[CJFusco]

I will be sad to see Saab go, if it does indeed go (maybe it will be bought out by someone else?). The old, pre-GM Saabs had tons of character. Were there better cars out there? Sure, but at least Saabs were unique.

But Pontiac? Was there ever a more redundant brand? When I first started driving, I wondered how car companies got away with having 3 or 4 brands of basically the same car - Buick and Olds were essentially going after the same market (competing for customers WITHIN the same corporation); ditto Pontiac and Chevy; ditto Mercury and Ford (over at Ford). I wasn't surprised at all to see Olds go away a few years ago.

I had a 97 Olds Cutlass - the same car as the Chevy Malibu , and the same basic shell as either the Grand Am or the Gran Prix (I forget which). It was unquestionably the worst car I ever owned. The damn thing tried to kill me one day out of nowhere. I was at the top of this really dangerous hilly road on the West Hartford/Avon line in CT when (apparently) the head gasket blew and somehow took with it the power steering and power brakes (I'm guessing the accessory pulley broke too? From the heat?). Absolutely no warning; by the time I realized that there was a problem, I was already flying down the hill with no brakes and no steering. I was lucky that the light at the bottom of the hill was green; this intersection was the site of a major accident just a few months prior, in which a tractor-trailer couldn't stop and plowed through a major intersection, ending up in the front window of a furniture store.