2004 Pontiac GTO: the name returns on a Holden coupe

The GTO name returned for 2004 on a rear-drive coupe built by Holden in Australia, powered by the LS1 5.7-liter V8 at 350 hp with a choice of a six-speed manual or a four-speed automatic. Secondary sources give 15,740 built for the year, split 8,486 manual and 7,254 automatic, a transmission-basis split this record's own production notes describe as partitioning the total cleanly. A separate, later-arriving W40 package, pairing Pulse Red paint with red GTO embroidery and a grey gauge cluster, accounts for 794 of those cars.^1,2,3

This record's own production section carries an unusually granular breakdown beyond the plain manual/automatic split: twenty-four individual exterior-color, interior-color and transmission combinations, all sourced to Mark Quitter Racing's own vehicle-build-combination tables, with each color's own combination rows summing to that color's separate paint-production total. Eight exterior colors are documented with their own production counts, from 573 Barbados Blue cars up to 5,009 in Phantom Black, and four interior leather colors are recorded, though this record's own note flags that the source page prints the black and red interior counts with an apparent decimal-point typo, "3.344" for red, which this record resolves as 3,344 specifically because that is the figure the stated 15,740 total requires.⁴

The LS1 is documented at 350 hp and 365 lb-ft in Pontiac's own specification sheet, but this record's own conflicts section flags a second, transmission-specific torque pair from a separate fact sheet, 375 lb-ft at 4,400 rpm for the manual and 360 lb-ft at 4,000 rpm for the automatic, and states its own treatment plainly: the Pontiac specification sheet leads because it is the factory document, with the secondary transmission-specific figures shown alongside it with full attribution rather than silently adopted in its place.^1,3

The GTO coupe carried a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $32,495 as of November 14, 2003, before tax, title, licence, dealer fees and options, with automatic-transmission cars additionally subject to a $1,000 federal gas-guzzler tax that manual cars did not carry. The six-speed manual itself, RPO MN6, is separately priced at $695 as a stand-alone option according to Mark Quitter Racing, with 8,486 installations matching the manual-transmission production figure already given above.^1,4

Specification detail includes a 109.8-inch wheelbase, 189.8-inch overall length, a reported 3,725-lb weight on a basis this record's own note states is not specified, 10.0:1 compression on the LS1, 7.0 cu ft of cargo volume and an approximately 18-gallon fuel tank. This record's own identification and performance sections are both empty for the year, a documented gap in period road-test data and VIN-decoding detail rather than an assumption that neither exists for the model.^3,1

A separate unpublished lead gives 13,569 GTOs sold in the US against 15,728 imported for 2004, both figures close to but distinct from the 15,740 build total already described above; this record's own note states plainly that the 13,569 figure is a sales count on a different basis than the build totals used throughout the rest of this record, and does not substitute one for the other, leaving the precise gap between imported and sold cars for the model year unexplained by any source consulted here.²