Once a 1700s Native American war chief but now better known as the Pontiac Motor Division of General Motors, the Pontiac nameplate is an integral part of American motorcar history – as it has been around since 1926. Unfortunately, its parent company decommissioned it in late 2010, so it didn’t have centenary celebrations this year.
Sadly, General Motors decided to retire the legendary Pontiac brand and leave countless automotive fans heartbroken. Anyway, at least they were spared the pain of seeing GM’s mainstream brands having just one or no passenger car nameplates in their lineups, like it happens now with Buick and Chevrolet, and soon also with Cadillac since the CT4 is also going the way of the dodo.
Now, back to Pontiac, which is best known for passenger cars and not also crossover SUVs – since the Pontiac Aztek mid-size CUV is widely regarded as one of the ugliest automobiles ever made alongside the Fiat Multipla, one of its biggest and most recognizable models was, without a doubt, the Firebird. The nameplate was introduced in early 1967 as a sibling for the platform-sharing Chevrolet Camaro, obviously targeting Ford Mustang’s fame and fortune.
Over the years, the Pontiac Firebird was produced across four generations until the 2002 model year, and illustriously went down in pop culture history not just because of its benchmark performance credentials but also due to various appearances in the media of the day, including the iconic Smokey and the Bandit films.
Additionally, there was also the Pontiac Trans Am, which was a specialty package that traditionally enhanced appearance, handling, suspension, and horsepower, rather than serve as a different model series altogether. That’s how it came to be that everyone had their favorites, even the members of the imaginative guild of digital car content creators.
One of them, instead of dwelling across the parallel universes of vehicular CGI, decided almost a year ago to see if there any fans of the fourth-generation Pontiac Firebird Trans Am out there. Yep, there’s a treasure trove of them, of course. Andreas Wennevold, the virtual artist behind the ‘wnvld’ account on social media, has a knack for American muscle in vintage-modern form, and he chose the fourth-generation Pontiac Firebird Trans Am as their next unofficial, hypothetical design project.
The pixel master played with a simple gray Pontiac Trans Am and compltley transformed it with lime details inside the car to provide a bit of contrast. The result was seriously bonkers due to the sheer amount of changes, but it turns out even the CGI expert believed that wasn’t the right color for the vision. So, now he’s back taking another digital swing at it with a switch to a more elegant burgundy shade, and also identifying the Trans Am as a WS6 high-performance version.
