Is The Pontiac LeMans The Same Car As The GTO?

Pontiac was founded by General Motors in 1926 and lasted until 2009, when slumping sales and GM's bankruptcy restructuring led to Pontiac flopping out of the market. The brand produced nightmares like the flammable Fiero and objectively hideous (but actually ahead-of-it-time) Aztek in its later decades. Earlier in its history, Pontiac brought us beasts like the Mustang-slayer 1967 Firebird, which shared space on dealership lots with some other notable but underappreciated muscle cars. 

One of Pontiac's most notorious models was the GTO, which debuted in 1964 and helped make a place for the muscle car on U.S. roadways. You might sometimes hear the GTO mentioned in the same breath as the Tempest, a compact car that was developed in the early '60s as an answer to the Chevy Corvair. The Tempest originally shared Y-platform underpinnings with the Oldsmobile Cutlass and Buick special, but would soon diverge from its GM cousins. But the GTO and Tempest are not quite the same car. Here is the difference between these two vintage Pontiacs.

[Featured image by Trekphiler via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY 3.0]

John Delorean had experience as an engineer with Chrysler and Packard when, in 1956, he was put in charge of the foundering Pontiac division. At the time, he was just 40 and the youngest person to command a division of GM. He immediately recognized the United States public's desire for street-legal cars that were fun to drive. At the time, the Automobile Manufacturer's Association had a mandate in place that all cars had to weigh at least 10 pounds for every one cubic inch of engine displacement. That ruled out putting GM's new 389-inch V8 in the Tempest, which weighed just under 3,000 pounds in 1963.

To get around the restriction, Delorean introduced the GTO as an option package on the 1964 Tempest LeMans, which tipped the scales at roughly 3,500 to 3,700 pounds. The base engine on that model was a 330-cubic-inch V8, but ponying up an extra $295.90 for the GTO option got you GM's new 389-inch powerplant. The GTO stayed in production through 1974 on three different platforms, then returned from 2004 to 2006. It split from the Tempest in 1966 and became its own model, selling almost 100,000 units. As for the Tempest, that nameplate hung around through 1970, then returned from 1987 through 1991 on the rebadged Canadian version of the Chevy Corsica.

[Featured image by Greg Gjerdingen via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC-BY 2.0]