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Engage super pursuit mode to buy 'Knight Rider' car

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Steven Musil
2 min read

If the car really could talk, it would probably tell you--in its subdued and sarcastic tone--that you paid too much for a car that can't really go 300 mph, leap 50 feet into the air or lob smoke bombs at evildoers.

K.I.T.T., the car that regaled us with witty banter alongside David Hasselhoff in the 1980s TV series Knight Rider, is for sale in a San Francisco Bay Area suburb for a mere $149,995. Officially known as the Knight Industries Two Thousand, the 1982 Pontiac Trans Am will be on display at Kassabian Motors in Dublin, Calif., for a month.

One of four surviving "camera cars" used for Hasselhoff close-ups before he became a lifeguard and singing sensation in Germany, the car has two working video screens on the dashboard, as well as cockpit buttons that control obviously necessary but nonoperable features such as the rocket boost, oil slick and ejector seat.

Those buttons don't really allow the car to go down ski slopes, drive itself or converse about Hasselhoff's career decisions since they last saw each other. For that matter, don't expect K.I.T.T. to do much more than sit in a garage or museum: it lacks the smog equipment to make it street-legal.

Tim Russo of nearby Livermore, the car's seller, bought the car at auction in San Diego and spent 10 years restoring it.

If you don't have a spare $150,000, a Web site called Knight Replicas can help you build your very own K.I.T.T. to take you on your own "shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist."