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A numbers-matching 1979 Pontiac Trans Am Special Edition, the black-and-gold Bandit car everyone remembers from the movies, just got the full walkaround treatment. Turns out the actual Smokey and the Bandit stunt cars werent real 1977 models at all, and depending on which V8 landed under this ones shaker scoop, it might not even be the strongest Trans Am Pontiac built that year.
Pontiac released the first Trans Am in March 1969 as a barely advertised option package, using a name it had to license from the SCCA because it did not own it. Total first-year production came to just 697 cars: 689 coupes and 8 convertibles, every single one finished in Cameo White with Tyrol Blue stripes. Of those, 520 were Ram Air III four-speed coupes like this one. Read on for how a rushed, quiet launch became one of the most famous nameplates in American car history.
Pontiac built 68,745 Trans Ams in 1977, and the black-and-gold paint that made them famous tells you almost nothing about what is bolted under the hood. One car is a 200-horsepower Pontiac 400. The next one, wearing identical decals, is an Oldsmobile engine with a different word on the shaker scoop — and that single detail decides everything.
A 1978 Pontiac Trans Am finished in the black-and-gold ‘Bandit’ style spent 34 years buried under a tarp, and nobody expected what the first wash would uncover. WD Detailing teamed up with Alex from Legit Street Cars to strip away three decades of mold, dirt, and debris from a car built to honor Smokey and the Bandit — only to find the neglect ran deeper than either crew anticipated. Watch to see what surfaces when three decades of grime finally comes off.
Filmed while the third-generation Trans Am was still brand new, this MotorWeek retro review evaluates the third-generation Trans Am completely on its own merits — new styling, real road performance, and an engine that didn’t quite live up to its own marketing. Watch the car exactly as period reviewers judged it, before it became KITT.
Pontiac stopped offering the 455 engine in 1976, meaning this 1978 Trans Am’s big-inch V8 isn’t a factory original, it’s the car’s numbers-matching 400 block, bored and stroked to 455 cubic inches during a full restoration. Edelbrock heads, a roller cam, and a rebuilt Quadrajet back up the added displacement. The result blends genuine muscle-era hardware with modern conveniences like Bluetooth audio.
This all-black 1978 Pontiac Trans Am hides a detail most casual buyers never notice: two completely different 400-cubic-inch engines were available that year, separated only by a single cylinder head casting number. See all eight photos of this dealer-fresh example, then read on to find out which engine code actually made it the car enthusiasts wanted.
A 1978 Pontiac Trans Am, immortalized by Smokey and the Bandit, was once cheap enough to be a common sight in driveways across America, sold by the tens of thousands every year. The comments on this video tell a different story now — one viewer cites $85,000-plus prices for clean examples, calling the video’s ‘bargain’ framing badly out of date. Watch to see why GM’s most aerodynamic 1977 production car still gets called ‘the aerodynamics of a brick.’
Pontiac built fewer than 700 first-year Trans Ams in 1969, and this white-with-blue-stripes example, restored by a specialist shop and shown at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals, is one of the survivors. Owner John Steger walks through what made the earliest Trans Am different from everything that came after. It’s a rare look at where the nameplate actually began.
Ordering the W72 400 in a 1979 Trans Am forced you to take the WS6 handling package and a four-speed manual as well, with no exceptions. That bundle produced 220 horsepower, 320 lb-ft and a 0-60 run of 6.90 seconds in the middle of the malaise era. Only 2,485 were built in that configuration without T-tops, with another 2,917 wearing the T-top roof this one has. Read on to find out why 1979 was the cutoff.
Not every car at Mecum Kissimmee 2026 found a buyer. Some rolled across the block, drew a scattering of half-hearted bids, and rolled right back off completely unsold. Buried in the same footage sits a Chevrolet SS that international viewers instantly recognized as a Holden Commodore SS wearing a different badge on the other side of the world. What actually separates a car that sells from one nobody wants to touch?
1976 was the last year Pontiac dared to build a real big-block muscle car, and this Trans Am is a rare survivor of that final stand. Backed by the numbers-matching 455 V8 and a genuine four-speed manual, it’s the kind of drivetrain combination most buyers skipped in favor of the easier automatic. Add in an untouched original interior and you’ve got a driver-quality time capsule from the twilight of an era.
The 1969 Firebird Trans Am existed for exactly one model year in this form, wearing a color combination buyers couldn’t change and stripes that ran straight over the roof, a look Pontiac never repeated. This Ram Air III 4-speed example from The Brothers Collection pairs that one-year-only styling with a functional hood feeding a 400 cubic inch V8. See what made the very first Trans Am look and drive like nothing else on the lot.
Pontiac only sold the 400-cubic-inch W72 with a mandatory four-speed manual in 1979, the final year for its biggest V8, and this factory-correct four-speed Trans Am backs that combination with an aluminum intake, Edelbrock carb, and long-tube headers. 1979 was also the single best sales year the Trans Am nameplate ever had. Read on to find out what made the last big-block Bird so specific.