[north]

Apart from unseasonably large amount of hot air in DC it was a slow news day so I was testing out a new spreadsheet program for my business by plugging some old car data into it.

In case you ever wondered, all the engines Pontiac produced for the 1969 model year developed a total of exactly 260,536,090 horsepower.

The most powerful engine of all was the Catalina basic 2bbl 400-290 engine at 66,625,000 hp
The lowest horsepower engine was the Firebird spec RAIV 400-345 at a measly 65,000 hp

[dataway]

Would be interesting to know how many of those HP are still around

[north]

more useless data from my new spreadsheet test...

total cubic inches of displacement... 333,216,380 CID or 192,834 cubic feet or 0.00000131 cubic miles!

Total 1969 Pontiac engine production break downs..

By Carb:
1 bbl engines 5%
2 bbl engines 59%
4 bbl engines 36%

By Fuel:
regular 38%
premium 62%

By Transmission:
manual 8%
automatic 92%

By Displacement:
250 5%
350 28%
400 53%
428 14%

[north]

Even more useless...

If you filled all the gas tanks of every 69 Pontiac built... 20,212735.5 gallons. If you assume that each car used one tank a week then combined annual usage of all 69 Pontiac's would be one billion gallons a year. I would imagine it's quite a bit less than that now!

Initial crankcase oil fill for all those cars was 5,187,378 quarts

[north]

weighty issues...

Total weight of all 1969 Pontiac's (curb with no options included)... 3,353,929,061 lbs and with say 300 pounds of options per car you're at 3.6 billion pounds or so. (V8 on 80 percent of Tempest, Custom S, LeMans, Firebird and over half of all cars had AC, most had steering, brakes, automatic, radio etc)

[242177P]

Noticeable by it's absence... how many of them were big blocks?

[north]

Cha..ching...

Total sales dollars of base price of all 1969 Pontiac's (retail price)... $2,819,173,952. or $3,238 per car

I looked at a whole bunch of different invoices and took a weighted (by production of different models) average and it looks like average extra for options and destination charge is about $1,300 per car. Total retail sales would be almost $4 billion or $4,538 per car.

$1,300 extra per car sounds high but first deduct say $100 average destination charge and you are at $1,200. $1,200 goes fast. Just the basic steering, brakes, automatic, radio, whitewalls and hubcaps that almost every car had gets adds $550. 85% Firebirds and tempests, Custom S, Lemans had some V8 option, most cars had AC, half had vinyl tops. The average option cost in my collection is over $1,750 because of a bit of bias towards higher end cars.

[north]

Originally Posted by 242177P

Noticeable by it's absence... how many of them were big blocks?

No Canadian ponchos in my stats so no pumpkin orange engines either!

[Andretti]

Even with all those Chubby 350 Pontiacs out of the equation, seeing there were almost twice as many 400's compared to 350's was a surprise for me. I always assumed it was the other way around.
All your "useless" data does make a fun read though!

[north]

The 400 numbers are boosted by about 250,000 400 2 bbls that were standard in the Catalina and Executive. Then there were almost 100,000 400’s in GP’s and of course another 70 odd thousand GTO’s.

I suspect the 350 percentage went way up in 1970 when the standard Catalina engine was downgraded to a 350 and the other big 400 users, the GTO and GP saw their sales collapse

[dataway]

My folks had a 69 Cat with a 400 2bbl ... bought new, damn fine car. Really well built .. maybe it was just me but I would say the fit and finish was better than an A body.

[68ragtop]

Originally Posted by 242177P

Noticeable by it's absence... how many of them were big blocks?

Was watching an old re-run of "home improvement" the other night & Tim had a new neighbor that was salivating over a 1970 GTO, then Tim asking if it was a 455 Big block. I thought, Tim knows better than that....... Doesn't he?

I guess everybody just associates big blocks with 400 cubes and up. Fun to say & sounds powerful I suppose.