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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.
A black Pontiac Trans Am shared the screen with Burt Reynolds in 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, and two years later Pontiac moved 117,108 of them in a single model year. Two decades later, the LS1-powered WS6 Trans Am was faster and better built than ever — and GM killed it anyway. Top Tier Motors traces the cancellation back to four competing forces inside and outside General Motors, none of which had anything to do with the car actually failing to sell.
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story now — one viewer cites $85,000-plus prices for clean examples, calling the video’s ‘bargain’ framing badly out of date.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.’
Jay Leno takes the wheel of a 1979 Pontiac Trans Am on loan from the Audrain Automobile Museum — the same black-and-gold decal car most people know from the movies, but with a mechanical story that’s easy to miss. According to fans in the comments, this was the year Pontiac’s W72 400 actually out-accelerated the Corvette. Watch Leno find out if the reputation holds up.