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General Motors’ Pontiac division built the Fiero from 1983 to 1988. It’s a mid-engine sports car, meaning the engine is placed in front of the rear axle and behind the passenger seats — not exactly midway in the car but close. The advantage of a mid-engine car versus a rear-wheel drive or front-wheel drive is that the weight of the car is more evenly distributed and usually has a lower center of gravity, so there is less chance of over- or understeering the car. The fiberglass Fiero was designed by George Milidrag and Hulki Aldikacti and was the first mass-produced mid-engine sports car built in the Unites States.
Five good years produced 370,168 Fieros, which made Car and Driver magazine’s Ten Best List for 1984. It was also named the Official Pace Car of the Indianapolis 500 that year. As a comparison, in the first five years of the Toyota MR2 mid-engine sports car only 163,000 were sold. Not all was peaches-and-cream for the Fiero, however, as the car was criticized for safety issues, performance and reliability.
The original plan for Fiero was to build a two-seat sports car with an all-new V6 engine and suspension system. It’s not unusual for the different departments of large automotive companies to have conflicting plans on how to proceed. Engineering departments want to build the best cars achievable, and the accountants want to spend as little money as possible. Usually, they reach a compromise. Initially, I think, the bean counters won as the early Fiero used GM’s fuel-efficient 2.5-liter, four-cylinder, 92-horsepower engine and the rear suspension design from the Chevrolet Citation and Pontiac Phoenix.
The Fiero looked nothing like other GM cars. It looked foreign like a Ferrari or Porsche and was available in four colors; white, black, red and gray. Although it was planned as a sports car, the early models were marketed as economically sensible two-seater commuter cars with a base price of $7,999, or about $19,682 in today’s dollars. The EPA rated the mileage of this model at 50 mpg on the highway and 31 in the city. Automatic transmission and air conditioning were available but only on the more expensive models and power steering was not available for any of the Fiero models.
San Leandro resident Eric Asmussen in 1985 paid $11,609 or about $27,582 in today’s dollars, for this issue’s white 2,580-pound Pontiac Fiero, and his dad actually had to teach him how to drive the manual transmission car.
“I became interested in cars at the age of 12 when my dentist bought a DeTomaso Pantera in 1972. He probably could have pulled a tooth without Novocaine with me staring at that car. But when I could afford a used Pantera in 1984-85, I found out those Italian cars are not very comfortable plus a host of other undesirable features like reliability and maintenance requirements.
“About that time the Fiero had come out with rave reviews. I ordered this one in May of 1985 with the 140-horsepower V6, four-speed manual transmission, handling suspension and basically nothing else. I don’t have air conditioning, power windows or door locks. It is one of the gutsiest things I have ever done. I wanted a sports car, but I had never driven a stick. I don’t even like sticks, but a sports car is going to have a manual transmission,” Asmussen said.
“One of the things I like to do,” he said, “is go camping, but there is not a lot of truck space in a Fiero. My dad created a camping cabinet that went up front on top of the spare. I got so good at packing it that if I forgot anything the space left open was shaped like what I forgot.”
The mechanically inclined Asmussen has used this car as his daily driver for most of the years he has owned it. He has replaced the clutch and found a five-speed transmission to replace the four-speed.
“At 20 years,” he said, “the paint on the upper surfaces started going bad. Plastic is more thermally active — plastic body panels expand and contract more than steel. I found out by noticing that the car, parked in the shade over the winter, had some moss on the roof. I grabbed the hose and started spraying the roof to remove the moss — then the paint went with it. So I went to the junk yard and found a white roof and hood and rear bodywork and swapped them onto my car.”
One thing Asmussen wishes his car had is power steering. He has helped that situation some by reducing the front wheel tire size from 215-millimeter tires to 205. He loves his car: “It’s a mid-engine car like the exotic cars, but it’s easy and comfortable to drive. It’s also dirt-cheap to maintain.”
He haso plans to sell this Fiero with 200,000 miles on it — after all, he’s only owned it for 35 years.
Have an interesting vehicle? Contact David Krumboltz at MOBopoly@yahoo.com. To view more photos of this and other issues’ vehicles or to read more of Dave’s columns, visit mercurynews.com/author/david-krumboltz.
