Trans-Am news - Smokier and the Bandit - 2010

It's official: GM has consigned Pontiac - its so-called ‘athletic brand' that has been wheezing into obscurity over the last few years - to the scrapheap. 

To those of you outside America - and, in truth, probably quite a few of you within America - this news probably bothers you as much as finding out that The Best of Alan Titchmarsh has finally been released on DVD.

But Pontiac's demise does spell the end for the admittedly very remote chance of the Trans-Am - the iconic muscle car beloved of Burt Reynolds and Michael Knight - making a glorious retro comeback.

Unless, that is, you go to the nice guys at Gearhead Performance, who'll cook you up one of these stunning retro-modern Trans-Ams using nothing more than a new Camaro, a lot of plastic and, er, a 900bhp twin-turbo V8. With that sort of power, you'll be able to perform a very literal reinterpretation of Smokey and the Bandit.

The original Trans-Ams, remember, were based around Camaros, so it's kinda historically accurate. Or something.

We can't help but wonder if, had Pontiac spent the last several years building cars like this instead of, say, the Torrent, whether it would have been sentenced to GM's electric chair...