Home » Kitt turns 40, so the TV series “Supercar” anticipated the future

Kitt turns 40, so the TV series “Supercar” anticipated the future

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Kitt turns 40. For lovers of TV series of the 80s it is the icon of the car of the future. In 2022 there will be occasions to celebrate a car that, especially in the world of tunning and replicas, has so many fans. The syncopated theme song and the sparkling black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am with Michael Knight, aka David Hasselhoff on board, represented in 1982 a leap into a science fiction that already had a touch of realism.

“Supercar”, this is the title in Italy of the Knight Rider series, broadcast on the small screen a world that still does not exist, but more alive than others, especially for four wheels. In the space of 40 years many of those devilry conceived and staged have become true, others have remained thought of fiction. Let’s see which ones.

Talk to a machine? It’s not really that extravagant. On the contrary. In a few years the dialogues will be more and more dense. Knight, a policeman who fights evil after the Knight foundation saved his life and put him in the control of the Pontiac, today he wouldn’t call Kitt, but he would have to invoke Google, Siri and Alexa. And who knows what names will pop up from the dashboard in the next few decades. Just as it is not strange to have a car that tells you where to go and when to go. And it won’t be unusual to have a machine that thinks for itself thanks to artificial intelligence.

In the episodes of the 80s everything happened thanks to the Knight 2000 microprocessor: a “self-aware” cybernetic logic module that allowed Kitt to think, learn, communicate and interact with humans. Brain that together with the Alfa circuit allowed Knight Industries Two Thousand, this is the acronym of the acronym Kitt, to drive without a driver. A high concentration of chips that today, given the microprocessor crisis, would have relegated the Hasselhoff custom-built car for a long time to the traveling workshop housed on a truck. Situation that make the Kitt of forty years ago even more real.

The Supercar, which looked at the world around her thanks to the LED scanner with the red light swinging from right to left, was nothing more than an ante litteram prototype of a level 5 self-driving car. Perhaps the LED would be judged today of dubious taste, but the intuition was correct: cameras and sensors that allow the cars to control and connect with the surrounding world. These are functions that are already largely available, others will arrive in the next decade.

An ongoing digital transformation that will be able to have futuristic dashboards like that of Kitt, but with touch, design and transparency on the windshields. Different systems than the carousels of lights, buttons and various levers that today, outside a Boeing cockpit, would be unwatchable and not at all user-friendly. What Supercar was the inspiration for the Tesla designed by Elon Musk? Hard to say. Certainly cars of today will never be fitted with boosters or afterburners that allowed Kitt to jump from one building to another or to overcome the traffic jams of the United States highway. And then the futuristic materials such as Tri-Helical Plasteel 1000 Mbs or pyroclastic lamination.

Trials that some might come up with, but would be out of the norm or outlawed. Ideas that cannot be exchanged from the television series closed without explanation in 1986. Kitt, created by Michael Scheffe, a former Mattel engineer involved in the design of Hot Wheels cars, retires after four seasons. NBC attempted a new series in the 1990s, this time with a Pontiac Banshee, but without success. The Supercar no longer surprised like that of the 80s: it was not just a vehicle, but a true co-star of the TV series, the first role of its kind for a car, so much so that Hasselhoff was relegated, who a year ago put his car up for auction. Kitt, not only in the role of co-pilot, but of co-actor.

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