Yes, Even In Star Trek The Most Famous Machines Have Been Essentially Human In Appearance (Data In TNG,

Yes, even in Star Trek the most famous machines have been essentially human in appearance (Data in TNG, the Doctor in Voyager) which IMO has always bugged me.

I will note that there have also been the exocomps and recently some other non-humanoid ones, but there aren't any individuals that are nearly as popular as those mentioned before.

I was chatting with my mom today about how unique Knight Rider is as a show for one reason only- having a character that's honestly, genuinely, and truly a car.

(Yeah, sure, there's Transformers, but watch any Transformers show and you'll see that they rarely keep the robots in car mode for any scenes. The car modes are almost exclusively used for scene transitions or for action set pieces.)

Knight Rider is different in that it challenges the viewer to imagine a character who is a car. This character is Kitt. There is no way for him to stop being a car, even when it's inconvenient for him, or even when it's inconvenient for the plot. Kitt, as a concept, asks the viewer to empathize- what would being a car genuinely be like? What challenges would that present? What advantages?

This is where most robots in fiction, and fiction that claims to analyze humanity through the lens of robot characters, ultimately fail. I'm hard-pressed to find another work of sci-fi with a lead character in such a genuinely divorced role from humanity. Most fictional robots have:

Hands, to physically interact with a human-scaled world in the way that humans do,

Faces, for humans to relate to, and

Eyes, for humans to look at, and tell where the robot is looking.

Kitt has none of these. He never gets any of these at any point. The show even reflects on this in episode 22 of season 1, where he projects eyes onto his screen for the little girl who's trying to understand him. Yet even this is temporary- he gets rid of them after only a minute, and the girl gets used to the real him accordingly. It's never portrayed that these attributes (of hands, a face, and eyes) are some kind of upgrade that Kitt is missing.

However, Kitt is still undeniably 'human', and this is the most important part. Kitt's way of thinking isn't alien just because his body is different. It's what he is thinking about that's been altered from the traditional human experience. This leads to a fascinating exploration of topics such as:

Accessibility. Kitt is constantly analyzing where his body can go and to what places he has access to. Even Michael Knight learns to start thinking this way as he grows closer with Kitt, to the benefit of them both. The question of what Kitt can do vs what he can't do given his body is at the core of Michael's problem solving when the show is at its best.

Priorities. What does Kitt care about? Again, it's deeply important that the first answer to this is "his friends", but barring that, what else? Things like a good road or the polish of bodywork become elevated in importance through his perspective.

Prejudice. A lot of science fiction has the trope of "robot racism", or the idea that there's a portion of humans who actively believe that sentient robots are not equal to humans. Knight Rider, however, never takes this easy drama. Humans treat Kitt differently, and sometimes with a shocking amount of disrespect (even after he's revealed himself to be a person,) but it's never out of malice. It's out of ignorance. The bulk of these humans have only the best intentions. This presentation reflects upon real-world prejudices through a different lens than the aforementioned trope, which has, by now, been thoroughly beaten to death.

Again, it's the fact that the show actively goes out of its way to tell the audience that Kitt has a soul (season 2, the episode literally titled "Soul Survivor"), yet doesn't shy away from the genuine differences he faces from being nonhuman, that makes it so damn compelling to me.

(Mind you, the way the show usually "explores" these themes is through the lens of comedy that relies on Kitt's differences being the butt of the joke. . . and that the inclusion of these deeper themes definitely do NOT cancel out the show's genuine problems with sexism/racism! But-)

I really do consider Knight Rider to be science fiction at (or at least close to) its finest. Which is an insane statement out of context, I realize, but I hope after reading this post you might be able to understand why. Knight Rider set the bar for robots in fiction for me and nothing has been able to compare since.

TL;DR: Kitt is a car. This is deeply profound.