Parked out in front of The Jazz Kitchen one summer Sunday afternoon a few years back was this super-straight '77-'81 Pontiac Bonneville coupe. It's a boat of a car by modern standards, but it's actually downsized from the Peak Boat era of GM B-bodies, 1971-'76, when the Bonneville would have stretched most of nineteen feet from stem to stern and sported a wheelbase long enough to park a pair of Smart ForTwos side-by-side between the axles with inches to spare.
I think this one's a '78 (in which case the two-tone colors are Desert Sand and Burnished Gold) or a '79 (which renames the colors Mission Beige and Sierra Copper), which would mean the base engine was Pontiac's 301 c.i.d. V-8 smog motor, putting out 135 net hp, with optional 350-, 400-, and 403-cubic inch motors. The latter was a 4-barrel Oldsmobile engine rated at 185 horsepower. Not a ton of grunt by the standards of the '60s-'70s muscle car years, to say nothing of the modern era, but it'd still get out of its own way.
In 1980, the increasingly strict CAFE regs caused GM to downgrade the base motor to Buick's 231 cubic inch V-6. The optional V-8s shrunk to 265- and 301-c.i.d. motors, plus the dire Olds 350 diesel V-8, which helped put an entire generation of Americans off the very idea of diesel power.
The late Seventies B-body coupes had really good lines, and made better looking by the fact that their 2-door full-size counterparts from FoMoCo got beaten badly with the ugly stick in their '79 downsizing.
This one was photographed in June of 2019 using a Nikon D700 and a 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6 VR lens.
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