As we enter 2018, we’re getting a sense that Knight Rider nostalgia is building. Mr. Robot showrunner Sam Esmail dedicated the opening sequence of one of this fall’s episodes to Knight Rider, and now we’ve heard from an Ohioan, Chris Blasius, who has constructed a ridiculously correct version of Michael Knight’s trusty steed, K.I.T.T.
Although the sentient Pontiac Trans Am voiced by William Daniels evolved over the course of the TV series, Blasius chose to focus on the car as it appeared during the show’s first season, 1982, digging up a hardtop Trans Am with a 165-hp 305-cubic-inch V-8 equipped with General Motors’ short-lived Cross-Fire injection. For correctness, he notes, he “had to have an ’82, [and the hardtop car] was the only way to find one, because most ’82s leaked from the T-tops and rusted out the floors.” The roof was then cut away and replaced with the T-top bar from a 1987 model. Otherwise, Blasius made every effort to restore the car with NOS parts from the ’82 model year. It even wears the correct Goodyear Eagle GT rubber.
The repop K.I.T.T.-style nose wasn’t correct enough for Blasius’s obsessive tendencies, so the front fascia was cut and reshaped into a plug from which a new nose was molded. Meanwhile, Blasius enlisted his friend Billy Gunter to build the dash, center console, and steering wheel for him. Gunter, in turn, contacted Michael Scheffe, who originally came up with K.I.T.T.’s design for series producer Glen A. Larson, and invited him down to Gunter’s shop in Atlanta to confirm the correctness of the pieces. The dash itself took Gunter eight and a half months to sculpt, then another couple of weeks to pull a molded dash from. According to Blasius, the engine speed, road speed, oil pressure, and fuel-level readouts all display what’s actually going on with the car.
Chris Blasius, the man responsible for this fit of K.I.T.T.-tacular madness.
This fresh new K.I.T.T. is capable of repeating 20 phrases from the show at the push of various buttons, which Blasius can swap in and out by loading new ones onto an SD card. Exterior speakers hooked up to a 600-watt amplifier play K.I.T.T.’s distinctive turbine whine when the car is in motion. An AGM battery mounted in the trunk will run all of the show-car electronics for about eight hours with the ignition shut off.
If you’ve ever seen a TV or movie car in person, you know that they’re 10-footers at best, slapped together just well enough to complete an on-camera illusion. With the obsessive detail Blasius and Gunter put into this tribute to the Knight Industries Two Thousand, there’s little doubt that this K.I.T.T. is aesthetically superior to the various Pontiacs that helped David Hasselhoff along on his shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Have a gander at Blasius’s YouTube channel for more on the commendable nerdery that went into the reconstruction of one of the most beloved automobiles of the 1980s.
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