Doors on the Pontiac Solstice are long, so climbing in and out is relatively easy, even though it's a long way down. Driver and passenger sit hunkered down in this roadster, with shoulders below the tops of the doors, Corvette-style. Some will love the feeling; others may feel discombobulated by the difficulty of seeing the front end of the car. The new power height adjustment for the driver's seat can help.
The Solstice seats are supportive, with a one-piece back and integrated headrests. For people space, Solstice compares well with competitors like the Mazda MX-5, and the seats can accommodate fairly tall frames. The optional leather in a Solstice GXP we drove was well tailored, with GXP embroidered on the seatbacks.
Most materials are generally good quality, particularly the leather, soft plastic and trim plastic. However, the hard plastic on the doors and dash looks and feels too much like hard plastic.
The three-spoke steering wheel could be thicker, but the optional leather-wrapped wheel feels great. Cruise-control buttons and audio controls buttons are embedded in the spokes. The dash design is simple, handsome and effective. The panel sweeps up from the center console, over the gauges and into the door panel. The gauges sit at the bottom of deep tubes, and while they're nicely shielded from reflection, they could be better aimed toward the driver's sight line. Four circular vents move plenty of air.
The three climate-control knobs are big and easy to find. The square stereo face plate stands out oddly from the nice flowing curves everywhere else in the car. The volume and tuning knobs are large and covered with the same soft, grippy material as those for the climate controls, making them easy to adjust. A row of buttons sits to the right of these gauges for hazard lights, traction electronics, fog lamps and dash lights, right where fingers stretch from the right hand when properly wrapped around the steering wheel.
The window switches are awkward to reach. With forearm flat on the driver's door arm rest, and the left hand resting at the door pull, the window switches sit somewhere under the wrist. It's difficult to slide the arm back to reach them (or the mirror adjustor), because the elbow is blocked by the seatback bolster. The driver must contort his or her left arm to try to get fingers on the switches.
Storage space is lacking in this car, and that might be the biggest single strike against the Solstice as a daily driver. If you think this is simply life with two-seat roadsters, then have a look at some of the competition and you'll realize otherwise.
The Solstice has a decent-sized glovebox, though smaller than average. It also has a bin behind the front seats on the rear bulkhead; it will accommodate some CDs, but you can't get into it while driving and the cheap plastic latch is easily broken. Likewise, the cupholders, which pull out from under the bin on the bulkhead, are as good as useless for the driver. Beyond the glove box and the bin, there are little pockets (more like rails) molded into the door jams. These will fit a pen or a CD stood on end, but you'll have to move the CD before you get out. There's really no room behind the seats. Accessories from the dealer or the aftermarket could come to the rescue, but otherwise there's no place to stash a phone, a pair of glasses, or a wallet.
The trunk offers little help. Doubling as storage for the convertible top, it provides 5.4 cubic feet of space with the top up, and just 2.1 cubic feet of space with the top down. Those numbers don't truly tell the tale, however. The elephant in the trunk is the gas tank. Finding no other place to put it (and still stay within the development timeline and budget set for the car), Solstice engineers plopped the gas tank in the middle of the trunk. The result is a huge box sitting on the trunk floor that leaves barely enough room around the edges for small, soft-sided, duffel-bag-type luggage. While storage space in other small roadsters may not look significantly greater by the numbers, the practical, usable space in most is significantly better.
There's no room for a spare tire either. As with the MX-5, the Solstice comes with an emergency inflator strapped to the back wall of the trunk; in other words, air up that flat tire and continue. Or call a tow truck. Next Page