Oh, of course it was understood, don't be condescending. We weren't living in caves, and we'd had wind tunnels for decades. I saw plenty of magazine articles and science-show features at the time about auto aerodynamics. The show just didn't care, as long as it looked cool. As I've been pointing out over and over again, Knight Rider was a low-intelligence show even for its time. It made no pretense of realism on any level. The viewers understood that Super Pursuit Mode was nonsense, the designers surely understood that it was nonsense, but everyone understood that the whole show was nonsense, so it fit right in.
I remember a science magazine article from sometime in the '80s or '90s pointing out that most American cars would actually have better aerodynamics driven in reverse, because an airplane wing is rounded in front and tapers toward the back, while car designs tended to be the other way around. But auto makers prioritized what looked fast to consumers over actual streamlining and fuel efficiency. The science was understood, it just wasn't prioritized by the automakers, any more than it was by the makers of a lowbrow action TV show.
If anything, I think today's American audiences are probably a lot less informed than audiences back then, since the channels that used to be educational, like Discovery and The Science Channel, have mostly degenerated to reality-show crap, UFOs, and ancient astronauts. Not to mention how staggeringly ignorant this generation of Americans seems to be about things that used to be universally understood, like the fact that vaccines work and what the word "pronoun" means.
