GM Killed Pontiac in 2010. The G6 Has Killed 908 People Since.

Pontiac stopped existing on October 31, 2010, when GM shuttered the brand during bankruptcy, sold the tooling, laid off the engineers, and closed the website, but nobody told the G6. Between 2014 and 2023, 908 people died in G6 crashes according to NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System, every single fatality logged after the brand that built the car had already been buried.^[1]

That lethality figure deserves a moment. When a G6 shows up in a fatal crash, someone dies 69.9 percent of the time, while the Toyota Camry manages 59.3 percent, the Ford Fusion sits at 55.1 percent, and the Hyundai Sonata comes in at 54.1 percent.^[2] Fifteen percentage points separate the G6 from the Sonata, a car that cost about the same and shared the same dealership-lot demographic of "first car after the divorce" buyers.

Model year 2006 was the worst vintage at 230 deaths, and the 2008 added another 217. Between those two model years alone, GM built a mid-size sedan that has killed 447 people so far, which is more total fatalities than the entire Mazda6 lineup has accumulated across all its model years combined.^[1]

Toxicology compounds the damage. Of 1,292 G6 drivers involved in fatal crashes, 10.4 percent tested positive for drugs, the highest drug-impairment rate of any mid-size sedan in the FARS dataset, with overall impairment reaching 22.1 percent. For comparison, the Camry's impairment rate is 19.2 percent and the Accord's is 20.0 percent.^[1] A car that attracted riskier drivers also failed to keep them alive at industry-standard rates when things went wrong.

Not that GM was unaware of the car's problems. In 2014, NHTSA forced a recall of 1.37 million vehicles, including the G6, for sudden loss of electric power steering that could strike "at any time while driving."^[3] Separately, 855 brake-light malfunction complaints rolled in, covering vehicles whose brake lights either refused to illuminate or stayed on permanently, and GM recalled those too.^[3] Both campaigns landed four years after GM had told everyone Pontiac didn't exist anymore.

A G6 today is a $3,000 Craigslist car, someone's beater, someone's first car, someone's transportation of last resort. At 1.64 deaths per 100 million miles, its fatality rate exceeds every Japanese mid-size sedan on the market during the same era and lands 33 percent above the Ford Fusion.^[1] If you are driving one and haven't checked your VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls, you should, because there are at least three open campaigns on these cars, and nobody at Pontiac will be answering the customer-service line.