Even although the Pontiac 400 got here first, Pontiac had at all times been a step behind within the manufacturing of V8 engines. This was particularly as a result of Pontiac was late to maneuver away from the straight-8 engine design that went again a long time, eschewing that for the block mannequin that Chevrolet and others had already achieved. 

When Pontiac finally did make its personal block V8, it wasn’t all that totally different from Chevy’s. Where the corporate deviated from Chevy was that every one of its V8s have been the identical exterior measurement, and the totally different displacements have been achieved purely by bore and stroke.

The Pontiac 400, which was launched in 1967, completely exemplifies that as a result of this engine was only a bored out model of its 389 V8 — which had been round since 1959 and change into the corporate’s commonplace engine that they have been now going to retire. This new 400 engine may generate as much as 360 horsepower, and was provided as an choice for a number of Pontiac fashions, together with the GTO and Firebird. 

The 400 could be in use for slightly over a decade till 1978, and by that point, a lot had modified with muscle automobiles, V8 engines, emissions laws, and an oil disaster that Pontiac actually had no cause to maintain manufacturing occurring them. By 1981, Pontiac stopped making V8s all collectively, whereby GM determined that components sharing throughout corporations wasn’t such a foul thought.

[Featured image by Valder137 via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY 2.0]