Pontiac Died in 2010. It Has Killed 3,038 People Since.

Here’s a fun fact that will ruin your morning commute. General Motors officially killed Pontiac on October 31, 2010. Filed the death certificate, pulled the logos off the dealerships, moved on. The FARS database I’m looking at covers 2014 through 2023. Every single death in this story happened after the brand was already a ghost.

Three thousand and thirty-eight people were killed in Pontiac vehicles across nine models and an estimated 2.45 million cars still haunting American roads. That’s roughly 304 people per year. A mid-size regional airline crash, annually, from a brand your kids have never heard of.

The Grand Prix leads the obituary column with 970 deaths at a rate of 2.14 per 100 million VMT — comfortably worse than the Toyota Camry (2.03) and Ford Fusion (1.23) it theoretically competed against. Model year 2004 alone accounts for 156 of those deaths. The G6, Pontiac’s final sedan, follows with 908 deaths. Its 2006 model year — the one Oprah gave away to her entire studio audience — generated 230 fatalities. The Grand Am adds another 713.

Together, those three sedans account for 2,591 deaths. For context, that’s more than the Chevy Tracker (856), Ford Crown Victoria (881), and Hyundai Veloster (97) combined. From a brand that hasn’t built a car in sixteen years.

The impairment numbers tell a consistent but unremarkable story. The Grand Prix sits at 21.5% impaired drivers, the G6 at 22.1%, the Grand Am at 21.6% — all hovering around the national average. The Pontiac Vibe, ironically, posts the highest impairment rate of the lineup at 25.4%, despite being a rebadged Toyota Matrix and the safest Pontiac per mile at just 0.54. The people driving the good Pontiac were the most likely to be drunk in one.

GM killed Pontiac because it was redundant. Overlapping with Chevy, cannibalizing Buick, diluting the portfolio. The corporate logic was sound. But nobody recalled the cars. Nobody pulled them off used lots. Nobody told the 2.45 million people still driving them that their brand’s safety engineering had stopped evolving the day the last one rolled off the line.

The Aztek, for what it’s worth, killed only 12 people. Sometimes being too ugly to sell is a safety feature.