Because not every small screen star gets to be K.I.T.T. Twelve brilliant TV cars and trucks got overshadowed by bigger stars like the A-Team van and Magnum's FerrariFrom kit cars pretending to be supercars to bubble cars driven by nerds, television has featured some properly mental machineryMost of these shows have vanished into syndication obscurity, taking their automotive stars with them Right, hands up if you remember the Coyote X. No? How about Steve Urkel's BMW Isetta? Still nothing? Well, that's exactly the problem, isn't it? While everyone bangs on about K.I.T.T. and the General Lee until the cows come home, television has been absolutely stuffed with brilliant cars and trucks that have somehow managed to slip through the cracks of automotive memory. This is a travesty of the highest order. These aren't just background props we're talking about – these are proper automotive characters that deserved better than being forgotten the moment their shows got canceled. Some appeared in series so obscure that even your mum's never heard of them, while others had such brief appearances that you'd need a photographic memory and an unhealthy obsession with automotive trivia to remember them. But fear not, because we're about to remedy this situation. What follows is a comprehensive tour through the automotive graveyard of television history, where brilliant cars went to die a slow death in the purgatory of late-night reruns and streaming service obscurity. Kit cars and proper monsters Let's start with perhaps the most ambitious bit of automotive fakery ever attempted on television: the Coyote X from "Hardcastle and McCormick." Now, this was a show that understood something fundamental about American television – if you're going to have a judge team up with an ex-con to fight crime, you're going to need a properly mental car to do it in. The Coyote X looked like it had been designed by someone who'd seen a McLaren M6GT in a fever dream and decided to recreate it using whatever they could find in a Volkswagen scrapyard. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what happened. The body was fiberglass molded from McLaren's road-going Can-Am car, but underneath lurked the humble chassis of a Beetle, powered by a four-cylinder engine borrowed from a Porsche 914.It should have been terrible. It should have been an embarrassment. Instead, it was absolutely brilliant, because sometimes the best way to build a supercar is to completely ignore the rules of supercar building. The fact that you could actually buy a similar kit car called the Manta during the same period suggests that someone, somewhere, was paying attention. The producers eventually switched to a DeLorean-based version after the star complained about having to perform yoga just to get in and out of the thing. Which, let's be honest, is exactly the sort of complaint you'd expect from someone who clearly didn't understand that suffering for your art is part of the job description. Then there's the 1982 GMC K2500 Sierra Grande from "The Fall Guy," which took the novel approach of solving crime by launching itself into the air at every possible opportunity. This wasn't just any pickup truck – this was a pickup truck with a secret holding cell in the back, which sounds like something from a particularly dark episode of "Black Mirror" but was apparently considered perfectly acceptable family entertainment in the 1980s.The really clever bit was that they modified it to a mid-engine configuration specifically to improve weight distribution during all those jumps. Because apparently, the production team understood that if you're going to spend most of your screen time airborne, you might as well do it properly. American excess and European elegance Moving into the realm of pure automotive madness, we encounter the Dodge Viper from the show "Viper," which represents perhaps the most shameless bit of automotive product placement in television history. Chrysler didn't just sponsor this show – they conceived it, produced it, and filled every background shot with their products like some sort of automotive fever dream. The star wasn't just any Viper, mind you. It was the "Defender," a bulletproof, crime-fighting machine that could transform into a normal Viper when not busy saving Metro City from various ne'er-do-wells. Because apparently, someone at Chrysler watched "Terminator 2" and thought, "You know what this needs? More V-10 engine." The show was absolutely ridiculous and completely brilliant in equal measure. Where else could you find a storyline involving a man whose memories had been erased and replaced with the personality of a fictional police officer, all so he could drive around in a shape-shifting supercar fighting crime? It was like someone had fed every action movie cliché into a computer and asked it to write a television series. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the 1970 Aston Martin DBS V8 from "The Persuaders," which proves that British television understood something about class that American television never quite grasped. This was Roger Moore before he became James Bond, driving what was advertised as the fastest four-passenger car in the world. The irony, of course, is that the car wasn't actually a V8 at all – it was an earlier six-cylinder model with V8 badges stuck on it because Aston Martin was selling the real thing so quickly they couldn't spare one for television. Which is exactly the sort of problem you want to have if you're running a car company. The good, the bad, and the forgotten Some of these forgotten television cars deserve their obscurity. The 1976 Ford Mustang Cobra II from "Charlie's Angels," for instance, represents everything that was wrong with American automotive design in the 1970s. Built on the Pinto platform with styling that looked like it had been designed by a committee of people who'd never actually seen a car before, it managed just 122 horsepower despite being called a Cobra.And yet, somehow, Farrah Fawcett managed to make it look cool. Which just goes to show that with enough star power, you can make almost anything seem desirable, even a car that was essentially a glorified economy car wearing a sports car costume to a fancy dress party. At the other extreme, we have genuinely brilliant cars that deserved better than the shows they appeared in. The 1960 BMW Isetta from "Family Matters" was used purely as a punchline, assigned to Steve Urkel specifically because it was small, odd-looking, and slow. The fact that it was actually a rather clever piece of engineering – a genuine city car decades before anyone knew they needed such a thing – was completely lost on a generation of viewers who learned to associate it with uncoolness. The tragic irony is that Jaleel White was given the Isetta as part of his contract and still drives it today, which suggests that even he understood it was something special, regardless of how the writers chose to portray it.Perhaps the most forgotten of all these automotive television stars is the 2000 Bentley Arnage Red Label from "Hannibal," which served as the perfect automotive expression of its owner's refined but deeply disturbing personality. Here was one of the last cars to leave Crewe with the old-school 6.75-liter V8, a proper anachronism that existed at the periphery of modern automotive development in much the same way that Hannibal Lecter existed at the periphery of polite society. Most viewers probably didn't even register what car it was, which is exactly the point. Like its owner, it hid in plain sight, anonymous despite being extraordinary. These forgotten television cars represent something important about our relationship with automotive culture. They remind us that not every great car gets to be famous, and that sometimes the most interesting automotive stories are the ones that slip through the cracks of popular memory. They deserve better than obscurity, because each one represents someone's attempt to create something special, even if that something was destined to be forgotten the moment the credits rolled.
