Gayle King Reveals How an Unexpected Airport Run-In Led to Oprah’s Famous “You Get a Car” Giveaway

Gayle King says The Oprah Winfrey Show’s famous car giveaway was pitched to her while she was at an airport.

On Sept. 13, 2004, Oprah Winfrey gave each of her nearly 300 studio audience members a brand-new Pontiac G-6 sedan — a car, at the time, worth upwards of $30,000. Gifted as part of the “Oprah’s Favorite Things” segment, the daytime talk show initially called 11 people to the stage. There, Winfrey revealed each one would get a car before passing out white boxes with red bows, teasing that a twelfth audience member who found a key in their box would also receive a vehicle.

The twist, of course, was that every box had a key, and so each audience member received a vehicle. While sitting down for People’s Pop Cultured, Oprah’s longtime friend and CBS Mornings host Gayle King revealed that the idea for the giveaway, which doubled as a promotional effort for the carmaker, came from a chance encounter at an airport.

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“I was at an airport, minding my own business. A guy walks up to me — and I’ll call him Larry — [and said,] ‘We’re really interested in giving a car to the show.’ I said, ‘Oh, OK. That’s nice,'” King recalled. “He said, ‘No, no, we’re interested in giving a car to everyone in the audience.'”

King said at that point, she put down her suitcase and asked him to clarify what he had just said. “He said, ‘We’ve been trying, and we can’t get anyone to return our calls,'” the CBS News journalist explained. “Well, why would they return a call because it just sounded so far-fetched?”

Still, she says “there was something about him” that made her believe him, and so she went against her and Winfrey’s general rule of no shop talk in their friendship and broached it with the talk show host.

“[Oprah] said, ‘I have a whole team that does this. I get this all day long. I really don’t want to get it from you.’ There are still times that I just can’t help it, which is what happened with the cars. So I said, ‘I’ll take your card and pass it along to her team.’ And I couldn’t get to the phone fast enough. And then from there, then the question became, how do we execute it?”

The plan was to give the cars to “people who are deserving,” which is why the show surveyed people ahead of the taping, including how they get to work.

A 2020 episode of the Making Oprah podcast identified the stranger King met as an executive from Pontiac. Following that initial conversation, the two walked away with an initial agreement to give just 25 cars away. But after ongoing discussions between the show and Pontiac, the car company eventually agreed to give away nearly 300 sedans, worth a total of $8 million, resulting in one of TV’s most iconic moments and one of the internet’s favorite memes.