There are lookalikes, and there are lookalikes. How many Cadillac hearses – of various vintages – have been predictably turned into ECTO-1? What about the dozens of DeLoreans that got the inevitable Back to the Future treatment (Great Scott!)? Those are usually rather half-assed, as it should be, given the rarity of those cars. With a cheap base like the Pontiac Trans Am though, the temptation to impersonate David Hasselhoff can be overwhelming. Take that to local otaku levels of commitment to the bit, and you get a pretty convincing piece of KITT.
I don’t think I’ve seen an episode of Knight Rider in decades, though I do remember some of it – especially the theme tune and, well, the car. The show, produced by Glen Larson and Universal, ran on NBC for four seasons from 1982 to 1986. I would have seen it on French TV, where it was known as K-2000, sometime in the late ‘80s / early ‘90s. It was a pretty successful show, both in the US and abroad, though it chiefly appealed to a younger demographic not overly concerned with plot, acting or reviewability, the latter being probably pretty dismal. Different times, different entertainment…
For those of you who have no idea what the deal is with this black Pontiac with a funny nose, the show Knight Rider’s premise was that a guy called Michael Knight solved crimes and righted wrongs by riding around in the Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT), an “intelligent” car that had a bunch of cunning gadgets, plus an A.I. that could talk to the hero and even drive itself. The car was the sidekick, conveyance and the hero’s superpower all rolled into one.
I’m not sure why they picked a Pontiac in particular, but they could have done worse, from a looks perspective. There was the fact that this was a completely new model in 1982, so one could hope it would stay visually fresh for a while – which it certainly did.
Universal forked out a small fortune to purchase three Trans Ams. One was turned into a star/hero car (for close-ups), one became a high-performance driver with a rubber skin, one was a tricked-out car so a stuntman could drive it from the back seat, giving it the appearance of driving itself. A few faux KITTs were made from VW Beetle chassis as lightweight “jump cars” for harder-duty stuntwork.
This was still a pretty precarious way to film a series where the car was, in essence, a main character – not a bit-player like Columbo’s Peugeot 403. In 1983, a train carrying a bunch of Pontiacs derailed in California. By law, GM were forbidden from selling them, even though many were unscathed, but they did contact Universal to see if they’d be interested in a dozen Firebirds for $1 apiece. Suddenly, the Knight Rider folks had a bunch of KITTs made, allegedly with the help of George Barris.
They re-built the “hero car” in 1984. There were a few notable changes to the interior, but nothing externally. As far as I know, the Firebird’s engine (the 5.0 litre V8, I’m guessing?) remained stock, but it’s said the transmission got uprated to a Turbo 350 3-speed for most cars used on the show.
A KITT replica’s pièce de résitance is, of course, the dash. This one is about as convincing as these get, down to the carpet.
The single large screen on the right-hand side, which might well be a cleverly-disguised satnav, makes this a “mark II” dash, i.e. the one that was featured on the third and fourth seasons. Originally, there were two small TV screens there. The steering…er… yoke should also have a little “Knight Industries Two Thousand” in white, located in the groove just below the red logo, but that’s the only small inconsistency I can discern with the show car. Keeping all that clean and shiny must be a job and a half.
So why is this a 1990 model? Because it is. For once, I remembered to take a picture of the VIN. This also tells us that this car has the 225-235hp 350ci (5.7 litre) V8, which is what you’d want to have on a car like this.
It’s not all that difficult, to be fair, to turn your Firebird into a TV star replica. There are at least a couple of specialist shops whose stock in trade is this very thing, though some people have also built their own from scratch. The trickier thing is to find a good base car, which is not as simple as it sounds nowadays, and to keep the replica bits in top nick. Nothing would kill the suspension of disbelief like dead red bulbs in the front light bar or a dirty interior.
Despite the popularity of the show abroad, GM did not export many of this generation Firebird / Trans Am. Out of 839k units made from 1982 to 1992, only a few thousand at most were shipped overseas (not including Canada) each year. It’s a little odd that they utterly failed to capitalize on this fad, which they must have had some inkling about at the time. Another Deadly Sin, but of a purely PR nature?
Maybe not. This is more an exercise in nostalgia than in selling new (and pretty expensive, for export markets) cars. it took a couple of decades for the kids who watched Knight Rider to have the means to buy 3rd gen Trans Ams and turn them into the KITTs of their dreams, both in the US and elsewhere. This was the first installment of “American ‘80s Week,” by the way – yes, with a MY 1990 car, but one that was firmly rooted in the mid-‘80s.
Related posts:
Curbside Classic: 1983 Pontiac Firebird 25th Anniversary Daytona 500 Limited Edition Trans Am – Fake It ‘Til You Make It, by Perry Shoar
Curbside Classic: 1985 Pontiac Firebird – Fast Fashion, by Joseph Dennis
Curbside Classic: 1988 Pontiac Trans Am GTA – Generating Teenage Appreciation; Now, Getting Transglobal Attention, by Jason Shafer
In-Motion Classic: 1985 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am – Model Citizen, by Joseph Dennis
Curbside Capsule Redux: 1991 Pontiac Formula Firebird – The Subtle Trans Am, by Ed Stembridge
CC Capsule: 1992 Pontiac Trans Am GTA – Kitt and Caboodle, by T87
COAL: 1987 Pontiac Trans Am – The Beginning, by Danny F Cabrera
This show would have looked so much different had it aired just a year earlier. KITT would have been a late 2nd-generation Trans Am with a chicken on the hood and a turbocharged Pontiac 301 underneath it…
Had I been a decade younger than I am, I would have never missed an episode. However, it came along when I was out of college and I wasn’t watching much TV. And if I had been watching much TV, campy idiocy like this show would not have been on the menu.
That said, we have to love a good recreation of a TV car that is iconic to some. Really, the car was probably the best part of the show, so I say we should celebrate it.
I am impressed with the dashboard conversion, particularly. It’s a shame you couldn’t get the car started in some conversation. 🙂
I think we are about the same age at the beginnings of the seventh decade. I can attest to have never watched Knight Rider and definitely not Dukes of Hazzard which I considered plain stupid. Yet that is TV in their most insipid. In fact if you asked me what car do I remember the most, leaving out the Bullitt Mustang, it would be Starsky & Hutch in their red Gran Torino. While I have never seen a Hazzard clone, or Knight Rider clone, I have seen a Gran Torino clone on the road.
My Dad and I went to the Ford weekend at Carlisle a few years back, and the Torino section had those Starsky & Hutch “striped tomatoes” all lined up in a row. That row looked like a row of fleet cars ready to be signed out. There must have been over a dozen of them. I wished that I’d grabbed a picture. Heck, maybe I did, but can’t find it at the moment.
Now if only they’d’ve had a few ’72(s) painted up like Clint Eastwood’s ride in the movie “Gran Torino”…
Being about a decade younger than JPC, I did watch Knight Rider. Some. It was on right after the Dukes of Hazzard if memory serves, with NBC early during the show’s run having a promo for KR which had a Trans Am next to a Charger and the announcer showing the Charger, saying “This used to give you thrills on Friday night”. I still prefer the Dukes as it is much more relatable and truer to my life and experiences than was Knight Rider, relatively speaking.
I saw something recently that some of the cars used on television are still in existence and have found their way into the hands of collectors. One had been used by Universal for years after the show, where people could get in and enjoy the car while on static display. That car, if memory serves, had less than 10,000 miles.
This is an intriguing find.
I’m a year younger than JPC, but I watched Knight Rider occasionally back then as my roommate at the time must have been a Hasselhoff for whatever reason. This dude was also known to watch Babe Watch or whatever that lame show was called.
While I too found it cheesy, the car was definitely cool. Even DC’s transit system must think so too, as they have a similar light (only in yellow) above the windscreen on all of their busses, but I digress as usual…
Back in 2008, NBC thought that they could revive this TV series with an equally cheesy show (albeit with better special effects), changing the hero car to the ultimate “Retro-Stang”, a 2008 Shelby GT500KR.
This series was no Hawaii Five-0, a very successful reboot of Hawaii Five-O lasting 10 seasons. The Knight Rider reboot was only going to last one season…
Over time, and likely seeing that they were going to get canceled, they wrote in some sort of McGuffin that the hero car had some sort of chameleon circuit like the TARDIS is supposed to have on Doctor Who (another cheesy show, but one that I still like very much!) that could allow the car to transform in to things like an F-150, Ford Van, Crown Vic, and once a ’69 Mach One. My guess is maintaining a Shelby King of the Road was too much budget for a soon to be canceled show. Hmmm… All Fords… where have we seen THAT before?*
And yes, I only watched if for the car. When they stopped using the Mustang, I lost interest.
In one small parallel to Hawaii Five-0, where that reboot sometimes played as an hour long Chevy commercial, the Knight Rider reboot was definitely an hour long Ford commercial.
* Quinn Martin would have been proud. 😉
Those orange light bars on the front of DC’s transit buses are a pet peeve of mine. It started as a “pilot program” 15 or so years ago – and like most pilot programs, it just never went away.
The idea was supposedly to make the buses “more visible” – which is a dubious claim, since it’s already a 30,000-lb., red-painted, lit-up vehicle. In my opinion, all those lights do is just add to visual clutter. Grr. And I’m convinced that a lighting company somewhere is getting fat profits from its contract with Metrobus.
OK – I’ll step off my soap box. The light bar on the front of KITT was cool.
I guess I can forgive some of the misinformation here if the author was originally from France and not properly raised on 1980’s US car and pop culture. The car from the show was based on the Trans Am, not Grand Am. And that 116k production number is just for 1982, not 82-92. Total 3rd gen Firebird generation production numbers were around 800k.
Grand Am was a typo — mea culpa.
The other number was a weird source that I should have double-checked. Fixed both.
cheers, Sal.
TARTA87: I’ve asked this question before related to Japanese License Plates, but got no response. I’m still very curious though.
Many times when you post these pictures of classic cars from over there, they have tags that in some way reflect the car itself. In this case, Knight Industries 2000 (“20-00”).
Is this somehow similar to our Vanity Tags here in the states? Do folks apply for and pay an extra fee to get a special number?
With only 4 digits, it seems like it would be difficult to pull off multiple tags like that, say “19-57” on the multiple latter tri-five examples that are likely over in Japan and wanting that number.
Again, just very curious.
I have no idea how they do it, but I don’t think it’s like vanity plates (i.e, you cannot pay for it). It’s probably more of a sequential numbering system, so you have to get your application put in at just the right time to get the number you want. It was the same system in France until fairly recently. The key was to either ask (very) nicely or know someone within the licensing admin who could arrange that for you.
But I could be wrong. Maybe Jim Brophy has a better idea…
Thanks T-87… It would seem difficult to time that perfectly, but the “ask very nicely” thing may just work in Japan.
That will NOT work at the MVA here in Maryland… You get the next plate on the pile and that’s it. There is no asking nicely. So if you don’t like your number, too bad.
I know a guy who had one of those little Lexus coupes back in the early aughts and his tags had the letters BMW of all things. I’m sure he didn’t ask for that.
According to my Japanese friend, the numbers in the bottom row of the license plate can be customized (if available, of course). The Japanese character to the left, as well as the numbers in the top row, are assigned and make the plate unique. My friend has 4 cars and they all have the same numbers in the bottom row—they are meaningful only to him, and meaningless to everybody else, so he could apply and get them.
A quick internet search reveals more KITT tribute cars than I would have imagined. This does seem to be one of the better ones. If only cars could talk, this one would have quite a story. Oh, wait…
Knight Rider was one of the few TV shows I watched as a kid – having a car as one of the main characters was a good way to sucker me in to a show. Great entertainment for a kid like me.
I was never into the show, but it seemes to have been big in Japan. Over the years Aoshima has had this kit in their catalog several times, seemingly in several versions depicting different seasons of ths show and some in different ‘modes’. Whatever that means.
I’m quite taken by that interior; in my ignorance of the program I’d thought it was just a Firebird with a light cut into the nose.
When KITT was in AUTOPILOT mode, it wasn’t a stunt driver driving from the backseat. The stunt driver was actually hiding in a modified seat, wearing the seat as a cover.
Here is an article on Jalopnik about it: https://jalopnik.com/knight-rider-had-the-best-trick-for-faking-a-self-drivi-1845825711
Here is an IG post that shows more images of how it was done: https://www.instagram.com/crewstoriesig/p/CxpQw07Lbyk/?img_index=1