Pontiac Vibe GT, Design & Engine

Pontiac Vibe GT
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In the quest for cool, the General's teamed up with Toyota to offer a youth-oriented sport compact in its Pontiac showrooms. You'd have to go back nearly 40 years to the first GTOs or at least 25 or so to the "Smokey and the Bandit" Screaming Chicken Trans Ams to find a Pontiac pop heartthrob. The Vibe GT is a Pontiac-styled version of Toyota's hot-selling Matrix XRS new-age sport wagon. No foul there, as the Matrix has the sport- compact hardware the street is asking for. In a sense, the Vibe rather successfully pulls off the newer, hipper look Pontiac was going for with the clumsily executed Aztek. You might even go as far as to say the Vibe is a cleaner take on the sport- wagon theme than the aggressively scooped, skirted, and spoilered Toyota. And, unlike the Matrix, the Vibe doesn't look like it just went through a sport-compact-car swap meet with a magnet.

What's important, however, is the way the Vibe GT struts its stuff. It's edgier and better balanced than other small-car GM fare, with hard-working mechanical elements. Though the base Vibe resonates with a perfectly tractable but uninspiring 130-hp Corolla engine, the Vibe GT runs a few octaves higher with the 180-hp Yamaha-built screamer from the Celica GT-S. You'll have to feed in more than a few revs to keep from stalling the 2ZZ-GE engine when leaving a stoplight, and, up to 6000 rpm or so, performance is just econobox competent. But cross the 6000-rpm threshold where the high-lift long-duration cam lobes take over, and the accelerative pace increases noticeably as a hive of angry bees start buzzing under the hood. Great fun once you get there! The problem is that sweet performance zone is way up in the 6000-8200-rpm range, so unless you're always driving like Vin Diesel running for pink slips, the fun is a few thousand revs, two or three gears, and too many seconds away.