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canyonwalkerThe main part of Breaking Bad S5E4, "Fifty-One", was Skyler going off the deep end (literally) at Walt's birthday party. But I can't not remark on the show's opening scene involving Walt's car, a Pontiac Aztek.
In the opening scene Walt gets his car back from the mechanic. It's just been fixed for the nth time in the series. While walking Walt through the things he fixed, the mechanic gushes about what a great car the Pontiac Aztek is.
Really, the Pontiac Aztek? The Pontiac Aztek is literally one of the biggest flops, if not the biggest flop, in modern automotive history. It's the early 2000s equivalent of the late 1950s Ford Edsel your Boomer/Silent Generation parents, and the TV shows written for them, were always joking about but you'd never seen because it happened long before you were even born.
The Pontiac Aztek debuted in 2000 as a 2001 model. Literally immediately automotive journalists and prospective buyers criticized its looks. The front end, especially, fell into the uncanny valley between car and "beast from a horror movie" with what looked like 6 eyes and 2 mouths. The back end made the car look like it had been salvaged from a trash compactor. And the plastic cladding all around was by then a decade out of date.
As more details about the car's design came out, we learned that it was a case of "design by committee". Ironically that same phrase described the Edsel 45 years earlier. The car had some novel interior design elements that would ultimately be copied by other vehicles— the Aztek was arguably the first crossover SUV— but the exterior was designed to fit around the constraints of the interior, and designers were commanded to be "innovative" by the company CEO. What resulted was a turd of an exterior. Then, when test marketing audiences panned the design, not one thing was changed for production. (That's another similarity to the Edsel flop. Edsel designers didn't even try test marketing, as was already common in industry at the time. They simply asserted customers would be thrilled.)
The Aztek was such a flop that Pontiac redesigned the exterior in the first model year. All they did, though, was tone down the ridiculous hip-wader-ish plastic cladding by painting it the same color as the body.
Introduced as a 2001 model, the Aztek ended production with the 2005 model year. Data shows that some dealers had vehicles on their lots until 2007. Fewer than 120,000 were sold in the US in total.
By 2007 when the first season of Breaking Bad went into production (it premiered in January 2008) the Aztek was already well known across the car industry as the biggest modern design failure. I can only assume that the show's writers picked it deliberately as Walt's car for that reason. What better way to round out the picture of a sad-sack, mild-mannered, middle-aged man in a dead-end high school teaching job than to show him driving around in an ugly commercial flop.
I've read that the growing popularity of Breaking Bad in the early 2010s caused a small blip in consumer interest the Aztek. But then there would've been only used vehicles. Did the resale value maybe go up a bit? I don't know. I imagine it was more about growing popularity in memes than actual sales. An ugly car is an expensive thing just to buy ironically.
BTW, in the episode I'm writing about here, Walt sells his Aztek for just $50.
In the opening scene Walt gets his car back from the mechanic. It's just been fixed for the nth time in the series. While walking Walt through the things he fixed, the mechanic gushes about what a great car the Pontiac Aztek is.
Really, the Pontiac Aztek? The Pontiac Aztek is literally one of the biggest flops, if not the biggest flop, in modern automotive history. It's the early 2000s equivalent of the late 1950s Ford Edsel your Boomer/Silent Generation parents, and the TV shows written for them, were always joking about but you'd never seen because it happened long before you were even born.
The Pontiac Aztek debuted in 2000 as a 2001 model. Literally immediately automotive journalists and prospective buyers criticized its looks. The front end, especially, fell into the uncanny valley between car and "beast from a horror movie" with what looked like 6 eyes and 2 mouths. The back end made the car look like it had been salvaged from a trash compactor. And the plastic cladding all around was by then a decade out of date.
As more details about the car's design came out, we learned that it was a case of "design by committee". Ironically that same phrase described the Edsel 45 years earlier. The car had some novel interior design elements that would ultimately be copied by other vehicles— the Aztek was arguably the first crossover SUV— but the exterior was designed to fit around the constraints of the interior, and designers were commanded to be "innovative" by the company CEO. What resulted was a turd of an exterior. Then, when test marketing audiences panned the design, not one thing was changed for production. (That's another similarity to the Edsel flop. Edsel designers didn't even try test marketing, as was already common in industry at the time. They simply asserted customers would be thrilled.)
The Aztek was such a flop that Pontiac redesigned the exterior in the first model year. All they did, though, was tone down the ridiculous hip-wader-ish plastic cladding by painting it the same color as the body.
Introduced as a 2001 model, the Aztek ended production with the 2005 model year. Data shows that some dealers had vehicles on their lots until 2007. Fewer than 120,000 were sold in the US in total.
By 2007 when the first season of Breaking Bad went into production (it premiered in January 2008) the Aztek was already well known across the car industry as the biggest modern design failure. I can only assume that the show's writers picked it deliberately as Walt's car for that reason. What better way to round out the picture of a sad-sack, mild-mannered, middle-aged man in a dead-end high school teaching job than to show him driving around in an ugly commercial flop.
I've read that the growing popularity of Breaking Bad in the early 2010s caused a small blip in consumer interest the Aztek. But then there would've been only used vehicles. Did the resale value maybe go up a bit? I don't know. I imagine it was more about growing popularity in memes than actual sales. An ugly car is an expensive thing just to buy ironically.
BTW, in the episode I'm writing about here, Walt sells his Aztek for just $50.
