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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.
A 1978 Pontiac Trans Am could hide two completely different personalities under the same cross-hatch grille that year. Order the standard 400 and you got a workmanlike 180 horsepower; check the right option box and Pontiac’s W72-code heads bumped that to 220 horsepower off nothing more than a smarter combustion chamber design. Here’s what actually separated a good 1978 Trans Am from a great one – and why the base engine wasn’t even a Pontiac.
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story now — one viewer cites $85,000-plus prices for clean examples, calling the video’s ‘bargain’ framing badly out of date.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.
1979 was the only year Pontiac forced its last big 400 V8 to come exclusively with a four-speed stick, no automatic allowed. This factory-correct combo gets backed up here with an aluminum intake, Edelbrock carb, and longtube headers that finally let the W72 breathe. Here is why the pairing was never optional.
Few nameplates carry as much baggage — good and bad — as the Pontiac Trans Am, a car that went from low-volume performance special to pop-culture icon almost by accident. This transformed example takes that legacy and pushes it somewhere new, keeping the silhouette that made the Trans Am famous while updating what’s underneath. Read on to find out how a build like this honors the Trans Am’s history instead of erasing it.
This custom-built 1979 Pontiac Trans Am pushes the factory’s final big-block V8 to 450 horsepower, more than double what the original W72 400 ever made from the factory. Read on to find out why 1979 was the true last call for Pontiac’s biggest engine, and how a modern build manages to respect that swan song while blowing past it entirely.