Pontiac's car museum, in the city that gave GM its wide-track swagger

For a city whose name rode on millions of car trunks, Pontiac went a strangely long time without a museum to tell that story. That changed in May 2024, when the Pontiac Transportation Museum opened its doors at 250 W. Pike Street, downtown, inside a repurposed old elementary school. Inside are the things the place is owed: rows of Pontiacs, the lesser-known Oaklands that came before them, GMC trucks, even horse-drawn carriages from before any of it had an engine.

That last detail matters, because Pontiac made wheels long before it made cars. The town was a carriage- and wagon-building hub in the 1800s, a natural distribution point for farm country, and the skills just carried over when the automobile showed up. The Oakland Motor Car Company started here in 1907; General Motors absorbed it and eventually folded it into a brand named for the city. GMC Truck and Coach was headquartered in Pontiac for around seventy years.

The brand’s strut shows up in the street grid. In 1959 Pontiac engineers spread the wheels farther apart on the whole lineup — a genuinely lower, planted stance the ad men christened “Wide Track.” It sold a lot of cars, and the name stuck so hard that the loop of road circling downtown Pontiac is called Wide Track Drive to this day. You can stand on it.

The museum leans into all of it, with a kids-focused bent toward the science and engineering under the hood — fitting for a building that used to be a school. The Pontiac brand itself ended in 2010, quietly retired by GM. But the cars are still here, parked in a classroom town that built them, no longer rolling but still very much wide-tracked.