1,500 Cars Destroyed During Fast & Furious Franchise

Now-collectible cars were destroyed in the hundreds but most of them were actually junk.

It’s news that isn’t exactly surprising yet still shocking to hear. Around 1,500 cars were destroyed over the course of seven Fast and Furious films with a lot of them being sports cars, supercars and classic cars.

This isn’t a case of a thousand Ford Fiestas being destroyed, we’re talking Mustangs, Supras, Dodge Chargers, Nissan Skyline GTRs, BMW M3s and so on. All of these are cars that may have been more common ten or fifteen years ago but today, they’d be rare, collectable and incredibly valuable.

The breakdown is as follows:

• Fast & Furious: 78 cars
• 2 Fast 2 Furious: 130 cars
• The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift: 249 cars
• Fast & Furious: 190 cars
• Fast Five: 260 cars
• Fast & Furious 6: 350 cars
• Furious 7: 230 cars

It may sound like a great travesty to see so many special cars be wiped out en masse but it is not quite as bad as it seems as there’s some movie magic going on in the background that the average viewer isn’t aware of. We’re not talking about CGI, we’re talking about ways that the producers were able to minimise the destruction of these great cars with restorations and recycling.

The fact is these film studios didn’t go out and buy a nice Dodge Charger and then wreck it, or buy a pristine Toyota Supra just to be beaten up. On the contrary, most cars that were used in the film were utter junk, with some of them even coming from junkyards. These cars were high mileage, problem-ridden, rusty, already crashed or highly undesirable versions of the car it was in the films.

For example, Craig Lieberman, Technical Advisor for the first two Fast films, said that Slap Jack’s Supra in ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ was actually a leftover Supra from the first movie and was also a non-turbo model with auto transmission which he described as ‘one of the least desirable iterations of the Mk IV Supra’ and likely very cheap to buy at the time.

Other examples include a Porsche 996 GT2 RS actually being a standard 996 Carrera 2S with over 100k miles on the clock, a BMW E39 M5 actually being a 540i with other clones being 530i models, Fast & Furious 4 mostly using Skyline GTTs instead of real Nissan Skyline GT-Rs and so on.

Not only were the cars ‘fake’ but were also in pretty bad shape most of the time. Although they may have had a myriad of undercarriage issues, the production team were able to make them appear like-new thanks to specialist in-house bodywork teams that reworked damaged panels, borrowed parts from multiple cars, then proceeded to apply beautiful paintwork as well as the necessary accessories needed to make that car look the part. They’d look like a million dollars on the outside yet be piles of junk under the surface that were repaired just enough to work.

Let us know how you feel about the hundreds of destroyed movie cars, in the comments!

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