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" With all due respect to Frank Bullet, Eleanor and that bald guy from The Fast and the Furious, the most significant car movie of all time is Smokey and the Bandit. It&amp;#039;s true. It might even be the most significant film ever made. Smokey and the Bandit should have easily swept 1977&amp;#039;s Golden Anniversary of the Academy Awards.  Instead, Annie Hall won Best Picture that year. Annie who?  My memory might be a little fuzzy but I don&amp;#039;t think I saw one Trans Am in Annie Hall. And I&amp;#039;m pretty sure Woody Allen and Dianne Keaton didn&amp;#039;t run blocker for 400 cases of Coors beer. And even though Keaton&amp;#039;s death-defying drive in lower Manhattan did make for one of the more suspenseful Volkswagen bug scenes, I&amp;#039;ll still wager that Woody Allen doesn&amp;#039;t even know how to do a smoky burnout.  The film might have been upstaged, but Smokey and the Bandit made the Pontiac Trans Am a superstar. Trans Am sales jumped from 68,745 in 1977 to 93,341 in 1978. And just one year later that number swelled to an amazing 117,108 units sold. Those are big numbers, and they made the Trans Am an icon of our culture&amp;#039;s awkward slip into the 1980s. More importantly, those are big numbers Pontiac could see again.  The new Camaro Concept is likely to become a production reality in a few years. And we certainly dig the design. But why not bring back the Trans Am too? We posted Kevin Morgan&amp;#039;s Trans Am concept illustration back in January and your comments have been flooding in ever since.  And just in case GM hasn&amp;#039;t realized: 1970s pop culture is hip again. It&amp;#039;s on TV; it&amp;#039;s in the movies; and it&amp;#039;s in the clothes we wear. Why not strike while the iron is hot? A modern T/A with styling cues from the 1970s would instantly become the coolest car Pontiac&amp;#039;s lineup. And it would give GM&amp;#039;s performance division a sports car above the Solstice. Imagine the Corvette&amp;#039;s 6.0-liter V8 expanded to, say 6.6-liters. That would give Pontiac with a unique engine offering true to Trans Am heritage. As the proud owner of the 1978 Trans Am pictured\u2014I say build it. Here are a few new looks at of Kevin Morgan&amp;#039;s concept.\u2014Ben Stewart The only thing that makes a 1978 Pontiac Trans Am better is owning it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a4448/2690321/>