'80s movie cars that stole the spotlight from their co-stars

’80s movie cars that stole the spotlight from their co-stars

Most props don’t outlive the films they appear in. The cars in the films on this list did something different. They walked off the set and kept going, became characters in a way most of the actors who shared screen time with them did not, and have been doing it for forty years without anyone calling cut.

The DeLorean DMC-12 — Back to the Future (1985)

Ford offered the filmmakers $75,000 to change the time machine to a Mustang. Co-writer Bob Gale said no on the grounds that Doc Brown doesn’t drive a Mustang, which is the most important creative decision in the history of automotive product placement. Hagerty documents the DeLorean as arguably the most recognized movie car ever made, with gullwing doors chosen because they looked like those on an alien spacecraft. The car was already commercially struggling before the film. After it, DeLoreans became objects of obsession that collectors fight over at auction.

KITT — Knight Rider (1982–1986)

The decision to cast a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am as an artificially intelligent crime-fighting car was, per Hagerty’s Hollywood cars roundtable, smart specifically because the Trans Am was on the cover of every car magazine before it came out and everyone had their hopes pinned on it. The car talked. It had a red scanning light in the grille. It was, functionally, the co-lead of the show, and the show knew it.

Ecto-1 — Ghostbusters (1984)

A 1959 Cadillac Miller Meteor ambulance, one of approximately 25 produced, purchased because it looked like exactly the kind of vehicle three eccentric parapsychologists would drive. Hagerty calls it part of an elite crowd of movie cars with a level of celebrity that belongs to the car itself rather than the film. The film is forty years old. The Ecto-1 still draws crowds at parades.

The Bluesmobile — The Blues Brothers (1980)

A decommissioned 1974 Dodge Monaco police sedan purchased for a dollar and driven through a shopping mall, off a bridge and through more plate glass than any other vehicle in cinematic history up to that point. Hagerty’s community notes it as one of the great American movie car performances. The film used several identical cars for the stunt sequences. All of them were destroyed. That is its own kind of achievement.

The Ferrari 308 GTS — Magnum P.I. (1980–1988)

Tom Selleck’s mustache got the attention. The Ferrari got the screen time. The red 308 GTS driven across Hawaiian roads for eight seasons made Ferraris aspirational for Americans who had previously considered them purely European. Ferrari initially objected to their car appearing in a detective series. After the show launched and 308 GTS sales increased measurably, they stopped objecting.

The Pontiac Firebird Trans Am — Smokey and the Bandit (1977/1980)

Burt Reynolds and the black Trans Am became one and the same in the American cultural imagination for the better part of a decade. Hagerty’s readers voted it among the most recognized movie cars of all time. You don’t have to know the year, make or model. You see it and you know what it is.

The bottom line

The movie cars that became icons share one quality: the films gave them something to do that wasn’t just transportation. When a car has a job that a human can’t do alone, it stops being a prop. That’s when it becomes a character. And characters don’t retire.

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’80s movie cars that stole the spotlight from their co-stars