I think the reason Knight Rider has been revived so many times (Knight Rider 2000, Knight Rider 2010, Team Knight Rider, the '08 sequel) is because it gives auto makers a vehicle (pun intended) for promoting their merchandise, so it's easy to get funding. That's also why Viper got revived in syndication after its network run was cancelled -- the whole thing was a commercial for the title vehicle, and the car company wasn't willing to give up on it so soon.
I found the original show quite silly and cheesy, but I always liked KITT. I tend to have an affinity for disembodied AI characters in fiction, and KITT was always fun. I also thought the car was pretty cool, though I'm not usually a car buff.
I rather liked the Knight Rider 2010 movie that was part of the Universal Action Pack (which also gave us Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, TekWar, and other less-remembered things), but it wasn't really a Knight Rider production at all; IIRC, it was originally a separate project, a post-apocalyptic story where the hero's murdered girlfriend was preserved as a digital consciousness installed in his Mad Max-ish custom-armored car, like a more mobile version of Diana in RoboCop: The Series. (The girlfriend/car AI was played by Heidi Leick, better known as Hudson Leick, who would later play Callisto in Xena: Warrior Princess. It was years before I figured out that Heidi and Hudson were the same person rather than twin sisters.) But they tacked the KR name onto it for promotional purposes, even though there was nothing explicitly linking it to KR (and 2010 was way too soon for the post-apocalyptic world it depicted, unless it was one that had diverged from ours considerably before the movie premiered).
