Auction: David’s Personal KITT Knight Rider Car on Sale

The buyer's premium is a fee (usually a fixed percentage on top of the auction price) paid by the buyer.

> The auction says it ships from Canoga Park, CA, the description says it's located in U.K.

Pictures are from a shop in London. I imagine contacting them might shed some light on it for an interested party. https://yiannimize.com/

> What is a buyer's premium?

Buyer additionally pays a percentage of their winning bid to the auction house. This is very common in auctions.

Did you see his cheeseburger video?

> How unprofessional is it to have so many typos and punctuation mistakes in one short blurb?

The blurry picture of Hasselhoff about to step out of the car and not ready for a pic is the cherry on top...

It’s just a car with a nice looking but totally impractical dashboard and steering wheel.

There’s a YouTube video of someone driving it, it’s great nostalgic value but that’s all really.

Or they could retrofit the existing AI with a state of the art one.

"Super Pursuit Mode, KITT!"

"Looking for Proper Fursuit Mods on www.cyberfurries4u.org, Michael"

You might have to buy Devon's truck and hire Bonnie for a while.

> and based on a review it’s horrible to drive:

Not really a surprise. The design of the car is close to 40 years old, even before you take into account the age of the car itself and all the junk piled on for the purpose of looking good on screen.

>assuming it was used in the show’s production

There are only two blurry photos of an old Hasselhoff in the car. I suspect someone has converted an old car, and agreed to pay Hasselhoff well for the privilege of putting his name on the title.

It's like the home contractors who reluctantly sell "the builder's own dream home" every year.

Not too many years ago all the props of movies and TV shows were simply destroyed when the TV show or movie ended. There was no "collector market". Since the items were worthless to the studios when filming was complete, actors were allowed to take what they wanted. This is why you rarely see items from the early days of movies (1920-1950) for sale, they were rarely saved. The movie posters from the movies in those days were some of the only items preserved, and those can command premium prices, even into the millions for a poster like "Metropolis". It also makes you appreciate the fact that the ruby slippers from "Wizard of Oz" were saved. (Source - the Hollywood ride in Disney Studios)

After a season or 2 — if it’s a hit — I bet it becomes pretty easy to negotiate ownership of items into your contract, since they can’t do the show without you anymore and it’s a relatively small price to pay.

See Sex and the City wardrobe.

If they end up as producers on the show, they can often just get it granted to them, or included in the promotion obligations that are part of their contracts.

A lot of people (probably not big time actors though, more like taking and no one says no) end up stealing props and smuggling them out from production, as otherwise they wouldn't be able to get anything from the production.

At least from the few people I've visited who had props at home, 90% of the props were stolen by them on the last day of shootings.

I don’t see anything in the post that convinces me this isn’t replica as well (albeit one ostensibly owned by Hasselhoff).

I don't think any of them wins in terms of design appeal (that Pontiac is really really peculiar and peak in its own genre). Now I think that BtTF got 1) an already very excentric car (pontiac was mainstream) 2) hollywood seal of fame, TV is important but not as glam.

If you won the auction you could ask KITT exactly that...

Are they certain it's KITT? There was a baddie version of KITT for a while called KATT

That's genius. It's more than PR, it's an organic user experience with mainstream familiarity for hundreds of millions of people. If I were at a large car company, this is easily worth the price of 2-3 engineers.

As a product manager, I would use the popular understanding of KITT as a reference early-adopter customer experience, not to replicate, but as a median.

KITT's dashboard instrumentation is amazing (and oddly seems to have a synth ASD envelope if you look closely), which seems hilarious, but the point is to be a sophisticated command console for powerful operations, which is what it looks like. Totally different from the disconnected infotainment web pages of today.

The entire car UX today is about permission, approval, safety, and comfort, like a kind of suburban living room in a display case. Whereas what the KITT (and motorcycle) UX is about is measurement, instrumentation, and consequence. A KITT style UX may be the secret to getting self-driving car traction because almost nobody will believe autonomous land vehicles are safe, but they will believe they are powerful.

I should do a self-driving car startup.

Kung Fury was amazing. But after years of Vaporwave, /r/outrun, and all that, not sure that formula will land in the same way.

Probably because as a car, it's not worth as much. I think this is the sort of thing that would appeal to a memorabilia collector, rather than a car collector. If I was selling the Batmobile, from either the movies or the TV series, I would not think of selling it a car auction.

we just have to wait til 2087

Did you miss the ones with David Hasselhoff inside of it?

David Hasselhoff is promoting it on Twitter so it is legitimate https://twitter.com/DavidHasselhoff/status/13454826542973132...