This 1977 Pontiac Trans Am needs some work and has 5 days remaining in the listing. It is priced at $11,400 here on eBay. This Trans Am is located in Spring Valley, Wisconsin, and the seller is open to offers. The eBay listing has 68 watchers, a sign of how much interest a driver-quality/project Trans Am from this era still draws. The seller reports 109,782 miles on a car with a clean title, finished in red with a black interior. True to its high mileage, the car comes with a documented list of flaws: a dent on the driver’s side front quarter panel, a crease in the roofline above the driver’s door, a missing A/C compressor, an inoperative power window module, a worn driver’s seat, worn carpet, and a non-original aluminum radiator. The seller also notes that a previous owner painted black over the original red in various spots, which lines up with the black hood, shaker scoop, and bird decal visible in the photos against otherwise red bodywork. Specifically, the car has a bumblebee stripe that is usually associated with Mopar products. The seller says the car runs, drives, and is currently registered.
1977 was the year “Smokey and the Bandit” turned the black-and-gold Trans Am Special Edition into a cultural icon, but it was also a significant redesign year in its own right. Pontiac gave the Firebird square, DOT-certified headlights, a flat one-piece front fascia in place of the old separate bumpers, and a new, more angular hood scoop for the Trans Am. It was also the first year GM leaned hard on engines borrowed from other divisions, including Buick and Oldsmobile, a move controversial enough that GM ended up offering a buyback program to unhappy buyers. Firebird sales responded anyway, jumping to more than 150,000 units for the year.
Pontiac built 155,735 Firebirds for 1977, and the Trans Am was the runaway favorite at 68,744 units, more than the Base, Esprit, and Formula combined. Of those, 53,177 were standard, non-Special-Edition cars like this one, with the remaining 15,567 split between Special Edition coupes and T-tops. Trans Am buyers outside California could choose the standard L78 400-cubic-inch V8 rated at 180 horsepower or the W72 higher-output 200-horsepower version, while California and high-altitude cars received an Oldsmobile-sourced 403 rated at 185 horsepower. All the engines generated more than 300 ft lbs of torque.
Pontiac’s 1977 Trans Am came in just six colors, and this car’s red is the factory faded Buccaneer Red, the only red Pontiac allowed on the Trans Am that year (Firethorn Red was reserved for other Firebird models). The car has a black factory interior color trimmed in the cloth/velour Custom Trim Group. Cosmetic issues aside, is this numbers-correct-looking, clean-titled Trans Am from the height of the Bandit era a reasonable project for a buyer willing to sort out its mechanical gaps?
Mopars are the only cars that look good with a bumble bee stripe. That’s because they started it. This Firebird looks horrible with it. Just because you wanted to show the engine size, doesn’t mean it would work on this car. It’s just like when Dodge put the red hash marks coming off the hood of the 2010 Challenger R/T. They came down the side of fenders with the R/T underneath. Looked just right. After that I noticed a lot of people putting aftermarket ones on their non Mopar cars, but they never looked right because of where they applied them on the fenders. My point is, don’t copy Mopar.