Many of us who grew up at a certain time fondly remember KITT, the black Pontiac Trans Am from “Knight Rider” with a snarky attitude and a plethora of crime-fighting gadgets. Yet somehow, KITT has turbo boosted out of the TV screen and received an automated speeding ticket in a New York City school zone, reports ABC 10 News. This would be quite a trick, since the car that received the ticket has an airtight alibi. It is currently on display at a museum in Illinois, and has been for several years.
A speed camera captured a black Pontiac Trans Am with the California license plate “KNIGHT” on Ocean Parkway, allegedly driving 36 mph in a 25 zone. We’re not disputing the speed, but this is obviously a fictitious plate in multiple senses of the word. As the saying goes, “To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer” (though KITT may disagree). Since the Foundation for Law and Government is also fictitious, the logical course of action would be to send the ticket to whoever has this license plate in real life, regardless of what type of vehicle it’s on.
It belongs in a museum
Instead, NYC sent the speeding ticket to Volo Auto Sales in Volo, Illinois. This company operates not only a collector car dealer, but also a theme park featuring a Jurassic Park adventure, a Titanic experience, and a car museum, with a KITT replica in the collection. It’s also not like the Volo Museum is the only place you can see KITT. I’ve sat in another replica at the Celebrity Car Museum in Branson, Missouri, and seen a screen-used KITT at the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles. How and why the NYC system chose to send the ticket to Volo is a mystery. With accuracy like this, it’s no wonder that over 40 percent of NYC speed camera tickets get thrown out.
Still, I can imagine a fantasy world where the KITT on display at the Volo Museum is really the genuine article hidden in plain sight. I don’t mean a screen-used KITT. I mean a real life Knight Industries Two Thousand. Perhaps he left the museum and hit Super Pursuit Mode to New York on a secret mission, completed it, then sped back to the museum before anyone noticed.
Except there’s no way that fantasy could be true. The real KITT would be smart enough to detect and microjam the speed camera to prevent it from taking the incriminating pictures in the first place. Plus, his prime directive to preserve human life would have stopped him from speeding in a school zone in the first place.
