Road to Power

Chapter 3 The Fiero: Trial by Fire

The pouty young woman with the Farrah Fawcett hairdo puts on black aviator glasses, then leaps like a ninja to a half-crouch beside the door of her red car. She's wearing white jeans, red boots, and a red jacket. High-pitched guitars play. The commercial cuts to a scene of the woman driving down an empty road, interspersed with spots of her vamping for the camera like a model in a cosmetics or shampoo commercial. “Fuel-injected and economical,” the male narrator intones. “Pontiac builds excitement.”

The Pontiac Fiero was one of General Motors' most successful launches of the 1980s. A sporty little car, the Fiero was a two-seater with a low-slung profile that evoked pricier and faster vehicles such as Chevrolet's Corvette. It had a tapered front hood with retractable headlights that popped up like the eyes of an insect, a jaunty racer back, and a shortened tail.

The Fiero's body was made out of plastic, rather than the heavier metal used for most cars at the time; it was hailed as an engineering feat—and promised that its body would never rust. Its engine was a low-powered V-4 located in the middle of the body, rather than under the hood or trunk. Billed as a “commuter car,” the Fiero got great mileage for its era, and the car had a starting price tag of just under $8,000 when it was introduced, making it attractive to young drivers—especially working women—on limited budgets.

At the same time, the car looked like the muscle cars of the previous ...