Possibly the most famous Pontiac in Switzerland, and it never appeared on television. On Saturday, November 7, Broad Arrow Auctions will sell the 1982 Firebird Trans Am that went along on David Hasselhoff's European music tours. The car crosses the block at the Dolder Grand in Zürich with an estimate of CHF 250,000 to 500,000. The auction house calls it Hasselhoff's actual tour car and an exact replica of the TV car. Keep "replica" in mind, because it drives the price.

What it actually is

According to Broad Arrow's lot listing, this was one of the cars Vienna's Peter Malek imported from the U.S. for Profile Promotions, the firm run by Hasselhoff's manager at the time, Herbert Fechter. The car appears in the Knight Rider Historians registry, which Joe Huth maintains. K.I.T.T. historian AJ Palmgren inspected it in Switzerland in 2007 and identified it as a car built for Hasselhoff's Austrian Night Rocker tour. A St. Gallen customs report stamped July 15, 1991, also ties the paperwork to the chassis number.

That chassis number is 1G2AW8772CL574806, and it tells its own story. Run it through NHTSA's VIN decoder and it decodes cleanly: a 1982 Firebird Trans Am coupe built in Van Nuys, California, with a 5.0-liter V8 and throttle-body fuel injection. In 1982 that combination means the Cross-Fire Injection 305. So this started life as a real Trans Am, not a base Firebird dressed up in black.

That matters to the next owner. Cross-Fire used two throttle bodies on a crossram intake. It looks fantastic under the hood, but it has a long reputation for being fussy. Vacuum leaks and idle problems come with the setup, and any original sensors are 44 years old. Anyone who plans to do more than push the car onto a museum floor should budget for a specialist who knows the system.

The heist

The car's strangest chapter came in the 1990s, after it had passed to the Swiss record label Exclusa AG. The current owner, Lucerne musician Urs Kunz, told SRF that the car was stolen in Italy while it was working as a display car. Interpol later traced it to the Czech Republic, and by then the thieves had badly damaged the electronics. Kunz bought it from the record company in poor condition. He found it in a parking lot in Cham, parked under a fir tree and full of needles. Broad Arrow says he has owned it since October 1999.

That means the dashboard Hasselhoff looked at is mostly gone. The listing says the original early-'80s dash shell survives. The missing electronics were replaced with a Season 1/2-style setup from Alessandro Zagni's ZA Elettronica, including a voice box and twin LOTI monitors. Kunz recently had the car restored in Giswil, and SRF says it now runs and talks reliably again.

The metal and the paperwork carry the Hasselhoff history. The blinking lights are skilled modern work. That isn't a flaw, but it should affect the bid.

Can you drive it? No.

Broad Arrow says outright that the car runs and drives but is not road legal because of its K.I.T.T. modifications. Kunz told SRF that in Switzerland the problems are the specially shaped steering wheel and the taillights behind dark plexiglass. Swapping those parts back to stock to get plates would mean removing the very things buyers are paying for.

In practice, the buyer gets a trailer queen. Insurance will likely be an agreed-value collector policy for storage, display, and transport, not a road policy. Valuing it will be tricky: a stock 1982 Trans Am is worth a small fraction of this estimate, so the paperwork is what sets the agreed value. Keep the customs stamp and the registry entry together. They're what the agreed value rests on. Broad Arrow is part of Hagerty, the collector-car insurer, so the auction house knows how these cars get insured.

The money question

A top estimate double the bottom means the auction house is guessing, and here it's allowed to. This isn't a screen-used hero car, a far rarer category. It's a Trans Am with a paper trail to Hasselhoff's European tours and a stolen-in-Italy, found-under-a-fir-tree backstory most Trans Ams lack. As metal, it's one of thousands.

Kunz told SRF he would most like to see the car stay in Switzerland, ideally at the Verkehrshaus, the Swiss Museum of Transport in his hometown of Lucerne. Whether a museum can afford a bidding war with homesick Gen-Xers with plenty of money is what Saturday will settle.

Shopping for a celebrity car? Run the VIN and read the customs stamps, then make the seller say which parts are original. And say you run the Verkehrshaus with a CHF 500,000 ceiling: do you bid on a K.I.T.T. that isn't road legal?
Images Via: classicdriver.com