Pontiac Trans Am custom Hurst Edition 2013 – stand out from the crowd

Pontiac hasn’t built a car in years, but a Tallahassee shop called Trans Am Depot will still sell you one — by starting with a fifth-generation Camaro and spending eight weeks turning it into a Hurst Edition Trans Am tribute, gold logo, shaker hood, and all. Between the base conversion, a fully optioned Camaro donor, and a supercharger kit, the final bill can climb past $100,000. Read on to find out what that money actually buys, right down to the carbon fiber sill plates.

Pontiac stopped building cars years before this one existed, which makes it either an elaborate tribute or an outright impossibility, depending on how strictly you define the word Trans Am. A small shop in Tallahassee, Florida decided the strict definition didn’t matter and set out to build the car anyway, starting with a completely different manufacturer’s Camaro and spending roughly eight weeks turning it into something that, on the street, most people would swear was a genuine Pontiac. The transformation isn’t cheap, and by the time every option box gets checked, the final invoice climbs well past six figures. What you get for that money, though, goes considerably deeper than a hood decal and a name.

Starting With Someone Else’s Camaro

The build begins with a fifth-generation Camaro, the platform Chevrolet produced from 2009 through 2015, which the Trans Am Depot in Tallahassee transforms over roughly eight weeks into a Trans Am tribute using a base conversion cost of $29,995. The shop leans on genuine original Pontiac performance parts wherever they can still be sourced, and only falls back on aftermarket reproduction pieces when nothing original exists — and even then, those reproduction parts get revised until they match the original factory look as closely as possible before installation. It’s a level of attention to detail more typical of a factory-correct restoration than an aftermarket conversion built on an entirely different car’s bones.

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What the Full Build Actually Costs

The conversion cost is only part of the real number. A well-equipped 2013 Camaro to start from runs somewhere north of $50,000 before any Trans Am-specific work begins, which puts the baseline investment for a finished car close to $83,000 once the conversion itself is added in. From there, the options get serious: a supercharger kit for the 6.2-liter engine adds roughly $10,550, and a T-top roof option — a detail the shop considers worth the money rather than skippable — runs another $7,500. Add it all up and the final total can comfortably clear $100,000, which puts this conversion solidly in territory usually reserved for genuine low-production collector cars rather than aftermarket builds.

A Limited Run by Design

The Trans Am Depot doesn’t treat this as an open-ended production line. Several custom components used in the build carry their own production limits, which means there’s an effective cap on how many of these Firebird-badged tributes can actually be completed — a detail that matters to anyone considering the build purely as a collector-value play rather than just a personal project. For a buyer weighing whether to commit the deposit, that scarcity is part of the pitch: unlike a mass-produced modern Camaro, a shop-built Trans Am tribute with a hard production ceiling is never going to flood the market the way a factory car eventually might.

The Retro Look That Sells the Illusion

Visually, the build commits fully to the classic Trans Am identity. A gold logo spans the hood in the same eye-catching retro style the originals were known for, backed by an exhaust note tuned to be just as noticeable as the paint scheme when the car rolls down city streets. LED lighting handles both the tail and headlight configurations, a modern touch layered onto an otherwise vintage-inspired design, and downward-sloped quad exhaust tips finish the rear-end look in a way that reads as correct to anyone who remembers the originals firsthand rather than just from photographs.

The Hurst Edition Adds Its Own Signature Details

The specific Hurst Edition trim layers on its own set of visual cues beyond the base Trans Am conversion: front fender extractors, a functional shaker hood, and a long, low tail section, finished off with 20-inch gold-colored aluminum wheels that echo the original Hurst/Olds color scheme from decades earlier. Inside, the trim skips the flashier metallic accents that defined actual 1970s interiors in favor of a Pontiac-designed T-roof, a black-and-gold color motif, and newly patterned seats, along with an upgraded instrument display and an eight-ball shift knob topping the short-throw Hurst shifter — a genuinely functional nod to the Hurst name rather than just a badge exercise.

Carbon Fiber Where You’d Least Expect It

The interior work goes beyond seats and gauges. Carbon fiber shows up extensively throughout the trim pieces and even on the sill plates, a material choice that would have been unthinkable on a genuine 1970s Trans Am but fits naturally into a modern reinterpretation built on 21st-century underpinnings. Embroidered headrests round out the cabin, adding a level of finishing detail that pushes the interior past tribute car territory and into something closer to a genuinely bespoke build — the kind of small touch that separates a serious conversion shop’s work from a simple decal-and-badge Trans Am kit.

The Numbers Under the Hood

Performance-wise, the base configuration uses a direct-injection 6.2-liter V8 producing 432 horsepower at 5,900 rpm and 420 lb-ft of torque at 4,600 rpm, returning 16 mpg city and 24 mpg highway — solid figures for a modern V8 muscle car on their own. Add the optional supercharger and output climbs to 575 horsepower at the rear wheels, enough for a 0-60 time under 4.0 seconds, while the full supercharger kit alone can push the engine as high as 720 horsepower. For buyers who want to go further still, a twin-turbo version is available delivering roughly 1,100 horsepower — numbers that put this Pontiac-badged tribute well ahead of nearly anything Pontiac itself ever actually built.

Who Actually Buys a Build Like This

A conversion this expensive isn’t aimed at someone looking for a cheap way into a Trans Am-shaped car — it’s aimed at buyers who already know exactly what a real 1970s Trans Am looked and sounded like and want that experience wrapped around thoroughly modern reliability, power, and safety. That’s a meaningfully different customer than someone shopping a genuine restored original, since a shop-built tribute sidesteps the increasingly scarce supply of correct original sheet metal and drivetrain parts entirely. For a buyer who’s priced out an actual numbers-matching first- or second-generation Trans Am and found the market has moved well past what they’re willing to spend, a modern donor car with period-correct styling cues can make more financial and practical sense than chasing an original.

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