Pontiac Is Officially Dead

[Birds]

Wheels car of the year is not a prestigious award when you say the following:

Leyland P76

Holden Camira

In industry circles it means jack. Esp when the major sponsor is..........Holden!!!!!!

If the VE Commodore can get car of the year why not the Falcon with 5 star Ancap across the entire range?

Because car of the year is about more than just how safe a car is. BA Falcon won car of the year too. But really, who cares about the opinions of a few motoring journalists who conform to a singular demographic.

[djr81]

Sif be Camira hating! those things are near indestructible! same goes for the Camry! They come under the heading of 'good thrashers' lol. Wheels does seem to be targeted towards more the kind of readers who are also into the NRMA/RACV magazines, ie boring baby boomers with a family.

P.S best mate and I did the rounds of the dealers out of boredom last monday, and the build quality of the VE's and FG's we looked at was shithouse, especially the fabrics used in the seats and interior plastics. They both felt flimsy, cheap and ugly, the VT/VX were of much better quality. You can tell where the corners have been cut.

Camira, indestructible. In the same sentence. They were badly built, with a litany of faults. Most were so hopelessly underpowered that thrashing the bejeesus out of them was the only way of keeping up with the rest of the traffic.

Plastic quality & build quality are not the same. For that matter "flimsy" is mostly a perception. How did you measure the quality?

Overwhelmingly the more recent the car the better its build quality. The VE is streets ahead of the VT. Just like the FG is ahead of the AU.

[bozodos]

Lol yeah I've seen a fair few Camira's getting around still, kinda remind me of the VN how they keep on going!

You've got me on the build quality, we were just looking over the interiors and exteriors and engine bays, grabbing things and visually inspecting, compared to the Euro's we looked at (VW Golf, M3, SAAB 930?, Mercedes) rather than giving all a comphrehensive test drive. Mainly with the plastics they felt thin and you could feel the dags from the manufacturing process on the edges. The seat cloth in the SS and the G6E Turbo was more of an aesthetic problem to us than anything else though.

Especially since my mate had a VX SS, we couldn't really see anything in the VE especially that seemed to make it 'better', we really should have taken it for a drive to confirm our suspicions though.

[Birds]

Highly recommend you take one for a drive, they are on a completely different driving dynamic to the VT/VX.

Also, if you're going to compare them to those Euros, atleast do it with the Calais or a Statesman/Caprice.

JE Camiras weren't too bad, they had the C20NE which gave respectable power (85kw) for a single overhead back in those days. A mate had one for a first car and had no issues getting it off the line