Best Forgotten: The Story of the Pontiac Aztek

From the December 2017 issue

Dear friends, we have arrived at a very dangerous moment in history. Please listen closely to what we have to say.

The Pontiac Aztek, that automotive punchline made by General Motors for five long and regrettable years in the early aughts, is on the verge of being considered cool. We blame its recurring role on AMC’s insanely good series Breaking Bad for getting this ugly ball rolling. Right now, 10 bloggers are spitting out stories about the ways in which the Aztek is now cool. Okay, not actually cool, but “cool” through the process of ironic reassessment. It’s the process by which sales of that low-budget swill Pabst Blue Ribbon increased by about 150 percent between 2005 and 2014.

As we pointed out in our “Guide to Automotive Bullsh!t” in July 2017, “If it’s mostly cool because it’s not cool, then it’s not really cool, is it?”

And make no mistake: The Aztek is not cool. It was and shall remain an irredeemable shit heap. It was the antithesis of cool from the start. Pontiac introduced the production Aztek at the 2000 Detroit auto show. For its press conference, the company hired locals to stand around in a mock mosh pit. Some wore rainbow wigs, some carried signs reading, “It’s The Versatility, Baby!” and “Aztek 185 hp”—you know, just what you’d see in a mosh pit. At the end of the presentation, the Aztek’s head marketing man, Don Butler, jumped into the pit and crowd surfed. This all actually happened in the real world. The Aztek, a blatant minivan-in-drag monstrosity, sat on stage looking like a sad, fat man who’d had his nose cut off. It’s so powerfully ugly that a blobfish wouldn’t be seen next to it. If you saw something that looked like the Aztek scurry out from behind your fridge, you might have difficulty deciding whether to kill it or kill yourself. After all, if you kill it, you’ll still have to live with the knowledge that it existed in the first place. If the infant Aztek were abandoned on a mountainside, it would eventually come crawling back to civilization because even the vultures and ants wouldn’t touch it.

The mosh pit at the Aztek's unveiling was every bit as wince-inducing as the shambolic Woodstock '99. Fewer Porta-Johns were lit on fire, though.

It wasn’t supposed to go that way, of course. According to designer Tom Peters, the idea bubbled up from GM’s West Coast Advanced Concept Center. The notion was to mix the attributes of a Camaro and a Blazer into a wide, low, powerful, off-roadish thing referred to as the Bear Claw. Think of it as a GMC Typhoon with off-road tires.

But the GM overlords determined that the thing should instead be based on the tall, narrow structure from the corporation’s minivans. Did this deviation, and the inherent compromises it represented, prevent GM from producing the thing? It did not.

The Bear Claw idea was to lash the practicality and off-road capability of an SUV to the performance and excitement of a sports sedan. Instead, the production Aztek, powered by the corporate 3.4-liter V-6 and with a decidedly on-road–focused optional all-wheel-drive system, combined the performance, excitement, and off-road capability of a minivan with the lesser practicality of a chopped minivan.

Bob Lutz, who took over the top product job at GM in the aftermath of the Aztek, has claimed that the design was presented to focus groups who felt about the thing the way we all felt about it when we first saw it: They hated it. Well, actually Lutz claimed that the market-research respondents said, “I wouldn’t take it as a gift.” So convinced were the powers that be of the essential rightness of the vehicle, though, that this didn’t kill the Aztek, either.

Instead, GM­—stung by years of criticism that it was a stodgy old corporation that produced stodgy old designs— pushed ahead. This was an era in which the General produced a number of vehicles that were determined to be innovative, regardless of whether buyers were interested in such innovations. Remember the awkward GMC Envoy XUV with a power-retractable roof over the cargo area? That arrived only a few years after the Aztek, which itself was an idea of versatility rendered in plastic and corporate parts-bin pieces. One of the Aztek’s few claims to cleverness was a removable insulated drink cooler mounted between the seats. That feature was later copied by zero car companies.

So poorly was the Aztek’s styling received that General Motors announced it would restyle the thing after only five months on the market. That didn’t help, either. Pontiac finally took the Aztek behind the barn in 2005.

And behind the barn it should stay. It’s no more worthy of reassessment, ironic or otherwise, than is Limp Bizkit. It should live on only as a memory. And then only for use in cautionary tales.

The Buick Rendezvous Proves That Ugly Is Relative

Next to its Aztek platform-mate, Buick’s Rendezvous didn’t look all that horrible. A mildly less repellent exterior and Tiger Woods’s shilling helped the Buick crush the Pontiac in sales. It still sat on the hideous end of the design spectrum, but it survived until 2007, two years longer than the Aztek.