The fourth-generation Toyota Crown is a rare car, even in Japan, which makes its destruction particularly agonizing to watch. In a car chase from the Netflix Japan series Alice in Borderland, a gunman in a 250 Nissan President gives chase to a bunch of teens driving a green S60 Crown sedan. It gets riddled with bullet holes and hits other cars as it weaves through crowded Tokyo streets, yet we can’t look away.
Alice in Borderland is a sci-fi series about a group of friends who get teleported into an alternate Tokyo where they must play a series of deadly games to survive. We haven’t actually seen it, so we don’t know more than that, but the vintage machines in the car chase definitely piqued our interest.
There’s even interesting background cars in this bizarro universe Tokyo. We see the Crown and President speed past an R35 GT-R, Honda Accord Inspire (aka Acura Vigor), Mazda RX-8, and even a Chevy Trailblazer. It’s also probably one of the most action-packed scenes involving a Kujira Crown has ever seen on screen.
A stock MS65 would easily be smoked by a new Prius and the chassis was built for gliding, not slalom. It might not be so realistic to have it flying through modern traffic, but it’s exciting to see the ancient body-on-frame chassis bob and weave through traffic. Alas, the Crown gets pretty beat up in the ensuing pursuit, and it’s a rare stick-shift model to boot. It’s heartbreaking, but perhaps not as gut-wrenching to watch as multiple classics getting shot up in Hunt.
Thanks to Frank G. for the tip!
The stunts they did were ok but they needed to have the other cars moving to make the scene more realistic, other than that overall, it was good did not seem like a real car chase to fake for me.
In the story everyone has disappeared from Tokyo and left it a ghost town so there’s no one driving those cars.
I guess the value of it is still very low so it was affordable to the production team. Luxury cars always get less appreciation than sports cars.
This was fun to watch as a Kujira owner. A few things I picked up watching it.
It is a facelift model, so 73-74. Rare.. but not uber rare. It’s unfortunate they folded the fender at the beginning, but it is fixable and I saw a fender on Yahoo auctions. I was actually impressed with how well it took a beating. After doing some research into it, I guess this one was actually abandoned that they restored for filming.
They would never do this with a Coupe, but everything (frame, suspension, length) is exactly the same for both models… and they handle way better than they should. It looks a little lower than stock, so they probably have newer springs and shocks under it. These are 4-way coil cars… no leaf springs.
500 number plate means that it has the 2.0L 2M, but it was possible to get with dual updraft carbs @ 140 HP (ish) which is probably enough to pull away from that boat of a Nissan that weighs 600lbs more and only has 130 HP. It was in a junkyard though, so it could have anything in it for an engine.
Movie magic aside (and shifting into the wrong gears) it was a fun little bit and now I’m going to have to go find it and watch it.
Glad it was an abandoned/restored car rather than a survivor that got beat up. Thanks for sharing!
The view from the pedals at 0:53 was straight out of Taiho Shichauzo.