You know what I love about 2026? We have AI writing novels, self-driving taxis clogging every city center, and yet the New York City traffic camera system just sent a speeding ticket to a car that has been sitting inside a museum in Illinois for years.
The Volo Museum, about an hour northwest of Chicago, houses a lovingly built replica of KITT — the Knight Industries Two Thousand, the talking Pontiac Trans Am driven by David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider. It is a fiberglass-and-steel monument to 1980s television excess. It does not drive itself. It does not drive at all. It sits on a display floor and makes children happy.
In May, the museum received a $50 speeding summons from New York City. A traffic camera on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn had clocked a black Trans Am with California vanity plate "KNIGHT" doing 36 in a 25 mph zone. The ticket was mailed to the museum. The car, as security footage conclusively proved, had not left its spot.
Now, there are several possible explanations here. Maybe someone built a second, near-identical KITT replica — not impossible, given the car's fan following — and New York's finest license-plate readers just happened to match it to the museum. Maybe a museum employee took the plate for a weekend joyride through the five boroughs. Maybe, and this is my preferred theory, the traffic camera system is so comically inept that it just picked a random Trans Am out of a database and sent the ticket to the first KITT owner it could find.
The museum posted about it on Facebook with the kind of deadpan humor that makes you hope the social media manager got a raise: "You can't make this stuff up. KITT got a speeding ticket in NYC. Except KITT hasn't left the museum." They're fighting the ticket, naturally. A museum spokeswoman told the Associated Press they have paperwork, receipts, and a building full of visitors who can vouch for the car's impeccable alibi.
This is the kind of story that makes you wonder about the entire automated enforcement industry. If a car that hasn't turned a wheel in years can get a ticket, what hope do the rest of us have? The system is running on a hunch. It saw a black Trans Am with a vanity plate and thought, "Yeah, that's the one." No human verification, no cross-checking registration, just a computer-generated citation mailed to a museum because the algorithm said so.
The $50 fine is beside the point. It's the principle. A car that has never committed a moving violation in its life — because it doesn't move — is now on the books as a scofflaw. KITT has a record. You know the Hoff wouldn't stand for this.
Then again, KITT's whole thing was refusing to drive through brick walls. Maybe the car just had an off day.