This ’76 LeMans posted by canadiancatgreen at the Cohort caught my attention. Is this a genuine former patrol car of the Montague County Sheriff Department in Texas? There’s lots of fake police cars out there, but who would fake such an obscure one? The utter lack of visible rust and the fact that it’s now in Canada tends to support that it’s real. Or at least from Texas.
Update: Of course it’s a Smokey and the Bandit tribute. My apologies; I’m a complete idiot when it comes to popular culture movies and music and such.
Looks like a copy of Sheriff Buford T Justice’s car from Portague County, Texas in “Smokey and the Bandit”.
Given that the door badge is nearly identical, I’d say it’s a tribute car. But a good one – where would one find a LeMans like that these days?
“Daddy, the top came off!”
“Ah am gonna BARBECUE your ass!” 😉
Of course. When it comes to popular culture movies and music, I am a complete idiot.
I wonder how many law enforcement departments used A-Body Pontiacs in the late 1970s. I know from personal experience the Seguin, Texas police department did. Those were tan and white. They were clearly marked but didn’t stand out like the black and white of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS*) cruisers or the blue and white of the Houston Police Department – two other vehicles with which I was familiar in my early driving days.
The choice of Ponchos for the SPD may have been political. That small, at the time, city did have Chevrolet, Ford (including Mercury), Buick, and Pontiac/GMC dealerships but no Dodge or Oldsmobile stores as I recall. Cadillac or foreign makes – forget it. The local Pontiac dealer might have made the city a good deal on purchase and after-the-sale service.
*DPS is the Texas state police/highway patrol
Fremont California used the Pontiacs, first Pontiacs I’d seen as patrol cars and perhaps the only Colonnades. Of course, at the time Fremont was home to the GM plant that built these RWD A Bodies, the plant that later became NUMMI and is now Tesla. So in a way it was also political, although I don’t remember seeing any Toyota (or Chevy Nova or Pontiac Vibe) police cars in the NUMMI days. But the Fremont PD now has at least two Tesla marked patrol cars, a Model S and a Model Y.
The Arvada, Colorado (Suburb of Denver) police department used Colonnade LeMans as well. I was pulled by them over on several occasions during my High School years.
I’m not sure it was political, although it can be. I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin and the city police department would just request bids from local dealers to supply new squad cars. While I was a child there we had 2 ’73 Olds 88’s with 455’s in them. Followed by 2 ’76 AMC Matadors with 401 V8’s.
Definitely a tribute car for Smokey and the Bandit. The base color looks off, though. But that door decal looks to be spot on.
Possibly done up for a movie shoot in town?
The town where I grew up (Lake Forest Park, WA) had one of these as an unmarked cruiser going into the early 80s. As new drivers, my friend group and I became quite adept in identifying the Pontiac front end.
I had never seen one until I watched Smoky And The Bandit in the theater. And with a 74 Luxury LeMans in our garage, I definitely would have noticed!
It seems like Colonnade LeMans sedans only exist as SATB tribute cars now – I have not seen a regular civilian model for decades at this point.
It took me a moment to realize what SATB in this context meant. The first thing that crosses my mind when I see “SATB” is soprano-alto-tenor-bass choral music–part of my livelihood for several decades as an organist-choir director. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen “Smokey and the Bandit.”
Oh my, I didn’t think there were any car guys who haven’t seen Smokey And The Bandit. I personally think it’s an entertaining lark of a movie, but I can totally understand some people thinking it’s insufferably silly as a film. However, it’s worth watching just for the cars. Practically the whole movie takes place on the road. In addition to the star car Trans Am, there are tons of other vehicles in smaller roles and ample shots of cars on the street that show what people, in the south at least, were driving circa 1976/77.
The studio obviously had an agreement with Pontiac to provide most of the cop cars, but I have read that Pontiac offered police packages during that time.
They’re rare enough that I can actually remember the last one I saw! It was at the GM show in Carlisle, PA, around the 2005-2008 timeframe. I can narrow it down to that, because I have a ’76 Grand LeMans coupe that I put in the show those years, and I remember seeing a ’77 Grand LeMans sedan there. It was brown with a buckskin interior, 301 V8. I remember thinking that, with it being factory brown, it could serve as a replica of Buford T. Justice’s police car. I didn’t know that doing those tribute cars was a thing back then, so for all I know, it could have been converted by now.
I also have a ’67 Catalina convertible, which I’ve been putting in the show from 2009 onward. Sometimes I’ve thought about putting the LeMans back in the show, because it’s actually rarer! Every once in awhile, a Can Am might show up, but otherwise that’s about it for the Colonade era LeMans.
There was a Smokey and the Bandit get together at the GM show in Carlisle Pennsylvania back in 2014. A ton of Trans Ams showed up, naturally. So did a Kenworth with a painted trailer that looked pretty authentic. There was also a pretty good showing of replicas of Buford T. Justice’s LeMans.
For the record, Buford’s LeMans in “Smokey and the Bandit” was white with a blue interior, but painted brown. In some shots, once it starts losing body parts, you can occasionally see white parts that weren’t spray painted. I also doubt Buford’s LeMans was a real police car. In some of the chase scenes, notably when they cut through the Shell station, just before the car loses its roof, it bounces around more like Jed Clampett’s LTD whenever he tried to push it too hard in “Barnaby Jones”, than anything resembling a police car.
As for the one in the pic above, I’m going to guess “tribute car”, mostly because of the wheels. I’m thinking a real police car would have wider rims that fill out the wheel openings a bit better. And obviously, not white walls, although those could have been swapped out at some point.
I don’t remember it well but we bought a lightly used ’76 like this from some long forgotten agency, it was clean as a whistle (metro car) but took over a year to resell, no one wanted to drive it home as was normal for the other used cars we’d rehab and flip .
-Nate
Pontiac was looking at the police car market in the 70’s, there was a police option package for the Lemans and in 1978 the Catalina. Pontiac also offered a police version of the Ventura/Phoenix, likely inspired by Chevy’s successful 9C1 Nova. The California Highway Patrol tried a few Catalinas but stuck with Dodge until the 80’s.
https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/classic-cars/a32151742/1978-pontiac-catalina-freeway-enforcer-catalog/
Baltimore County had a few of these too, and if I recall correctly, these were the last of the cars with white and red livery before going to the white and blue livery which is still used to this day.
My assigned range car in driver’s ed was a Pontiac LeMans Enforcer that looked like this. It was clearly a retired police car, but it wasn’t painted in the county’s colors, so I’m not sure where it came from. I recall that it had a number of badges glued to its dashboard proclaiming it to have Radial Tuned Suspension, Calibrated and Certified Speedometer, and one or two other features relating to its law enforcement purpose. It also had a 400 ci V8, which allowed me to do burnouts whenever I heard Coach Moore in the tower chewing out an incompetent student somewhere else on the course. My favorite spot was in the T-turn practice area, as it was hidden from Coach Moore’s sight by a hill. In hindsight, it should have been obvious who was doing burnouts, because it was usually when I was out of sight, and I had the only car with more than 115 horsepower. Somehow Coach Moore and I shared a similar level of deductive reasoning, and I never got caught.
I liked the Pontiac. Other students wanted the newer X-cars and A-cars donated by the local Oldsmobile dealer. They were all much smaller cars, and the other students probably wanted the extra space on track for making maneuvers. I’d been driving since I was in elementary school, so I didn’t really car. I was sorry that we always took the newer cars when we went out on the road. The Pontiac was an old clunker that had been through police duty, but it didn’t have the glaring flaws that the new cars did after a couple years of range use. I remember a Cutlass Cierra with a broken bench seat adjuster. The driver side worked, but the passenger side swung freely, forwards and back. Most students found it challenging to brake smoothly enough that Coach Moore wasn’t being shaken into ill-temper by having his seat swinging from travel stop to travel stop as his seatbelt choked him.
I want to say the NYPD had some quad-rectangular headlight Pontiac LeMans cars around 1977-78.
I’ve seen them.
What I’m not sure of is if I saw them in a movie, or in NYC.
The NYC cars were blue, a light smurf blue, with a broad white strip. The vast majority were Plymouth Furys and Dodge Monacos (1977-79 time frame). (Real life).
There were some 75-78 Nova marked cars in NYC also, but again, I’m not sure if that was a movie or real life.
In Suffolk County, the cars were the opposite–white with a dark blue strip. They were ALL Chrysler products–mostly mid-size. But they started using Dodge Aspens and Plymouth Volares around 1977-78, and by the early 80s, the mid-size cars were gone, it was all Chrysler “compacts”
I think fake because I don’t believe a police spec ‘77 LeMans would have wheel lip and rocker moldings. “Get me a Diablo sandwich and a Dr Pepper and make it fast, I’m in a Gd hurry”
I was in the military in those days, which meant a lot of driving all over the US between duty stations, going home on leave, etc, and LeMans patrol units were very common. I even got to ride in one in late ’77 when I had car trouble on the interstate just outside of Indianapolis and a “county mountie” stopped to check on me and gave me a ride to a service station. It was a Marion County LeMans in the two-tone beige and copper scheme used by many Indiana counties back then. Very sharp looking unit.