Brands

General Motors's revival of Pontiac is practically destiny.

Founded in 1926, Pontiac was named after a Ottawa Chief who also had an entire city named after him. Legendary wouldn't you say?

Seems more and more these days iconic car brands are rising from the ashes and staking their claim in today's auto market. A lot of those brands hinge on their past heritage and come back bolstered by some parent OEM. I for one am a very big fan of this, as long as the execution stays true to that heritage

GM should unleash new Pontiac models with a Cruze SS, Fiero, Firebird and GTO joining the mix.

FCA can only rely on large vehicles for so long.

How Pontiac can appeal to a new generation of performance vehicle buyers.

Let's look at the candidates, evaluate their merits, and see if we can agree which brand deserves to rise from the ashes.

Bring back the former Super Sport (SS) models under the Pontiac brand.

Read on to find out why it was chosen.

If ever there was an automotive brand that had style, and by that I mean "American" style, it was Packard.

The love of all things "premium" shows no signs of slowing down and it's becoming a join-or-die situation for some companies.

"Hot. Cold. Neutral. Pathetic." Those are the four brand descriptors professional Detroit auto industry provocateur Peter De Lorenzo applies to 40 major automotive brands in his latest Autoextremist rant.

In the latest release of its BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands study, market researchers Milward Brown have given BMW the highest ranking of any carmaker, according to Automotive News. Toyota – last year's winner – finished second, followed by Mercedes-Benz, Honda and Nissan, according to the report.

Interbrand uses a number of criteria to rank the world's top global, profitable, publicly-held brands – "global" meaning they operate on at least three continents, derive at least 30% of their income outside of their home market and no single market accounts for more than 50% of their income. Some of those stipulations are why you won't find companies like Mars or The BBC or even Wal-Mart on the list.

Subway Map to the Auto World – Click above for high-res image gallery

With gas prices soaring and SUV sales sinking, General Motors just put its HUMMER brand under "strategic review." That's generally the term used when a company is getting ready to dump a brand. And that begs the question, how many brands does a car company really need?

So here we have the kind of real-time social engagement that the Internet originally promised us. A site called Brandtag allows you to enter a 1-word attribute for a brand -- like "quattro" for Audi -- and then creates a page with the popularity of any brand identifier denoted by its size on the page relative to every other tag used, i.e. a tag cloud. For instance, one of the biggest words on the Ferrari page is "red," while one of the (many) smallest words is "viagra."

Could there be some dissension among the General’s troops?