Detective Sergeant Rick Hunter's (Fred Dryer's) badge number is 089, Dryer's jersey number when he played for the Los Angeles Rams.
During season three, the producers decided to kill off Sergeant Bernie Terwilliger (James Whitmore Jr.). When Fred Dryer got wind of his fellow actor's demise, he objected. The script was quickly revised and Robert Firth, who played Riley Causland in the previous season, was brought in to take the fatal bullet. In an odd twist of fate, Whitmore ended up directing the sequences.
Detective Sergeant Rick Hunter's blue car is the same car seen on Hill Street Blues (1981), season six, episode eleven, "Two Easy Pieces". One of the clues to this is a spotlight mounting hole on the driver's side windshield pillar.
Detective Sergeant Rick Hunter's (Fred Dryer's) and Detective Sergeant Dee Dee McCall's (Stepfanie Kramer's) nicknames for the first two seasons were "The Head Hunter" and "The Brass Cupcake", respectively.
The reason behind Rick Hunter always getting a junk car was because the scripts almost always called for his car to be destroyed, it would get expensive to constantly wreck roadworthy cars. In reality, all police cars are held to a very high standard of maintenance and functionality.