Starsky and Hutch Ford Gran Torino

The latest in a series on famous cars

From April 1975 through May 1979, detectives David Starsky and Kenneth “Hutch” Hutchinson kept the fictional streets of Bay City, California safe on the weekly ABC-TV crime drama, Starsky & Hutch. Though the show’s stars Paul Michael Glaser (Starsky) and David Soul (Hutch) gained considerable fame from the series, it was Starsky’s red-with-a-white stripe Ford Gran Torino that became, arguably, the show's biggest star as it became the most recognized car in America during the show’s run. 

Starsky and Hutch were originally supposed to drive a high performance, green and white, Chevrolet Camaro. However, when production started on the pilot, the Ford Motor Company's studio-TV car loan program was the lease supplier for the shows production company, hence no Camaro since Chevrolet is part of General Motors.   

It’s not clear exactly how many such Gran Torinos were used in the filming of the series or what happened to them all. Helping to confuse matters, Ford, looking to capitalize on the show’s popularity, produced a run of roughly 1,300 "Starsky & Hutch Gran Torinos", which were sold through participating Ford dealerships . Our subject car is allegedly one of those 1,300 which is probably true seeing that this car is shod with stock Ford rims and not the 5 slot mag wheels all "Zebra Three's" featured in the TV show had. Zebra Three, you may recall, was the radio call handle for Starsky and Hutch. These cars have been, somewhat incorrectly, nicknamed "Zebra Three". 

While cars that are from the actual TV show with documented histories do exist, the sheer volume of replica cars makes finding an authentic example, even a Ford factory version like this, challenging. And for the true collector, it’s a task that requires a great deal of research. If you find one, you might be inclined to knock over a liquor store; just recently, a fairly well documented Zebra Three that was allegedly featured in the TV show sold at auction for $40,000.  

While the shows producers were happy with the Torinos, the stars of the show, specifically Paul Michael Glaser, were not so pleased. In fact, when Glaser first saw his character's car, his reaction was more of disgust rather than pleasure. His initial reply was "it's red." When interviewed about the Torino, which, again, became the defacto "third star" of the show, Glaser had no qualms about saying he didn't like the car at all. He was quoted as saying "it was huge, it had no pickup, and it couldn't handle." To make matters worse, in all of the scenes where he would lock the brakes to stop at a crime scene, he'd make every effort to bump the car off a curb; Glaser purposely trying to break the Torino.