Autos Craze – Autos Blog

Pontiac Solstice Coupe is indeed the car of this generation and driving this small beast gives you the feeling of familiarity as though you have been driving this for years. It gives a good driving comfort and makes driving a cool experience. This drop-top variant is small but impresses with its style and performance.

The car feels like a true offspring of C4 Corvette Coupe and a Dodge Viper. Though the car is not anyway near in size or in power as these two American giants, all the features and merits of these two cars is present in this little coupe and this makes it unique in its cadre.

This car was spanned during the Bob Luz era at the GM. Bob is a true leader and one who values others creativity and innovation. He always wanted some new ideas from his designers and the first task he assigned to his designers when he joined GM in 2001 was to create a new concept or idea for the Detroit Auto Show. This has resulted in this grand coupe, Solstice.

Now with the company struck hard by the recession, Lutz is winding down his time at the company and as a result Solstice and the entire Pontiac are also fading slowly. Solstice is undoubtedly a true symbol of what went right and what went wrong with GM and Pontiac.

The original designs of this coupe were made by Franz Von Holzhausen, a newbie in the General Motor’s design studio at that time. From then on, Von Holzhausen has had tenure at Mazda and currently he leads a design team at Tesla Motors which works on the Model S.electric sedan. The designs were created by Von in the early 2002 for Detroit and Chicago auto shows and it was only in 2008 New York Auto show the coupe went to its production version.

The interiors of the coupe are tightly fit but are comfortable enough to provide the right amount of space. The center tunnel in the coupe is tall and wide to accommodate the transmission and the drive shaft. Unlike other sports cars, the coupe lacks dozens of buttons on its dashboard controlling its features. The seating position and the comfort are not up to the mark and the gaps between the dashboard and the doors are also uneven.

There is also an issue of visibility in this solstice coupe. With the roof panel, looking out of the low windshield requires you to lean ahead to see the traffic lights. It is indeed a difficult thing to do when you ought to concentrate more on road and drive.

The side glasses placed also do not encourage much as the side view is also not quite clear. Though there where initial doubts about the poor top mechanism employed for this coupe, the Pontiac now comes with a fold-up soft top that can be packed and kept inside. But this does not come with the base price as it is an $1100 option.