Michigan man recreates KITT car from Hasselhoff ’s ‘Knight Rider’
LANSING, Mich. – Aaron Aikman brings cult classic vehicles to life.
And his latest project, KITT from the 1980s television series Knight Rider, is Aikman’s dream car. One reason he’s crazy about the car is that he adores the Pontiac upon which it was based, the Trans Am.
“I was in love with this when it first came out,” Aikman said. “I just always loved this Trans Am. It’s a beautiful car, and then what they did to it ... the dashboard, over the top. It’s supposed to resemble an airplane.”
He bought the 1988 Pontiac Trans Am a year ago for $1,700 and spent a year converting it, devoting weekends and nights when he wasn’t driving a bus for Capital Area Transportation Authority to the build at his home in Lansing.
Aikman said purchasing the initial vehicle was the least-expensive part of the process. The project cost him $15,000 to complete.
“It had the wrong hood, the wrong nose,” he said. “It had the wrong rear spoiler, wrong rims, the wrong interior. It was not easy finding all of that.”
The car had gray interior. Aikman replaced it with the tan interior and seats fans of the action-adventure show, which starred David Hasselhoff and ran on NBC from 1982 to 1986, know well. The Trans Am named KITT was an integral part of the show. It talked, could drive itself and was able to help defeat the bad guys.
“These seats are hard to find,” Aikman said. He lucked out, connecting with a car enthusiast through a Knight Rider social media group who sold them to him for a fraction of their cost.
Aikman’s KITT comes complete with the curved, lit dashboard and automated twin screens. It plays the television show theme song and sports the voice of the artificially-intelligent car that on screen was virtually indestructible, and indispensable, to Hasselhoff ’s charac- ter Michael Knight.
“The dashboard normally runs
$8,000,” Aikman said. “I got lucky. This was a used dashboard, already built for me.”
It’s not his first television- or movie-themed car.
Two years ago, he teamed with How-To Halloween founder Jerry Jodloski to recreate the Ecto-1 car from the movie Ghostbusters. Last year, the pair turned a rusted out 1970 Dodge
A100 van into the Mystery Machine, cartoon dog Scooby Doo’s classic ride.
“This is the last four years of my life right here,” Aikman said Tuesday. He has plans to recreate more television and movie cars.
“I love it. It keeps me occupied.” The Trans Am is street legal, Aikman said, but is cramped thanks to the massive automated console.
“This is a lifelong dream to own a KITT, and now I finally do,” Aikman said. “It’s heaven. Driving down the road in this, it’s fun. You get plenty of smiles. I plan to drive it as often as I can.”