‘You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!’
Credit: Jamie McCarthy/Getty; Harpo Productions
NEED TO KNOW
- In September 2004, Oprah Winfrey gave away over 200 cars to her audience during an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show
- The iconic TV moment originated from a suggestion Gayle King received from a stranger at an airport
- Pontiac donated over $7 million worth of cars, but recipients were responsible for paying up to $7,000 in taxes
On Sept. 13, 2004, Oprah Winfrey kicked off season 19 of The Oprah Winfrey Show with a moment that would become a permanent part of pop culture history.
The legendary host deliberately misled her live studio audience into thinking that she was giving away just 12 Pontiac G6s. To keep them in suspense, Winfrey had small gift boxes distributed throughout the crowd after 11 cars were already given away, claiming that only one contained a key to the 12th car.
“There was supposedly one car left,” Winfrey recalled in a July 2026 interview with Vanity Fair. “And everybody was thinking they were going to be that one person. You see them all like, ‘I hope it’s me.’ ”
As it turns out, there wasn’t just one lucky viewer. Every box held a key, prompting the cultural icon to repeat four words that would follow her for decades: “You get a car!”
By the end of the episode, all 276 audience members had received a new ride, a feat that was even more complicated to pull off than it appeared on television.
From the giveaway’s unexpected origins to the last-minute decision that helped preserve its big reveal, here are eight secrets about Oprah Winfrey’s 2004 car giveaway.
Gayle King came up with the idea
Credit: Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage
Back in September 2004, Winfrey told PEOPLE that the theme for her show’s 19th season was to “make people’s dreams come true,” and her best friend, Gayle King, passed along the perfect way to make good on that promise. She told PEOPLE’s Pop Cultured that a man approached her at the airport, asking if his company could donate a vehicle to every audience member of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Though King admitted that the idea sounded “far-fetched,” she agreed to give his information to Winfrey’s team. “I couldn’t get to the phone fast enough,” she said during the January 2022 episode. “And then from there, then the question became, how do we execute it?”
Winfrey was “excited” and “anxious” ahead of taping
Despite being the one in on the surprise, Winfrey could hardly contain her anticipation ahead of the big reveal. She told PEOPLE at the time of filming that she had struggled to sleep through the night prior to taping.
“I woke up this morning at 2:13 and couldn’t go back to sleep,” the host explained, adding that she eventually got up to work out around 3:30 a.m. Winfrey said she was so “anxious anticipating” the moment that she had to sit alone in her closet before heading downstairs to film, something she said had “never happened” before.
She chose her red suit to match the bows on the cars
Credit: George Burns/Harpo
It was no coincidence that Winfrey’s cherry-red Céline suit matched the bows that decorated the audience’s new cars. Though her intentional outfit choice was so iconic that it now sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, King wasn’t a fan at the time.
“She comes into my dressing room and she goes, ‘You’re not wearing that, are you?’ ” Winfrey remembered in her interview with Vanity Fair, adding that her best friend thought it was “too suity” and that she should “wear something more fun.”
King conceded on PEOPLE’s Pop Cultured that the outfit hardly mattered: “The truth is, she could have sat up on that damn car buck naked, and that would have looked good too.”
Winfrey made a last-minute change to keep the surprise from being spoiled
One small detail nearly gave away the big surprise before Winfrey could reveal it. She told Vanity Fair that she realized in the middle of the night before taping that the keys inside the gift boxes hadn’t been secured. Guessing that “the first thing” audience members would likely do was shake the box, the host instructed producers to tape down the keys so they wouldn’t rattle inside.
She had the bows replaced because they weren’t big enough
Credit: Shannon Finney/Getty
The keys weren’t the only detail keeping producers busy before the taping. Winfrey told Vanity Fair that when the bows arrived the day before, she decided they were too small and insisted they be replaced with oversized versions that would cover more of the cars.
King later told PEOPLE’s Pop Cultured that Winfrey has always believed “love is in the details,” and the bows were no exception. Beyond insisting that every vehicle have an oversized red one, her best friend even compared different shades to find just the right hue.
“It was a whole big thing,” King said.
For the host, however, there was a reason for being particular: she wanted each winner to be able to drive home with a giant bow still attached to their new car.
The audience was specifically chosen because they needed new cars
By the time the car giveaway aired, Winfrey “was already operating with my producers with the philosophy that we do nothing that is not intentional,” she told PEOPLE in April 2024. That meant not giving away vehicles to just anybody, but specifically people who needed them.
The Oprah Winfrey Show asked viewers to submit their worst car stories, including a couple who racked up nearly 400,000 miles between their two rides and a woman whose son said it looked like her car “got into a gunfight,” per CBS News.
Pontiac supplied $7 million worth of cars
Credit: Jeffrey Sauger/Bloomberg via Getty
Pontiac spent more than $7 million to donate the cars, which audience members could customize with heated leather seats and OnStar or XM Satellite Radio. At the time the episode aired, the cars retailed for $28,000.
“A little idea grew into a big idea,” Mary Henige of Pontiac told The Associated Press in September 2004, per CBS News.
Winfrey yelled “You get a car!” because people were confused
Credit: Harpo Productions
The giveaway went down in TV history not only for its scale, but for the phrase Winfrey repeated multiple times during the big reveal. While “You get a car!” has since become a meme and Winfrey’s exuberant delivery immortalized in GIFs, she later explained that the famous refrain had a practical purpose: Her audience was confused.
The Oprah Winfrey Show host explained to PEOPLE in 2024, “Everybody opened the boxes at the same time. So you were looking at the person next to you who got theirs, and you’re like, ‘Oh, they got it. But I got it too.’ So I was like, ‘You get a car, you get a car, you get a car, everybody gets a car.’ Because people were confused.”
Read the full article here
