Mike Levine from Pickuptrucks.com recently spoke with Knight Rider Executive Producer Gary Scott Thompson and got the skinny on KITT's new ability to transform himself (seriously, I just called it a "him") from a 2008 Shelby GT500KR to a 2009 Ford F-150 FX-4. The idea for having KITT morph into a truck came to Thompson when he needed his main character and that week's damsel in distress to make a quick getaway without KITT having to stop for them to get in, so he imagined the car as a pickup. This way the characters could hop right in its bed (we see this happen in the new clip that was released by NBC), though we're unsure how they survive the metal origami that turns KITT back into a car. We also disagree with Thompson when he alludes to the GT500KR being "about the same mass" as the F-150, but he feels justified in taking this direction with KITT after consulting with "futurists" at Microsoft who predict that vehicles will change their shape to suit our needs by 2030. We don't know what being a futurist entails, but we're not inclined to believe ones employed by Microsoft who failed to predict the backlash against Vista, how bad the Zune would sell or that the entire first batch of XBox 360s would fail. Clairvoyants they are not.
Though the rendering at right reveals KITT F-150 was originally designed to bear a bigger resemblance to the GT500KR on which the car is based, it's ended up being just a blacked-out F-150 FX-4 with KITT's signature red light bar above and behind the top bar of the grille. That should make it easy for fanboys to recreate with their own 2009 F-150s though, because we just know sales of the truck are going to skyrocket after the new season of Knight Rider begins.
News coming out of Comic Con last week revealed that KITT would be able to transform into a pickup in the new Knight Rider series set to debut this fall on NBC. We thought perhaps the show and Ford, its biggest sponsor, would take the high road and have KITT's Shelby GT500 KR just grow a bed behind the B-pillar. Of course, we were wrong and this video proves that KITT will indeed transform into a full-size Ford F-150 FX-4. Never mind the fact that a Mustang just doesn't contain enough raw material to make up an F-150 truck, what really turns us off is Ford using a TV show that's already pimping one of its vehicles to push another one with sales falling faster than Goliath over a cliff. By this logic we expect that KITT will eventually encounter a resurrected KARR that's been stuffed into a Mercury Grand Marquis and the Knight Industries tractor trailer will be replaced by a fleet of Ford Transit Connects.
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