Could Pontiac be planning a production Solstice Coupe? Back in 2002, General Motors showed both roadster and coupe versions (in concept form) of what would become the fetching little Pontiac, but to this point, only the droptop made it to showrooms.

I had the opportunity to talk with GM design czar Bob Lutz Tuesday night at a GMC media event in San Francisco, and asked him whether a coupe version was still in the cards. While Lutz stopped short of unequivocally agreeing, he smiled wryly and said:

With vehicles like the Solstice, you have to ask yourself… what do you do when the ‘new’ wears off? What do you do two-to-three years from now? Do you give it a facelift and bend the sheetmetal differently, or do you do an additional bodystyle?

Naturally, I suggested that consumers would likely want the coupe to see the light of day, saying that such a derivation would free up some of the utility in the car (the current car’s trunk is oddly shaped and prohibitively small) while simultaneously appealing to more hardcore drivers. Lutz:

“That’s our thought. If we did it, it would look exactly like the Pontiac Solstice Coupe Concept Car that we had at the ’02 show. Remember it? The orange one.” “It was always our intention to kind of do that… we just had to manage the investment on the Solstice the first time around. Adding a coupe bodystyle would be a very logical thing to do. It would also make it very good for racing, where it’s doing well any way.”

When questioned whether the Solstice would get a retractable hardtop like its Mazda MX-5 archrival, Lutz was more frank:

We’re not going to do that. It’s so antithetical to what we want to do… which is light weight, low cost, simple, uncomplicated, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So there you have it – a coupe looks promising, but if you’re holding out for a hardtop convertible Solstice, you might want to start looking elsewhere.