They tell me General Motors is planning to demote Pontiac to a “focused niche car,” sort of the way astronomers demoted Pluto from a planet to whatever it is they call it now.

I’m not sure what a focused niche car is, any more than I know what Pluto is nowadays. I suppose Mustang is a niche car. Its surname is Ford, but “Mustang” defines the category of vehicle it invented. (A Ford executive, advocating fresh bucks to re-energize an anemic Mustang during the ’90s, told Alex Trotman, an Englishman who had taken over as Ford’s CEO: “If you ask an American what a Jaguar is, he’ll tell you it’s a cat. If you ask him what a Mustang is, he'll tell you it’s a Ford.”

The Corvette is a niche car, bearing the bow-tie icon of a Chevrolet, but filling a niche of its own.

Maybe Pontiac will keep its name and arrowhead alive through an offshoot such as the sporty Solstice or a re-ignited Firebird. I would hate to see Chief Pontiac’s name go up in smoke. We Southern boys have a sentimental attachment to cars, similar to our attachment to dogs. I never owned a Pontiac, but I sure wanted to back when the marque shone brightly on NASCAR tracks but remained several laps ahead of my financial means.

For years, Pontiac was not the kind of car young boys dreamed of. It was a descendant of the Oakland, built in Pontiac, Mich., by a company that made the transition from horse-drawn buggies to horseless carriages. GM bought the company in 1909 and eventually replaced the Oakland brand with “Pontiac” after introducing the “Chief of the Sixes” in 1926. (Pontiac was a chief of the Ottawa tribe.) It gave GM loyalists a seamless ascent up the ranks from Chevy to Pontiac, to Olds, to Buick to Cadillac.

The Pontiac engine was an L-head six, with cylinders lined up in a single row from front to back. It was the generic engine for American automobiles until the mid-1950s. (Buick and Chevrolet broke ranks to offer overhead-valve in-line engines.) Later, two more cylinders were tacked on to match other straight-eights.

The engines were not intended to provide hair-raising performance. They were designed for the three-speed manual transmissions of the days before automatics. A big engine, revving slowly but with a lot of torque, could provide the oomph to turn a corner smoothly in high gear and get back up to speed without down-shifting. Europeans, who lacked America’s energy abundance, preferred smaller engines that delivered their power through high rpm and four-speed gearboxes.

Pontiacs from the mid-1930s to the ’50s were perhaps the most easily recognized cars in America. Their trademark was a silver streak (actually chrome or aluminum) that ran longitudinally across the hood and trunk. The car didn’t live up to the “Silver Streak” name until 1955.

That year, the Big Chief replaced its L-head straight-eight engine with a 287-cubic-inch overhead-valve V-8 that boosted the horsepower from 127 to 180.

Until that year, the Oldsmobile 88 had been the performance king among family cars. When Homer and Jethro spoofed Hank Snow’s “Movin’ On,” they put in a line about an old hound dog who fell in a barrel of turpentine: “He passed the gate like an 88, now he’s movin’ on.” Everybody knew what they meant.

Chevrolet, with its own new V-8, stole the performance thunder in 1955, but Pontiac soon established itself as GM’s hot car. In 1957, Cotton Owens (no relation), born in Union, S.C., drove a Pontiac to victory in the Daytona 500. In 1960, Californian Marvin Panch drove a Catalina to victory at the Florida track and, in 1962, the fabled Fireball Roberts of Dayton drove the Big Chief to victory in his hometown. Buck Baker of Richburg, S.C., took the checkered flag in a Pontiac at Darlington in 1960, and Little Joe Weatherly of Norfolk, Va., matched the feat in 1963.

A few years after Pontiac’s silver streak made its mark on the race tracks, it disappeared from hoods and deck lids. By the early ’60s, the Big Four American manufacturers were eyeing the compact market as the country struggled with recession. After stumbling with the Chevy Corvair, then recovering with the Chevy II (later known as the Nova), the company brought out three “senior compacts”: The Buick Special, the Oldsmobile F-85 and the Pontiac Tempest. The Special sported a brand-new V-6 — something new on the American market. The F-85 had a small V-8. The Tempest (later dubbed the Le Mans) unveiled a slant-four that was, in effect, its 389-cubic-inch V-8 split down the middle. But that wasn’t its only break with convention. The drive shaft was curved, allowing for a relatively flat floor.

In 1964 — the year of the Mustang — Pontiac added the other bank of cylinders to its lightweight Tempest platform, and the immortal GTO was born. This is often referred to as the first of the muscle cars. The big engine in the little car gave it breathtaking acceleration — zero to 60 in under 7 seconds. Soon kids of all ages were singing, “turn it on, wind it up, blow it out — GTO!”

The fuel crisis brought on an identity crisis among American makers. The big, powerful, gas-hungry Detroit juggernauts began to lose ground to the more nimble and fuel-efficient European and Japanese brands. The Big Four had to re-orient their strategies, and it has taken awhile. GM, trying to save money, began providing the same cars, with different nameplates, to different divisions. The giant of the industry began hemorrhaging market share. Oldsmobile, the most venerable name in American motordom, became a memory after 2004. Pontiac sales peaked in 1984 at around 850,000 vehicles; last year the division sold about a fourth that many. Pontiac lost a lot of glamour when it withdrew from NASCAR racing in 2003.

So GM has decided to slim down to Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, GMC and a focused “niche,” maybe one that will reprise the glory days of Pontiac: “Turn it on, wind it up, blow it out — GTO.”

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC 29621 or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com