1976 50th Anniversary Limited Edition Pontiac Trans Am

Celebrating Pontiac's 50th Year 1926 - 1976

The 50th Anniversary Limited Edition was the first in a long line of Special Edition Trans Ams.

The Black and Gold Trans Am first made it's debut at the 1974 Chicago car show. If you want to check out photos of the actual car.. Click Here. There was such a good feedback from this show that they brought the infamous "Black and Gold" back for the 1976 Limited Edition 50th Anniversary Trans Am. Pontiac decided to produce 2400 Limited Edition for the 1976 model year (but actually made 2,590). All of the Limited Edition Trans Ams were supposed to be produced with the Hurst hatches, but Pontiac discovered that the Hurst Top tended to leak so only the first 643 Limited Editions had the Hurst roof, the remaining 1,947 came without the Hurst Hatches. They were given the designation "Y82" and it did not matter if they had t-tops or not, they were still all designated "Y82". The Y81 code did not come out until 1977. The Limited Edition package with the Hurst Hatch roofs was an $1100 upgrade to the base Trans Am and the Limited Edition without the Hurst Hatches was only a $450 upgrade. The L78 Pontiac 400 was the standard engine and the L75 Pontiac 455 was optional. There were a few things that were dumped at the last minute. The first was Raised gold-lettered Goodyear tires which never made it and the second was black chrome tail splitters. The tail splitters proved to be too expensive to produced so they were dropped although a few did reach the production line (rumors say only 8 of them left the line with the black chrome tail splitters). So, if you have black chrome tail splitters... SAVE THEM.