferrari 308 GTB. How, then, did Pontiac manage to pull this off at the height of the “K” car era, where everything shared body parts with everything else? The solution, as it turned out, was plastic. The car was designed by Hulki Aldikacti, who had worked at GM for years and managed to convince Pontiac to utilize plastic body panels instead of steel. The body was thus cheap and easy to produce and lightweight, but still strong enough to withstand the wear and tear of everyday driving. It was also cast as a selling point: Pontiac claimed that you could remove and entirely replace all the body panels in 5 hours or less. Plastic bodies were still revolutionary at the time, and only high-end car brands such as Lotus tried using plastic or fiberglass panels. They were usually found to be rather flimsy and failed to hold up, but Pontiac used a mix of different plastic materials to produce a more durable composition than most anything that had come before. The panels were bolted to a “Space Frame,” (engineered exclusively for the Fiero) a welded steal unibody that was also exceptionally strong. On account of this, the Fiero scored very high in NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) crash testing. While the 14 in. wheels are small by today’s standard, they were actually a bit on the larger size for period compacts, and fit the small car nicely.

The interior was also new and different. In some of the higher trim models, buyers could option in speakers built into the headrest. This was very novel at the time, and had never really been attempted on a main stream production car. However, the idea seemed to disappear until Mazda offered it on the Miata in the 90s. While the exterior was already a head turner, the interior kept one’s head turning. The center console was large and high, a consequence of the “space frame” construction, though I’m sure it did make for a decent armrest. The transmission lever was also placed unusually high on both the automatic and manual transmission variants. While the body had a flow to the design, the instrument cluster inside stuck out from the dash and was shaped like a square. Besides the very 80s-looking round gauges, the rest of the interior stuck with square and rectangular theme, and the air vents were also all squares. Almost all of the buttons were squares too, and the entire front dashboard was a big rectangle. It appears that the entire interior was designed using only hard right angles.

The Feiro underwent various design changes over the course of its short production life, from 1984-1988. Nontheless, in this time the body and interior styles were altered, the suspension changed, and the powertrain revised. The 1984 Fiero was even the official pace car of the Indianapolis 500, and featured an engine producing 232 HP. Had this been a production engine option, maybe the Fiero would have stuck around longer. The GT model was introduced in 1985, along with various exterior upgrades. A V6 engine was also made available in 1985, although it only produced 140 HP. In 1986, the GT model (technically an 87, because it didn’t hit dealers until January of 1987,) came with a new fastback roofline. 1987 saw a power increase to the base 4 banger, bringing it up to a whopping… 98 HP. Finally, 1988 saw the end of the Fiero experiment. However, it went out with a relative bang. The suspension received a major upgrade, along with larger and wider tires, vented disk brakes, and a more powerful V6 engine was made available. Even the old inline 4 got an upgrade. The car had finally become something akin to the sporty mid-engine coupe that Pontiac originally envisioned in the late 70s. Not surprisingly, the 1988 Fiero is considered to be the most desirable model of the line, mostly due to the culminating vast improvements made since 1984.

The Pontiac Fiero was truly an American experiment: no other American automaker had ever produced a mid-engine production car, utilized plastic body panels, engineered a “space frame” from scratch, or installed speakers in a headrest. But, as is the nature of any mere experiment, it had to come to an end. A combination of poor upper management decisions, poor engineering, and a propensity to engine fires killed the Feiro just 4 years into production, right when Pontiac finally got the car to where they wanted it to be in the first place. Currently, there are 36 Fieros for sell on Autotrader Classics, with the early ones being quite affordable, around $1,500 to $5000, and the later models running upwards of $20,000. The Fiero was cool, quirky, fun, and iconic. When I think of a car that defines the 80s, the Pontiac Fiero stands right up there alongside the DeLorean. So next time you see a Fiero, grant it some respect, because despite the odds, that car accomplished more for the automotive world in 4 years then some cars do in a lifetime.