So, just how far are we from Knight Rider's Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT)? When the show was first aired almost forty years ago KITT seemed plausible yet hopelessly futuristic. Now states such as California are allowing self-driving cars to be tested on public roads. (California Vehicle Code Section 38750)
Technology has advanced since the 1980s and if you look at the fictional features for KITT it seems like we might be close to fiction becoming reality.
KITT's general a.i. might not yet be possible but autonomous cars are becoming just that; autonomous. Chatbots and machine learning are available as well as neural nets and experimental neuromorphic computing.
But what programming language would have been used to create KITT's artificial intelligence? Python didn't exist until the end of the 1980s so it would have been something like C or LISP I suppose.
It's possible to think that a nanotechnology such as graphene makes KITT so resilient to physical damage. KITT's videophone is basically Apple's FaceTime. All the laser weapons KITT had could probably be done by the Styropyro YouTube channel.
The one thing that might be different about a real life version of KITT is the dashboard. All those buttons would probably be unnecessary due to touchscreens. Maybe not. It's possible the buttons and toggle switches would be kept for the haptic experience like Tom Paris did when designing the Delta Flyer.
