

#Kitt knight rider driver
To solve this, Knight Rider’s producers hired the one and only George Barris: the designer responsible for creating Adam West’s Batmobile.īarris’ solution was a bit more complex than merely disguising a stunt driver as a car seat – and definitely a lot more complicated than using a small person to drive the vehicle.

While that solution seemed to get rid of the self-driving dilemma, the effect wasn’t all too convincing, as the driver’s seat would end up looking completely different from the front passenger’s seat. For some of the show’s earlier episodes, a stuntman, disguised as a seat, would drive the car to Hasselhoff’s location. Since we now have access to HD copies of the original episodes, fans have begun noticing that there seems to be something off about one of KITT’s front seats, particularly in the driver’s one. Alas, as stunt driver Jack Gill explains, there’s a lot more to KITT’s autopilot than that. Knight Rider fans who weren’t keen on the idea that a small person was driving KITT at all times usually believe that the producers of the show simply commissioned an RC Pontiac Firebird and called it a day. Modifying real cars and turning them into RC versions of themselves is a common practice in some of Hollywood’s massive blockbusters. Except, that is, drive itself, which is the issue that we’ll address next. Be it high-speed chases or off-road stunts, it seemed like KITT could do it all. However, the modified Pontiac Firebird Trans Am wasn’t always fit for every type of terrain, let alone capable of resisting some of the more severe collisions we saw on the show.īy the time the show got popular, there were about 18 different KITTs in Knight Rider, all of them custom-tuned to fulfil a specific task. If you’ve ever watched Knight Rider, you’d know that there are some pretty impressive stunts in later seasons. Considering that the show had some relatively humble origins, it would take some ingenuity to make viewers believe they were watching a supercar driving itself.

As the show grew ever so popular, demand for more complicated stunts meant that a simple, modified Pontiac wouldn’t cut it. Despite what fans might think, there was more than one KITT during Knight Rider’s production.
