RECENTLY I WROTE about the greatest cars in cinema, and plenty of you got in touch to point out the obvious. The cars we really loved weren’t in the cinema at all. They were in the corner of the sitting room, every Saturday evening, whether we liked it or not. And we very much liked it. 

Television cars had a harder job than movie cars. A film car has to be brilliant for two hours. A TV car has to show up every single week, do the same jumps, survive the same crashes, and still look immaculate for the closing credits. The way they managed that, as we’ll see, was usually by quietly destroying an enormous number of them.

Start with KITT, the talking 1982 Pontiac Trans Am from Knight Rider. The famous red scanner light sweeping across the nose was borrowed from the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, which made sense given Glen A. Larson created both shows.

What’s less well known is that Pontiac executives initially thought the whole thing sounded far too silly for their new sports car. They came around, and the production got some of the very first black 1982 Trans Ams off the line.

The show got through somewhere north of 20 of them, helped along by a stroke of luck in 1983 when a train carrying new Trans Ams derailed in California. The cars were fine but couldn’t legally be sold, so General Motors offloaded a batch to the production for a dollar apiece.

Only five screen-used KITTs are known to survive today. Two live with a pair of dedicated historians in Pennsylvania, one is at the Marconi Automotive Museum in California, one is in Orlando, and one is in private hands in the UK. Not bad for a car whose most famous quality was talking back to David Hasselhoff.

The General Lee, a 1969 Dodge Chargerm Dukes of Hazzard TV tribute car in America last year Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

The Dukes of Hazzard makes Knight Rider look positively gentle. The General Lee, the orange 1969 Dodge Charger that spent more time airborne than most light aircraft, was consumed at a rate of two to three cars per episode.

The best........

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