Europeans Call American Muscle a Joke – This 1988 Pontiac Trans Am, Built on the Same Body as KITT, Just Proved Them Wrong

A European reviewer takes on the 1988 Pontiac Trans Am that inspired Knight Rider’s KITT, and the reply section pushes back hard, pointing to a turbocharged 1989 pace car edition that hit 0-60 in under five seconds. Between childhood nostalgia, a giant hood decal, and genuine performance numbers, viewers aren’t ready to call this car pretty poor. Watch to see both sides of the argument play out.

European car reviews aren’t usually kind to American sports cars from the 1980s, and Number 27’s Pontiac Trans Am review opens by more or less admitting that reputation upfront. What the video didn’t fully account for was just how personal this particular car is to an entire generation of viewers who grew up believing it was basically a superhero. Somewhere in the reply thread, someone points out that Pontiac built a special 1989 edition of this same car with a turbocharged V6 that hit 0-60 in under five seconds and was fast enough to pace that year’s Indy 500 without a single modification — numbers that don’t line up with “pretty poor” at all. So which version of the story is actually true?

The KITT Problem European Reviewers Don’t Have

For American viewers, the third-generation Trans Am isn’t just a car — it’s Knight Rider’s KITT, and several commenters said outright that this association makes it impossible to be objective. One viewer called the Firebird “both a Superhero and a fully accredited Film Star” for an entire generation, arguing that criticizing the car on its engineering merits misses the point entirely. That’s a reaction a European reviewer, without the same childhood television context, simply isn’t going to share — which is exactly why this review generated such a strong, nostalgia-driven response from its American audience specifically.

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The Pace Car Nobody Expected to Be Fast

Buried in the comments is a detail that complicates the video’s central premise: in 1989, Pontiac built a special turbocharged Trans Am edition running a 3.8-liter turbo V6 that reportedly ran 0-60 in under five seconds, fast enough to pace the Indy 500 that year with no modifications required. That’s a genuinely serious performance figure for a factory-built American car from the late 1980s, and it stands in direct contrast to the era’s reputation for underwhelming, emissions-choked engines — a reminder that “the 80s were all bad” is a much shakier claim than it sounds at first.

The Screaming Chicken Effect

Multiple commenters credit the car’s giant hood decal — affectionately called the “screaming chicken” — with generating emotional attachment that has nothing to do with how the car actually drives. One viewer described meeting their spouse because of a black Firebird with a gold chicken decal on the hood, joking “blame it on the screaming chicken” for a relationship that’s still going decades later. Whatever a European review says about build quality or handling, that hood graphic clearly did exactly what Pontiac’s marketing team wanted it to do for an entire generation of American buyers.

The Weight Argument That Actually Holds Up

Not every comment is pure nostalgia. One viewer pointed out that Pontiac managed to build a version of this car roughly 200 to 300 kilograms lighter than the previous generation, calling it an achievement that “any brand releasing” a car today would be praised for. Weight reduction of that scale, especially in an era before extensive use of aluminum and modern high-strength steels, represents a genuinely significant engineering accomplishment — one that gets lost in broader complaints about the era’s underpowered, emissions-choked engines and often-criticized build quality.

A Car People Actually Kept for Decades

Several commenters weren’t discussing the car in the abstract at all — one bought a 1986 Trans Am in 1990 at age 26 and still owns it today, while another described a father’s 1989 Firebird that the whole family used for years, with the commenter washing it as a kid to save up for Lego sets. Those long-ownership stories matter because they contradict the idea that these cars were disposable or unreliable; plenty of owners kept them running and loved for thirty-plus years without major issue.

Was the Era Really That Bad, Or Just Misunderstood?

One commenter pushed back on the entire premise with a joke that lands harder than it should: “the US sports cars of this era are generally considered to be pretty poor — that era being 1891 to the present day,” implying the criticism gets recycled for every generation of American performance cars regardless of decade. It’s a pointed way of saying that European skepticism toward American sports cars isn’t really about the 1980s specifically — it’s a much older, ongoing disagreement about what a sports car is supposed to prioritize in the first place.

Why This Review Still Struck a Nerve

Whatever Number 27 concluded about the car’s actual dynamic shortcomings, the sheer volume and specificity of the pushback — pace car statistics, weight figures, decades-long ownership stories, and childhood memories all deployed in the same comment section — shows just how much cultural weight this specific Trans Am still carries in the U.S., regardless of how it stacks up against European benchmarks of the same era and segment.

The Verdict Is Still Split, and That’s the Point

In the end, the comment section on this video reads less like agreement and more like a genuine cultural divide: reviewers judging the car against modern handling and build-quality standards, and owners judging it against everything the car meant to them personally. Both readings are defensible, which is exactly why a simple review title asking if the car was really “so bad” managed to generate this much passionate disagreement in the replies, from viewers on both sides of the Atlantic weighing in with wildly different criteria for what actually counts.

That split is unlikely to resolve in a single comment section, but it does explain why a review format built around cross-cultural contrast keeps working: viewers on either side of the Atlantic are almost guaranteed to disagree, and disagreement, on a video like this, is exactly what drives the discussion.

If nothing else, the reaction proves that a car built to be a superhero’s sidekick on television is never going to be judged purely as a piece of engineering, no matter which side of the ocean the review comes from. That alone is worth remembering the next time a review this confident gets posted. Consider it fair warning for the next channel that tries the same format.

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