As 2022 comes to a close, there's one automaker that isn't slipping quietly into the new year. BMW launched a bizarre teaser campaign in early December with something called Dee, and now it just got weirder with a classic Knight Rider cameo from the Hoff himself. It will all come together for CES 2023 in Las Vegas, kicking off next week.
Jump over to BMW's Instagram page and you'll see David Hasselhoff chatting up K.I.T.T. about this "Dee character." For those not in touch with '80s automotive pop culture, Knight Rider was a television series featuring Hasselhoff as a crime fighter driving a talking, self-aware Pontiac Trans Am called the Knight Industries Two Thousand – K.I.T.T. for short.
How this connects with BMW is still a mystery, but we do have some interesting puzzle pieces to assemble. We know BMW will debut a concept car at CES; it was confirmed in November and we know it's an EV using the automaker's Neue Klasse architecture. The first teaser for Dee dropped on December 13, appearing as something that hacked BMW's social media channels. A teaser with Arnold Schwarzenegger talking to Dee followed just a few days later. And now, we have this Knight Rider scene. In between all these teasers, BMW has continued to share strange posts apparently coming from Dee ... whatever she is.
You may remember Arnold Schwarzenegger appearing in BMW's Super Bowl commercial last year as Zeus, going for a drive in his electric BMW iX. His presence now would seem to reinforce that BMW is showcasing its latest electric tech at CES. It would make sense, then, that Dee is some kind of new user interface for this concept car, especially since we now have a BMW teaser featuring the most famous talking car of all time. But is Dee just an interface, or some kind of advanced driver assist system? We have pieces, but alas, not the full picture.
We don't have long to wait for full disclosure. CES 2023 begins January 5 in Las Vegas. An announcement from BMW should drop before the doors open, but if you need a refresher on Knight Rider, check out the Rambling About Cars podcast with the Knight Rider Historians, available below.
