Pontiac Vibe: Toyota's Long Distance Cousin

Since the last blogpost, I have gotten quite a number of topic requests, so I will be taking them one at a time. For this week, my friend by the nickname Pablo Escobar requested that I write a piece on his car, which is a Pontiac Vibe.

2007 Pontiac Vibe

The name Pontiac takes me back to a great time in my childhood. Back when I still had a Play Station 2 and video games cost only two hundred naira per game. My Dad would give my brother and I one thousand naira during the holidays and we would purchase five games to keep ourselves occupied all through the break. One of those games we purchased was the Need For Speed Underground 2 and my favourite car in that particular game was the Pontiac GTO. As a kid, all I knew was that the Pontiac GTO was really fast and I used it to defeat my brother in split screen mode. I simply took note of the name and emblem of this particular car.

Need For Speed Underground 2 - Car Select (Pontiac GTO)

Coincidentally, during my Easter holiday in 2013, my cousins, brother and I travelled to Ghana for the holidays. On getting to Ghana I began to notice a particular car that was very common with the locals. These cars had a very familiar emblem, one from my favorite car in a game that I had left at home. To my greatest surprise, Pontiacs were everywhere in Ghana unlike in Nigeria but they were not sporty like the one in my game. They were normal economy cars but I was very excited to see my favorite car at the time in real life.

Pontiac Logo or Emblem

Fast forward a few years to 2019, I began to notice that the same cars I had seen almost 8 years ago in Ghana had begun to pop up everywhere in Nigeria. There was a sudden influx of Pontiacs especially the Pontiac Vibe model into Nigeria and people were buying them by the dozen. Word on the street was that the Pontiac Vibe was fuel economical, reliable and cheap to maintain because it shared parts with the Toyota Matrix. Nigerians play it very safe when it comes to cars, that is why we buy popular and well recognized brands like Toyota and Honda but for people to be buying Pontiacs, it meant that word on the street had to be true. So I went to do my research.

Pontiac Vibe (Left); Toyota Matrix (Right)

I then realized that the company Pontiac did not even exist anymore. Pontiac or formally known as the Pontiac Motor Division was an American automobile brand owned by General Motors. It is responsible for one of the most iconic cars of all time, the Pontiac Firebird or otherwise called Trans Am! Pontiac had seen it's glory days but by the early 2000's, it was facing financial problems and the final blow came via the financial crash of 2008 in the United States. By 2010, Pontiac operations had been shut down for good.

Pontiac Firebird/ Pontiac Trans Am 

Now the question is, if Pontiac no longer existed, how do we still have Pontiacs on the road? Remember word on the street was that the Pontiac Vibe shared parts with the Toyota Matrix? That is the answer to the question. Pontiac no longer existed but they were selling re-badged Toyota's. If you check the internet for Pontiac vibe, you will see that Wikipedia says,  "it was jointly developed by General Motors along with Toyota”. So in essence, anyone driving a Pontiac Vibe is simply driving a Toyota Matrix with some Kim Kardarshian type plastic surgery.

2010 Pontiac Vibe

In my opinion, the Pontiac Vibe is a wonderful car because it is a breath of fresh air from the commonly known car brands in Nigeria. Although it has become so popular and is now like pure water on the streets of Nigeria, it is a perfect family car because it has good ground clearance like an SUV while simultaneously possessing the reliability and fuel efficiency of  a Toyota. You just can not go wrong with the purchase of a Pontiac Vibe aka Toyotiac Vibtrix 😂

Thank you for reading and always remember to Turbo that engine!