Pontiac offered a pickup truck? Well, almost.

Has it been 10 years already? Gee, how the time flies. It was one whole decade ago that the Pontiac division of General Motors was planning to launch the G8 Sport Truck, a sort of El Camino for the 21st century based on a Holden Ute from GM of Australia. Alas, none of that would come to pass, and as we know now all too well, the Pontiac brand would not survive, either.

The Pontiac Sport Truck story starts here, with the Holden VE Ute series introduced in the summer of 2007.(above). While the market for sporty, car-based pickups had played itself out some years earlier in the USA (the Ford Ranchero was discontinued in 1979, the Chevy El Camino in 1987) a similar segment remained strong in Australia. There, the truck-ish body style was famously called a coupe utility, ute for short, and Holden’s player in the category from 2007 through 2012 was the Ute VE, closely based on the Commodore VE sedan, Australia’s take on the General’s global Zeta platform.

Beginning in MY 2008, Pontiac was already importing a mildly facelifted version of the Commodore sedan badged as the G8, offering rear-wheel drive and optional V8 power in a handsome four-door package for American drivers. It was only natural, then, that Pontiac—short on resources but hungry for new and differentiated products to fill out its thin model lineup—would bring along the pickup version as well. Or so the reasoning went.

First shown to the public at the New York Auto Show in March of 2008, the G8 Sport Truck (above) was more or less a Holden Ute with a Pontiac-themed, twin-nostril front fascia, a dual snorkel hood, and some trim changes. Naturally, the USA version was left-hand drive using the mirror-image dash and hardware from the G8 sedan. A hot-rodded version was displayed at the SEMA trade show in Las Vegas later that year, and plans were set for a public launch of the production version in late 2009 as a 2010 model. Pontiac’s marketing folks staged a naming contest for the new pickup, and after allegedly reviewing 18,000 suggestions they decided upon ST, which was simply short for Sport Truck—pretty much where they started.

Just like its cousin from down under, the Pontiac ST rolled on independent suspension on all four corners with unit construction and a traditional north/south front engine location. But unlike the Ute VE or the American G8 sedan, which each offered a variety of trim levels and drivetrain options, the USA pickup was to be offered in just one model with a choice of two engines, a 3.6-liter, 256-hp V6 or a 6.0-liter LS V8 with 361 hp, coupled to a 6L80 automatic transmission (no stick). Key stats included 3,500 lbs in towing capacity and a 0-60 mph time of 5.4 seconds, while the base price was said to be in the $30,000 range, comparable to a G8 GT sedan,

That was the plan, anyway. There was even some casual talk of a station wagon as well, based on the classy Commodore Sportwagon. But unfortunately, by mid-2008 GM’s condition was deteriorating even faster than the company’s upper management understood, and axes were soon falling all over the corporation. On January 6, 2009, the G8 pickup program was officially declared dead. Worse yet, the entire Pontiac division was killed off on April 27 as the company scrambled to prepare for its Chapter 11 filing on June 1. For Pontiac, that was all she wrote. There would be more badge-engineered Holdens imported to the USA, but those are stories for another day.