Back when I was at Oceanside High School on Long Island, New York in the early 1980's, you drove something like this 1976 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, you were cooler than Fonzie. If you were a junior you looked like a senior; if you were a senior, you looked like you were in college. Just being seen in one validated you and made you look like someone going places. Even if mommy and daddy or your friend's parents wrote the check for it.
Although Oceanside was (and is) a fairly affluent community that rubs elbows with some of the wealthiest communities in the country, no kid at Oceanside drove a Corvette to school; there were some things out of reach for even the coolest and richest kids. Firebirds, Camaros and Mustangs were far less expensive, could be had with less powerful engines thus cheaper to insure. Explains why personal luxury cars were so popular as first-cars back then. Naturally, I drove a four-door, 1974 Mercury Comet. Oh, the pain. The pain.
I lived on the literal "other side of the tracks" in a part of neighboring Baldwin that happened to be in the Oceanside School District. Had my parents bought a house another couple of hundred yards to the east I would have gone to Baldwin schools. Nothing wrong with that, just that Baldwin wasn't nearly as monied as Oceanside was or appeared to be.
Good news is, if you weren't "cool" back in high school or want to return to those halcyon days of yore when you were or thought you were, just fork over $54,575 for this redhead for sale outside Columbus, Ohio and you can be like Fonzie again. Or be as cool as Fonzie since no one could've have worn Arthur Fonzarelli's t-shirt back in the day.
Yeah, fifty-four-thousand, five-hundred-seventy-dollars. The kicker is, it's not unreasonably priced. Meanwhile, a 1976 Corvette in similar shape would sell for roughly half that, a 1976 Camaro would go for similar money to the Corvette.
How and why is that? Well, as us older Gen X'ers get on in age, some long for the trappings of our youth. Since no kid drove a Corvette, it makes sense, well sort of, that the cars the cool kids drove, or we aspired to drive would command top dollar.
That would explain, to some degree, why mid-'70's Corvettes go for as little as they do, and Chevrolet did not sell a version of the Camaro in 1975 and 1976 comparable to the Trans Am. Still, $55,000?
No doubt, in addition to nostalgia and this car's relatively pristine condition, it's not museum quality incidentally as we see here that something's not quite right, what's driving the price on this through the T-Tops is it has a 455-cubic inch Pontiac V-8.
1976 was the last year the big engine was available in any Firebird although the big mill was down a good hundred net horsepower from what it had just a couple of years prior. Chevrolet had discontinued offering the Camaro with their 454-cubic inch V-8 after 1973, on the Corvette it was dropped after 1974.
Us car guys and gals, who never really grew up, like big engines. Even if they are emasculated shadows of what they had been. This is the best picture of the engine they posted.
Even with a four-speed manual and 3.23:1 rear end, Road and Track recorded a 1976 Trans Am going from zero-to-sixty in 8.4-seconds, that, friend-oh, is far from fast. Your turbocharged, three-cylinder crossover today would smoke this thing. A 310-net horsepower, 1973 SD-455 powered Firebird Formula or Trans Am might give you a run for the money. Personally, I prefer more from my "oldies" than just a nostalgia piece, hence, my weekender is a 1991 Corvette convertible. Not only could it run circles around this car, but it also cost me a fraction of what the asking price is for this.
General Motors late and sometimes great Pontiac division built four-generations of Firebirds from 1967 through 2002, and a "Trans Am" from 1969 through 2002. The cars were very similar to Chevrolet's Camaro although marketed as being somewhat more upscale. Trans Am's were named after the Trans Am racing series.
Seems nostalgia, which is nothing new, can be very expensive.
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