G8 is no more, is there hope?

So GM went and killed one of the best car companies in American history. No worries right? At least they won’t let the best car of that company (the Pontiac G8) go down in flames. Surely they’ll recreate it as a valiant Chevy impala or caprice, right? If bob Lutz has his way, then yes, exactly that, and for awhile there was a shimmer of hope that the G8 would live on as a BMW killing Chevy. But ol’ Fritz Henderson shot down those comments in short order, both correcting the public, and forcing Lutz to correct himself via the blogosphere. So, no G8 re-body for the US?

This writer is not convinced.

Lutz may have been over enthused to recreate the impala into a street fighter that would do the ‘90s 4 door corvette justice (not to mention the 427 powered monsters of the past), but an impala is not viable for a brand aiming to recreate its image as something small and efficient. Fritz-y boy realizes this, and he realizes that the G8’s pavement pounding nature doesn’t suit the “new GM’s” green coated image.

Yet there remains another brand in the GM compendium, another brand in desperate, desperate need of a new image. Buick, the brand our grandfather’s drive, needs to become the brand that anyone who can’t afford a Cadillac drives. Granted Buick is attempting this with the newly revised (read: heavily revised) Lucerne, and honestly it looks like a perfectly good and capable car. But Buick is boring, really boring, it seems like every one of their cars is displayed in cream or dark grey metallic in advertisements, and they just look like a real dream to sleep drive in. A nice, pleasant, restful dream.

But I don’t want to drive a dream, I want a nightmare. And frankly, Buick has been subsiding long enough on the pleasant rest of the elderly. They need a Halo car, a car that brings attention, a car that shows the public that Buick isn’t a warm nap on a long stretch of highway, Buick is a driving machine capable of delivering comfort on long trips and excitement on even the shortest of drives. The G8 is dead, we’ve all shed the collective tears of a broken love, but GM, PLEASE, give it back. And this time, make it a Buick. I know GM is sitting there just wondering “but Daniel, how do we bring such an exciting car to such a boring brand”. Well GM, if only Buick had a few brief periods of truly hardcore performance to pull ideas from, if only Buick redefined the word “sleeper” by reinventing the GM V6 and create a monster. Dear GM, dear Fritz Henderson, please re-release the G8 as an almighty four door incarnation of the legendary Grand National. Hell, you can even call the GXP model a “GNX”; it even shares two of the three letters.

And PLEASE, if you are enlightened and intelligent enough to revive Buick’s most enticing and interesting car (tied with the muscular GS I would suppose), please please please recreate the appropriate “Darth Vader your car is ready” advertisements to go with it.

Jordin Sparks is more hardcore than your typical rockband.

It's wednesday morning, and the boredom of a day-off from work and customary laziness has lent itself to the watching of VH1; if nothing else than for the wonder of watching a music channel that plays music videos at SOME point of the day (the author does not recieve FUSE in his cable package.) During this exploration into a truckload of bands not to be particularily loved, but also not particularily hated, the image of a classic auto or two found itself arbitrarily plastered on the screen for effect. Two videos used classic '68 Camaro's for this effect. Daughtry utilized a '68 soft top (maybe '67, I wasn't inspired enough to care) for the singular purpose of making the frontman look more credible as a "bad ass". Perhaps someone should have informed him that a flat black hardtop with an 8-71 blower sticking out of the hood may have suited the purpose more aptly, but I digress. The next video to utilize the famed Chevrolet moniker was Safety Suit. They improved on Daughtry's feminin mistakes by utilizing a '68 SS with cowl induction and wide white rally stripes accenting the appropriate hue of blue. In both these cases, the Camaro served it's classic use in real life, making men of questionable maculine prowess into unavoidable examples of testosterone.

But all of this leads to the title phrase for this post. After seeing the two aformentioned videos (in Daughtry's case, VH1 felt is necessary to play it twice) a video panning across a lovely grass field came on the screen. Jordin Sparks name cited on the lower left of the screen, but good lord! the central character of the video is an all black DeTomaso Pantera. Not only was this mountain of car displayed in the video, but it remained a central piece of setting that commanded camera from the very first moment of the video, before even our dear Jordin made an appearence on screen.

This all leads to one pretty simple fact, directors can try and make frontmen look masculine and powerful by thrusting a typical american muscle car on the viewer. But when a director (or one could only hope, an artist) recognizes the beauty of a vehicle and utilizes that vehicle simply because it will catch the eye and draw in the viewer, that is the reason a vehicle should be used for a medium such as television (especially music television.)

For that, Jordin Sparks is more hardcore than either of the "rock" bands listed above.

See the Video here