CASEY: Obsession with TV show led him to a career

Jan 20, 2024

Dante Colie, 48, of Glade Hill, sells fully functional talking cars that are replicas of the one David Hasselhoff used to drive in the 1980s TV show “Knight Rider.” The show still has fans around the world to keep up demand for customized talking Trans Ams.

Dante Colie, 48, of Glade Hill, builds and sells fully functional talking cars that are exact replicas of the one David Hasselhoff used to drive in the 1980s TV show "Knight Rider." The show still has fans around the world to keep Colie busy selling customized talking Trans Ams.

In 34 years of journalism, I’ve interviewed countless people who’ve earned their living in intriguing, unusual (and sometimes illegal) ways. And then last week I met a guy whose occupation beats them all.

Dante Colie was a picked-on kid who barely made it through Franklin County High School. After graduation, he worked in a Pizza Hut, did construction, heating and air conditioning, sold vacuums and air cleaners. For awhile he made prosthetic arms and legs. He said he got bullied on that job, too.

He called me a couple of weeks ago, pitching a column about his unfathomably high electric bills. Colie lives along a country road a few miles east of Rocky Mount. He lives alone, and works for himself in a multi-room workshop connected to his house.

“What do you make?” I asked.

“I build full-scale replicas of the car from the television show Knight Rider,” Colie said. That was an early 1980s sci-fi crime-fighting series with actor David Hasselhoff. But the star of the show was an indestructible black sports car named K.I.T.T.

“They’re like real cars, with a motor and everything?” I asked.

“Yep. And they talk, just like on the show,” Colie said. “I sell them all over the world.”

“How long have you been doing that?” I asked.

“About 20 years,” he said.

“Dante,” I said, “I’m not really feeling a column about your electric bills. But I want to come and see your operation.”

So last Tuesday, photographer Stephanie Klein-Davis and I found ourselves driving in the sticks of Franklin County. Colie’s place is along a country road that cuts across the rolling-farm landscape of Glade Hill, a couple hundred feet past a cow pasture. It’s a nondescript, one-story joint on an L-shaped plot of about 3 acres.

About the only thing that distinguishes it from anything else there is an elaborate, light-blue outhouse-sized structure standing where Colie’s gravel driveway meets the pavement. It’s a full-scale replica of a “Tardis,” an English police phone booth that serves as a time machine on the science -fiction television series, “Doctor Who.” He built that for fun.

Over the next four hours, Colie treated us to an extraordinary story about a loner with a less-than-idyllic childhood. When he wasn’t being ignored, he got put down a lot. He worked many menial jobs. At times he was homeless and slept in his car. Telling us the story, he teared up a few times.

Today, he owns the house, shop, tools and the acres it stands on free and clear of any mortgage. How many people can say that at 48?

Outside Franklin County, where Colie remains largely unknown, he has an ardent following. Photos of his creations have appeared in the New York Times and in national magazines such as “Maxim” and “High Performance Pontiac,” which targets car aficionados.

Colie has made props for movies, such as the 2006 family comedy “The Benchwarmers,” which starred Rob Schneider, David Spade and Jon Lovitz.

He makes and sells — from scavenged, 1990s Motorola cellphones — a beeping, flashing exact replica of a timer used by characters on another TV science fiction series, “Sliders.” Colie said he’s sold about 50, at $2,500 each, to fans of that show. He chuckles and describes them as “the most expensive egg timer in the world.”

“It’s one of the most wanted props in television history,” Colie said.

“He’s like a mad scientist,” said Scott Rice, a retired cop and partner in a New York security company that provides bodyguards to celebrities. A Colie customer for the past 15 years, Rice owns a Colie-created K.I.T.T. that he values at $70,000 to $75,000. Rice said he’s entered it in major car shows all over America.

“It’s never been in a car show and NOT won first-place,” Rice said. “[Colie] makes everything himself, from the electronics to the fiberglass. My car is as close as you can get to having the real thing.”

Another Colie fan is Tim Racobs, who builds industrial water-purification systems in Colorado Springs, Colorado. They’ve never met, though Racobs has been a Colie customer since 2002. Racobs has dealt with some other K.I.T.T. replicators, too.

“I wasn’t really happy with their quality,” Racobs told me. “Don’s work is a much higher level, a much better attention to detail. He’s very artistic, and he’s managed to make a living from that talent. I admire that.”

“I always tell him he’s like an idiot savant,” Rice said. “He’s like Rain Man,” the central character in a fictional movie that starred Dustin Hoffman.

Colie’s company — Advanced Designs in Automotive Technology — isn’t fiction, though. It has a website, though much of his marketing is done via Facebook.

He’s entirely self-taught. Painstakingly, he handcrafted molds he uses to manufacture hand-made fiberglass body and interior parts. He taught himself how to make circuit boards from sheet copper for the K.I.T.T. car’s gizmo-laden dashboard; how to hand-etch them; how to design the circuits to produce the special effects; and how to install and program the computer chips. (When he has to heat larger circuit boards, he uses an old T-shirt press.)

Sitting in his shop’s electronics room, Colie told us the improbable story that led to his unlikely craft, or art, or whatever you want to call it.

He’s the middle of three children who grew up in the Wirtz area of Franklin County. He never knew his real father, but was raised by his mom and a stepdad. The latter was a steady provider but he was emotionally distant. (He has affection for his stepfather but not for his mother, with whom he hasn’t spoken in 13 years.)

Colie was a shy kid who had few friends growing up. He called those days, “the darkest times of my life.” Though he played games in the woods like army and tag and kick the can, he also watched a lot of television. He favored science fiction movies and shows like “Dr. Who,” “Sliders,” “Star Wars” and “Star Trek.”

“I was 12 years old when ‘Knight Rider’ came on TV,” he said. He quickly became a fan. When he was 13, he called the studio and persuaded them to send him a promotional kit. “I’ve been fascinated by that car ever since,” he said.

In high school, girls wouldn’t give Colie the time of day. “They didn’t want to hang out with me because I was a geek,” he said. And, “I was a horrible student; I got terrible grades.” When he “barely” graduated, in 1987, he figured he wasn’t college material. He took a minimum-wage job.

One day when he was 18 he was driving through Salem and noticed a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am for sale at The Rod Shop, a used car lot. That’s the vehicle the futuristic Knight Rider car — aka K.I.T.T. — was based upon. Colie had long dreamed of owning his own K.I.T.T.

“A salesman came out and said, ‘You like that car? We can put you in it,’ ” Colie recalled. He thought there was no way. “I was 18. I had no credit. I was making pizzas at the Rocky Mount Pizza Hut.” Somehow the salesman got him financing. The car cost $7,000.

Over the next year, he transformed it into K.I.T.T. But he was dissatisfied. The replica wasn’t perfect. So he spent three more years recustomizing it. Those were some rough times.

The monthly payments and the additional money he put into the car consumed every dollar he earned. Sometimes he couldn’t afford rent, so he slept in a van, or on the sofas of friends. “I built it in a trailer with a little kerosene heater,” he said.

At one point, “I thought I was going insane,” Colie said. “How could any person dedicate all their spare time and every dollar they earned to a car?” But, “life turned around when I finished the car . . . I’m not sure it wasn’t dumb luck, sometimes.”

After he completed it, he met a girl who suggested he exhibit it at the Virginia Museum of Transportation, where she worked. He did and it was a huge hit, he said. He ended up in a relationship with her that lasted almost four years. At one point, they talked about marriage. “I got close — then I got lucky,” he joked. They broke up.

In the meantime he bounced around other jobs — selling vacuums, working on modular homes, heating and air conditioning. At one point he joined an internet message board where other Knight Rider fanatics used to post photos of their custom creations. (It’s no longer online, he said.) Colie posted photos of his car there.

“Emails flooded in,” he said. “People were writing me, ‘Where’d you get that bumper?’ and ‘Where’d you get that dash?’ I replied, ‘I built it.’ And they were like, ‘Will you build me one?’”

By the time he sold his first K.I.T.T. bumper to someone else, he was working in a Roanoke business that made custom prosthetic limbs. He still recalls the day inside his employer’s shop that altered his career path for good.

A bullying co-worker ordered him to take out the trash, and when Colie didn’t immediately respond, the other guy threw a chunk of excess plastic and beaned him, he said.

“In one pocket, I had a $350 paycheck, which was for two weeks’ work,” Colie told me. “In the other, I had $1,500 I made from selling that bumper. I thought, ‘I’ve got to make a change. This isn’t going to work.’ ” He quit the job and has no regrets.

At first, he worked in the small basement of a house off Virginia 40. Eventually he earned enough to for a down payment on the place he’s now in. He’s been there 14 years, and he’s paid it off, by custom-making Knight Rider cars, and parts, and exact replica gizmos from other television science-fiction shows.

Colie hasn’t gotten rich off Knight Rider. He lives simply. He has few wants. He’s said he’s never taken a “formal” vacation. His income waxes and wanes — he had some real lean times after the 2008 stock market crash.

Most of the money he earns is from making custom K.I.T.T. parts. Colie gets $15,000 for a complete Knight Rider interior with all the electronic bells and whistles, including a faux radar scope and dash-mounted TV screen that’s linked to a rear-facing camera. These days, many new cars have those; in 1982 they were unheard of. (He gets $7,500 for K.I.T.T. dashboards with all the gizmos).

Complete cars go for $55,000, but “it’s $5,000 more if they want it to talk,” Colie said. “It’s not often you’ll sell a complete car,” he added. He’s made six or eight complete K.I.T.T.s — and he’s now got two in his shop that are in the works. His clients supply the old Trans Ams; he does the customization.

Outside the shop under a carefully-tied tarp is a completed K.I.T.T. car, owned by a client in Washington state. Colie didn’t build that one. But he rebuilt it.

“He started out buying parts from me,” he said of the customer. “But someone else did a bad job installing them. So he shipped it to me.” That was last year. Colie said he’ll ship the car back this upcoming spring.

The cars are not street legal, Colie said. His fiberglass bumpers are not approved by whatever federal agency regulates those; nor is the K.I.T.T.’s headlight configuration. But the cars he builds are mostly for auto shows, so that doesn’t matter. His contracts explicitly state “for exhibition use only.”

His older brother, who’s 51, still ridicules Colie because “I build Knight Rider cars,” he said. “People will judge you for whatever reason. They’ll criticize you if you’re not conforming to norms. You get to a point where you don’t give a crap.”

Why should he? He loves what he does. He’s found his niche. He earns a living in a way that doesn’t seem like work.

Occasionally he finds himself mentoring a teenager or young man or two. The girls who ignored him in high school are now married and have sons “who want to hang out with me,” he said.

And what kind of life advice does he give them?

“I tell them to find themselves first,” Colie said. “Know what you’re good at,” the rest will take care of itself. “Doing what I’d do naturally was a success.”

“I’m 48,” he said. “I live alone with three cats. I consider myself very fortunate. I’m alone, but not lonely. I feel young every day.”

How many of us can say that?

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