Posts Tagged: Pontiac
Jay Leno owns hundreds of cars, but few tell a story as understated as his 1966 Dodge Coronet, a boxy family coupe hiding one of the most feared engines Detroit ever sold to the public. That small “426 Hemi” fender badge marks the first model year Chrysler offered the Hemi as a genuine street engine rather than a race-only exotic, sold in just three B-body nameplates. Read on to find out why a car this plain-looking still commands serious respect from collectors like Leno.
The 1977 Pontiac Can Am packed a 400-cubic-inch V8 into a mid-size LeMans body as Pontiac’s unofficial answer to a GTO-shaped hole in its lineup. Pontiac planned to build roughly 5,000. A single broken piece of spoiler tooling ended the program at around 1,377 cars, making it one of the rarest factory muscle cars of the entire decade.
The Pontiac Firebird Survived Two Gas Crises and a Hollywood Bandit — So Why Did GM Kill It in 2002?
Pontiac rebuilt the Firebird four separate times in 35 years, surviving two gas crises and a movie-fueled sales boom that forced GM to delay an entire redesign. This retrospective traces every generation, from the 325-hp 1967 Ram Air 400 to the record-setting late-90s WS6 Trans Ams, right up to the federal safety rule that finally ended the run in 2002.
A black-and-gold 1977 Trans Am starred in a trucker comedy nobody expected to work. Two years later Pontiac’s production numbers had nearly doubled, and the car’s shaker-hood silhouette became shorthand for an entire era of muscle cars. Here’s the real story behind the movie, the stunt car, and the surprising engine hiding under some factory hoods.
Pontiac sold more than 6,800 GTO Judges for 1969, but only 108 of them were convertibles. This Starlight Black example carries a four-speed, the standard Ram Air III V8, and a claim from its seller that only two other Judge convertibles share its paint. Here’s what separates the rarest Judge body style from the rest of the pack.