The greatest cars ever to grace the small screen

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 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 estimates suggest more than 300 Chargers were used across the show’s run, most of them destroyed. The jumps looked triumphant on screen, but a Charger landing from 16 feet with concrete ballast in the boot does not drive away afterwards. The radiator comes through the fan and the frame bends, and careful editing did the rest.

When the show was cancelled, 18 survivors sat forgotten on a studio lot for years before being sold off. The very first General Lee, the one from the opening episode, turned up in a Georgia junkyard in 2001, was restored, and was later bought by the golfer Bubba Watson for over $100,000. The oldest surviving example sits in the Volo Museum in Illinois, treated with a reverence its 300-odd siblings never got.

Magnum, P.I. gave us the Ferrari 308 GTS, and very nearly didn’t.

Tom Selleck originally wanted his character to drive a Porsche 928 (the same unloved oddball from Risky Business I wrote about recently) but Porsche refused to modify one.

Ferrari said yes, lowering the seat to squeeze Selleck’s six-foot-four frame under the targa roof. Around 15 different 308s were used across eight seasons, all returned to Ferrari North America afterwards.

The car from the pilot episode sold at auction in Florida in April for $379,000 (€329,000), having changed hands for $115,000 (€100,000) only the year before. An ordinary 308 of the same vintage makes around $60,000 (€52,000). The other $300,000 (€262,000) or so, it seems, is for the moustache.

There is one for sale on DoneDeal Cars, but sadly not in the same Ferrari red as Magnum’s — but it is still rather nice. 

Advertisement

Ferrari’s relationship with Miami Vice was rather more complicated. Sonny Crockett’s black Daytona Spyder, the one sweeping past neon-lit palm trees to Phil Collins, was a fake. It was a replica built on a Chevrolet Corvette chassis with fibreglass panels, because Ferrari had turned down the show’s request for a real one.

When the imposter became one of the most famous cars on television, Ferrari sued the builder for trademark infringement, then offered the producers two brand new Testarossas on the condition that the fake was destroyed.

So it was, gloriously, blown to pieces with a Stinger missile launcher during an arms deal gone wrong in the season three opener. Viewers gasped at the destruction of a priceless Ferrari. It was a Corvette in a nice suit. The two Testarossas arrived in black, and producer Michael Mann had them repainted white so they’d show up in the night scenes.

A decade earlier, Starsky & Hutch had shown just how much a car could do for a show, and for a manufacturer. The red Ford Gran Torino with the white vector stripe, nicknamed the Striped Tomato, became so popular that Ford built a run of 1,000 replica editions in 1976 so the public could buy their own.

The great irony is that David Soul, who spent four seasons hanging out of it, reportedly couldn’t stand the thing. Around the same time, Jim Rockford was performing his signature reverse J-turn in a gold Pontiac Firebird, a move so associated with The Rockford Files that it’s still known as a Rockford turn, and James Garner did much of the driving himself.

Closer to home, the story starts with one of the great marketing blunders. When The Saint went into production in 1962, the producers wanted Roger Moore’s Simon Templar in a Jaguar E-Type, the most beautiful car in the world, launched the year before.

Jaguar said no.

They were selling every E-Type they could build and saw no need for television exposure. Volvo, sensing an opening, had a white P1800 shipped over almost immediately, and a stylish Swedish coupé that might otherwise have remained a curiosity became a star for six years. Jaguar executives spent the following decades being reminded of it.

The great British cop shows of the 1970s did it all on a fraction of the American budgets. The Sweeney’s bronze Ford Consul GT was actually a car from Ford’s own press fleet, fitted with a sump guard and a fuel tank shield for the chase scenes, and famously loaned with instructions that it wasn’t to be damaged. John Thaw and Dennis Waterman flung it around west London for two series before Ford replaced it with a Granada.

The Professionals took the same formula and gave Bodie and Doyle a pair of Ford Capri 3.0 S models, one silver, one gold, while their boss Cowley made do with a Granada. Those two Capris survived, and were sold together at auction in 2023 as a matched pair. If you fancy scratching that particular itch, I had a browse through the vintage section on DoneDeal Cars this week and found a 1980 Capri S with the same 3.0 V6 in Cavan. I make no apologies for what happens next.

And then there’s Gene Hunt’s Cortina from Life on Mars, a car so central to the show it was practically a cast member. Except it was a fake. The bronze “1973″ Cortina was actually a 1974 2000E wearing a GXL grille and headlights, a detail that drove Cortina anoraks to distraction. When the show ended, the hero car was sold on eBay for Comic Relief, fetching £10,000. The buyer found torn-up pages of the final script still in the glovebox.

That, I think, is the difference with television cars. Movie cars are icons. TV cars are companions. They turned up every week, took the punishment, and asked for nothing except a fresh chassis now and then.

Fire up the Quattro? Maybe next week. 

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.

Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with DoneDeal Ltd