Pontiac Motor Division

The story

Before there were Pontiacs, there were buggies. Edward M. Murphy ran the Pontiac Buggy Company before betting on the automobile and founding the Oakland Motor Car Company in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1907. General Motors bought a half-interest in Oakland in 1909 and acquired the rest after Murphy died later that year. In 1926, GM introduced a lower-priced companion to the Oakland line and called it Pontiac -- after Chief Pontiac, the Odawa leader who laid siege to Detroit in the 1760s and who had already lent his name to the surrounding city.

The companion outran its parent almost immediately. Pontiac was outselling Oakland within months and had absorbed the brand entirely by the early 1930s. For decades the home plants ran along Baldwin Avenue, and the city's identity and GM's were welded together -- assembly lines, a truck-and-bus complex, a metal-stamping operation, thousands of jobs. The Baldwin Avenue assembly plant built everything from the Oakland Six to the GTO to the plastic-bodied Fiero, which rolled off the line until that plant closed in 1988.

The brand outlived the home plant by two decades. By the end, no Pontiac was built in Pontiac -- the last one, a white 2010 G6 sedan, was assembled at Orion Township in January 2010. GM, restructuring through bankruptcy, killed the marque; franchise agreements formally expired October 31, 2010.

What's There Now

The historic Baldwin Avenue assembly plant closed in 1988; part of the original Oakland site survives as GM's still-operating Pontiac Metal Center stamping plant.

Everything that was here

• 1907–2010

  Pontiac Motor DivisionFactory

  The car was named after the city. The city was named after an 18th-century Odawa war leader. For 84 years the place and the brand were inseparable -- until GM retired the name in 2010 and left the city it came from behind.

  See the map in 1908 →

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