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These Four-wheeled Superstars Were Just As Famous As The Stars Who Drove Them.
There’s nothing like a great car to impress a girl, chase down a bad guy or amp up your cool cred. No wonder Hollywood has long relied on four-wheeled superstars to turbocharge a storyline. We salute some of pop culture’s most notable “Tv-ehicles,” their backstories, fun facts and famous drivers.
For eight seasons (1980-88), Tom Selleck donned a half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt and drove around Oahu in an open-top Ferrari 308 GTS to play Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV, a Vietnam vet turned private investigator living a luxurious island lifestyle in the Emmy-winning CBS series Magnum, P.I. While the mustachioed Magnum brought plenty of sex appeal to the long-running series, when he slipped into that red-hot convertible, he smoldered. Producers originally intended to use a Porsche 928 for the show, but the automaker wouldn’t concede to modifications enlarging the sunroof for aerial shots. It was their loss. Having a sexy male lead in the driver’s seat on one of television’s hottest shows was good business for Ferrari — so much so that the Italian car manufacturer gave Selleck a car for his own personal use.
Magnum’s own ride suffered countless mishaps — it was stolen, keyed, blown up (a few times) and driven off a cliff. But when the series ended in 1988, all of the surviving Ferraris used in the series were auctioned off. Last year, one of them — the 1984 308 GTS — sold for $181,500 at auction.
Another white-hot ’80s star-andcar combo was Knight Rider’s (NBC, 1982-86) high-tech modern crime-fighter Michael Knight — a role that made David Hasselhoff an international star — and his tricked-out Pontiac Firebird Trans Am called KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand). In addition to being able to drive itself, KITT also talked, with a voice supplied by William Daniels.
On Hasselhoff’s 60th birthday in 2012, the original car’s designer gifted him with a 1986 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am that was modified to resemble and function like KITT, including the flickering red and yellow LEDS on the dashboard and more than 4,000 sound effects.
When it comes to iconic TV cars, the General Lee barely needs an introduction. The Dukes of Hazzard’s (CBS, 1979-85) four-wheeled star was owned by moonshiner cousins Bo and Luke Duke, who were famous for scrambling in and out of the 1969 Dodge Charger through its windows, hoodslidin’ for quick getaways and vaulting the orange marvel over all sorts of obstacles. Over the course of the show’s seven-year run, more than 300 General Lees — with “01” on their doors, a Confederate flag emblazoned on their roofs, and horns that played “Dixie” — were called into service. And as the show’s ratings soared and fans sought their very own ’69 Charger, the model became so rare that producers went carspotting, leaving notes on suitable Chargers’ hoods begging their owners to sell.
In 2007, a version of the General Lee owned by John Schneider (who played Bo Duke), augmented with autographs of all the living original cast members and crew, was auctioned off for just under $10 million.
But human TV stars didn’t always love their famous, four-wheeled counterparts. Starsky & Hutch producers wanted a stand-out car for their cuttingedge cop show, settling on a muscular Ford Gran Torino, then painting it vibrant red with a bold and angular white stripe. When the show debuted in 1975, the switchboard at Spelling-goldberg Productions lit up, sealing the car’s fate as a TV star in its own right.
But the most famous vehicle in all of TV and filmdom’s history is the ever-evolving Batmobile. For the ABC TV series Batman (1966-68), genius car customizer George Barris bought a discarded 1955 Ford Lincoln Futura concept car for one dollar and spent about $15,000 to equip it with a Batphone, internal mounted rockets and other imaginative crime-fighting gadgets for the Dynamic Duo. The car paid Barris back handsomely: He sold the original Batmobile in 2013 for $4.6 million.
“Welcome to Hazzard County. You probably noticed there’s something different here.”
— The Balladeer (Waylon Jennings), The Dukes of Hazzard