Two decades after the death of the Fiero, Pontiac took a second swing at building a fun, affordable, two-seat sports car. The media launch was based in Portland, Oregon, and the day-long press drive went across the Columbia River into Washington state. The roads there were delightfully smooth, curvy, and mostly traffic-free, perfect for demonstrating the Solstice’s grin-inducing dynamics.

I was working on The Pontiac Solstice Book (Lamm-Morada Publishing, 2006) at the time and found myself loving how that sexy little roadster looked and drove. Its 177-hp, 2.4-liter four-cylinder was far from muscular, but the engine was eager enough to complement the car’s nimble, pavement-hugging handling, especially when mated to the standard, five-speed manual transmission. I headed home smiling.

A few weeks later, when I was close to finishing the book, Pontiac sent out a Solstice press car for me to drive for a week. I was away when it arrived, so my car-loving wife, Jill, backed it into our garage. When I got home later that day, she smiled and said, “I want one.” We still had our ’67 Corvette and the ‘03 Chevy SSR, so she suggested selling the ‘Vette to make room for a Solstice. I loved that compelling but crude old Corvette, but I could do without its need for regular care and occasional expense. Hmmm.

About that time, I attended the media launch of the Solstice’s mechanical twin, the Kappa-based Saturn Sky. I was equally impressed with that very different-looking but similar-driving sweetheart. The two were said to be polarizing, but I liked them both, and so did Jill. We applied for one of each through GM’s Captive Fleet (early-build company car) program for employees and retirees and—just to be sure—put down refundable deposits for new ones at our local Pontiac and Saturn stores.

As it turned out, we were offered a well-equipped, five-speed Captive Fleet Solstice in silver and a base Sky with cloth seats and black paint. Easy decision. We sold the ’67 Vette, probably for less than it might have brought had we held out for more. The arrival of the Solstice meant that we had two cool-looking, sweet-driving, essentially new modern vehicles that just might be future collectibles.

How It Came to Be

When GM product guru Bob Lutz drove the Pontiac Solstice concept sports car onto the stage at the Detroit North American Auto Show in January of 2002, the astonished gasp from assembled media was clearly audible. A round of applause was followed by another for the svelte Solstice concept coupe that rolled out next. “The North American market is ripe for an affordable, pure roadster,” Lutz said to the assembled media. “The Solstice is striking in its purity and simplicity.” It was love at first sight for me—but with two other special vehicles at home, where would I put a Solstice?

As GM began to sink toward bankruptcy amid a collapsing U.S. economy, it took nearly four years for Lutz to wrangle corporate approval for the Solstice and then to source, develop, certify, and validate the sexy little roadster into production. The car fulfilled a dream that Lutz had nourished throughout his career. Not long after then-CEO Rick Wagoner had hired him in 2001 to oversee GM’s global product, Lutz had met with Wayne Cherry, then VP of design, to look at every future vehicle and improve or even cancel any that Lutz thought wasn’t good. And in that meeting, Lutz brought up the inexpensive two-seater that he had long wanted to create, first at GM Europe, then at BMW, Ford, and finally Chrysler.

He strongly believed that a very affordable Mazda Miata–fighter, done right, would bolster GM’s product image and could turn a profit. “Bob wanted to know if we could do a concept roadster in time for the Detroit Show,” Cherry said in an interview for my Solstice book. “The show was barely four months away. But any time someone asks us to do a concept sports car … we’ll say yes! We were so excited to be able to do that kind of a car.”

Cherry launched a competition among GM’s global designers. When Ed Welburn—who had primary responsibility for concepts at the time—showed the best sketches to Lutz on a big screen, one of a series by Franz von Holzhausen from GM’s California studio jumped out. “That’s it!” Lutz exclaimed. “Exactly the character we’re talking about!” In Lutz’s words, the California studio “showed how [GM] could do a contemporary vehicle based on quintessential sports-car shapes of the 1950s and ‘60s…those voluptuous, flowing-fendered, Italianesque sports cars—Ferraris, Maseratis, Aston Martins—of that period … classical style done in a very contemporary way.” Another talented young designer from the California studio, Vicki Vlachakis, won the interior design competition.

That California team skipped scale models and went straight to full-size clay. Weekly reviews evolved into daily reviews. They took digital photos of the model and emailed them to Cherry and Welburn, who marked them up and sent them back. Working with incredible speed and intensity, they compressed what would normally be nearly a year’s work into a few short weeks.

On October 30, 2001, the full-size clay model was air-freighted to GM Design in Warren, Michigan, where Cherry and von Holzhausen worked overtime to fine-tune it. “The build shop gave us two days to do that,” Welburn said, “but we needed more time, and it finally got done in about a week of working day and night, night and day … a very, very focused block of time.”

The Concept Build

“Because of the tight timing, the engineers had already started working on the chassis and powertrain,” Cherry said. “One thing we wanted was a hood that opened forward like a Jaguar XKE and other sports cars of that era, because that always adds magic to a vehicle. But when you swing open a hood, everything underneath is exposed—the hinges, front substructure, inner panels, frame, suspension, exhaust system, firewall, the engine’s relationship to the chassis, the backsides of the headlights, all the containers. Everything had to be aesthetically evolved and designed on the go as that concept car was being built. We kept working through Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays, and Franz and Vicki stayed and worked at Special Projects right through the build for the show,” scheduled for the first week of January.

Lutz said he would have been “deliriously happy” to show a non-running fiberglass “roller” with a simulated powertrain. But Mark Reuss, who then oversaw concept-vehicle builds as executive director of Architecture Engineering, wanted to demonstrate what his team could do, and he picked exactly the right guy to do it: Mike Lyons, an engineer who was a drag racer in his spare time and had built some 15 race cars. (His latest was a small-block-powered Chevy Cavalier converted to rear-drive for NHRA Super Stock competition.) GM Special Projects fabricated the aluminum body, Roush Engineering did the chassis, and Wheel-to-Wheel built a 240-hp, 2.2-liter turbocharged Ecotec four that would fit longitudinally under the concept’s hood.

“Mike did that car in about 14 weeks,” Reuss related. “No one had done an all-metal running car in that timeframe. Franz and Vicki transmitted sketches from California, and when we laid them over our crudely packaged rear-drive Delta [platform], it was the first time we saw the design on a package that made some sense.”

Heading to Production

“Bob said, ‘Throw out the rulebook,’” said Mark Hogan, then VP of Advanced Product Development (and Jill’s boss). “’If we have to develop a new architecture, let’s do it.’ And that’s what we had to do.” A lot of components would have to be created from scratch, added Ron Pniewski, Product Planning VP, “including an all-new structure, before it could be defined to the point where we could move it to production. How fast could we do it? We figured late spring, early summer 2005, and we broke a lot of GM rules to get there.”

As the program was ramping up, Engineering VP Jim Queen and Purchasing VP Bo Andersson gathered all their engineers and component buyers in a big conference room and laid down the law on sourcing. It would take too long to validate new parts, so they wanted to use as many existing parts as possible—from GM’s current inventory, its partners, even outside companies. The fully independent suspension was SLA (short/long-arm) front and rear, with coil-over springs wrapped around Bilstein monotube shocks, and the lightweight control arms were forged aluminum. The rear suspension used a toe control link, and the differential (from a Cadillac CTS) boasted an optimized three-point mounting design.

One of the toughest challenges was figuring out how to execute a convertible top with sufficient sealing on a body that was mostly manually welded and glued together. The ultimately imperfect solution incorporated roof buttresses that tucked like the wings of a bird and moved inward more than six inches to drop into a rear compartment much narrower than the width of the top when raised.

The Solstice’s GM Ecotec four was designed and developed by an international team to be compact, lightweight, low-maintenance, and capable of accommodating such added technologies as turbocharging, supercharging, piston oil cooling, dual cam phasing, and direct fuel injection … mounted transversely in front-drive vehicles. Rotating the engine 90 degrees to power this rear-drive roadster required new mounts and modifications for improved dipstick access, while the engine’s cylinder head got better breathing, its crankshaft got an adapter and reinforcement at its transmission interface, its power steering pump became engine-driven (vs. electric in other applications), and its redline rose to 7000 rpm. One thing that did not change was its 10-degree tilt (rearward in front-drive cars, to the passenger side in the Solstice) since its lubrication system was designed for that angle.

The Solstice reached production (with its body MIG welded by hand) at a rate of just seven cars per hour in mid-2005 at GM’s plant om Wilmington, DE, then 59 years old, which was supposed to have been shuttered the previous year. Nominated for 2006 North American Car of the Year and Canadian Design of the Year awards, the Solstice got off to a strong start with 7,000 orders in its first 10 days and 6,000 more before winter. Media reviews were generally good except for its low-function interior and tiny trunk that offered little room when its oddly designed top was stowed.

Three other Kappa-platform cars (Saturn Sky, Opel GT, and Daewoo G2X) debuted as 2007 models. The turbocharged Solstice GXP and Sky Red Line also arrived for 2007, then the Targa-top Solstice Coupe in early 2009. Just 1266 Coupes (102 pre-production 2009 models, 1152 production 2009s, and 12 pre-production 2010s) were built before the plant closed in July 2009 after GM killed its Pontiac brand as part of a government-mandated bankruptcy recovery plan. In all, just 65,724 Solstices were produced for model years 2006-2010, while 34,415 Saturn Skys (122 of them rebadged as Daewoo G2Xs for South Korea) and 7519 Opel GTs were built. About 13,000 of the Solstice roadsters and 781 coupes were 260-hp, higher-performance GXPs.

Thus ended Lutz’s career-long dream of a youthful, affordable two-seat sports car. GM’s short-lived Kappas were not great cars, but they were stylish and fun at their prices. If you believe, as I do, that sports cars are mostly about style and dynamics, they were genuine winners in both categories. 

Our Solstice

Jill picked up our like-new, low-miles, silver Solstice (which had served for three months as some GM engineer’s or executive’s company car) at our local Pontiac dealership on the afternoon when I was driving our SSR in a collector-car tour sponsored by the Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum. (Okay, the SSR was near-new, not old, but looked like it belonged.) Jill joined me for dinner there in the Solstice. Driving home that night, top down, it occurred to me that we had two of the coolest-looking vehicles on the road, and both were essentially new and trouble-free with just a few thousand miles on their clocks.

Unlike all my other cool cars through the years, this one remains with us to provide big grins whenever we exercise it. Our ’67 Corvette was easily but sadly sold, and the ’03 Chevy SSR would soon be gone, but our sexy, little Solstice is still here. I eventually bought Jill’s half of the car—we had split the cost along with the drive time—and decided to keep it indefinitely as my one “collectible” car. Now nearing 20 years old but looking and running like new, it sits in our garage eagerly awaiting its next adventure as I write this. I recently took it out and drove it (in clear weather and roads) on some local errands. I still love it!