Original Pontiac XP-833 Concept Up For Grabs

Pontiac’s beautiful 1964 prototype, unceremoniously dubbed XP-833 during its development, is one of our favorite concepts out of GM’s talented design department of the era. Just two were built, one with a retractable soft top, and one with a removable fastback hard top. The latter is currently up for sale with an asking price of $1.2 million.

We featured the soft-top XP-833 a few years ago and our author got to spend some time behind the wheel. Rather than a show car that was cobbled together to be a static sculpture, the prototypes, while rushed, were built to highlight how such a car could be affordably built using GM’s vast parts bin. As such, they’re quite well-built and roadworthy.

The car’s overall look is reminiscent of the C3 Corvette that debuted for the 1968 model year, and it also features a fiberglass body. However, some significant cues differ. Up front, its hidden headlights seemed to preview the Opel GT, which concealed its beams by rolling the housings longitudinally. The rear of the car transitions into a tail that more closely resembles the 1970 Firebird. The example up for sale is the hard-top version, featuring a sleek removable fastback, another detail that differs from the Stingray, which featured a tunneled backlight in coupe form and a removable hardtop that closely mimicked the convertible top. We must say, the fastback suits it.

Of the two prototypes, this is the only one powered by Pontiac’s OHC inline-six engine. The overhead cam architecture was still novel for an American car engine at the time, and Pontiac was the only GM division to use it. It made its production debut in the 1966 Tempest and was also used in the Firebird. Never as muscular as the V-8, the OHC engine was still capable, and Sprint versions produced more than 200 hp. It would have made an excellent base engine considering the XP-833 was expected to weigh less than 2500 pounds.

All too often, GM gets vehicles ironed out just before pulling the plug on production. In the case of the XP-833, its designers got the lines just right and it never even got the chance to hit showrooms. It’s easy to imagine a Pontiac lineup that included this shapely convertible as its halo car as a lighter, inline-six alternative to the more muscular Corvette, and of course a V-8 would have been optional as long as John DeLorean hat his way. This beautiful experiment would be the centerpiece of any Pontiac fan’s collection, or anyone who values mid-century American design. We hope it finds a proper home.

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