As car enthusiasts, we’re familiar with the cycle of excitement and disappointment that accompanies car movies. Typically, you’ll see a trailer that promises incredible stunts and lots of action. Then after you’ve bought your ticket and popcorn, the actual movie delivers some total bullcrap like driving backwards down a freeway at 75 mph. This particular sin even happens in movies that supposedly to cater to car enthusiasts. But it doesn’t have to be something so egregious; even a simple joke in which one of Soichiro’s greatest is played for laughs boils the blood of a few readers we know.
What movie or TV car scenes have angered you most?
The best comment by next Monday will receive a prize. Scroll down to see the winner of last week’s QotW, “Which seven cars would be in your dream garage if money was no object?“.
It was a lot of fun to read the comments to see what y’all would put in your post-Powerball winning Garage Mahals. It’d take far too long to write about the excellent choices, and many made us think, “Oh, that would epic!”. Note that the question wasn’t limited to Japanese cars, so it was nice to see a diverse range of selections. In any case, this week the winner is Michael Pearsall, who gave an entertaining explanations for each of his dream cars, not a single one practical (though to be fair I guess we did say money was no object). Hope you don’t have kids or dogs!
Since just insuring a 1962 Ferrari GTO would be tough even when the stock markets are up It wouldn’t make me feel too unfulfilled with the following substitutes gracing my garage;
Lexus LFA, the epitome of what the Japanese can do when they pull all the stops with engineering and quality.
1967 Mazda Cosmo, I don’t mind having to talk and share fun facts about my ride wherever I go.
Fairlady 240 ZG, Godzilla laid a wet one on this already timeless design
1999 NSX “Zinardi Edition”, make mine in yellow please. I love helping in the migration of honey bees, hope the swarms can keep up with me!
2022 NSX, the definition of a perfect sports car in my opinion.
Ferrari 308 GT4, I love the wedge era Bertone designs and this prancing horse can be maintained with your Dad’s old Craftsman tools and a rock.
2011 Infiniti G37 IPL Coupe, Stop with the hate, I own one and still love it and have no plans to ever let her go and fall into a fate of unscrupulous Fast & Furious wannabes.
Omedetou, your comment has earned you a set of decals from the JNC Shop!
i hope “TV car scenes” includes commercials in this week’s questionaire. I have found the recent Nissan “driverless assist” commercials to be the worst in all aspects. There was one which was Star Wars themed, and the couple was about to drive in between two semis. The presumably husband was sitting shotgun and questioning the wife about what she was gonna do, and the wife looked over, smiled, and pressed some button, and the camera focused on her hands letting go of the steering wheel. Then you had the Star Wars theme going full blast and the Nissan Rogue “deftly” pass the two semis between them. There was the pet dog sitting center rear row, supposedly in awe as the this was all happening.
Nissan, you were the epitome of commercials, you’ve went to the lowest of the low.
Great pick. I’ll throw the GMC commercial with all the drivers clapping to a beat and looking away from the road while using their hands free driving system. I would fire the ad agencies that thought these commercials to the screen.
Basically any scene where a car makes an “abrupt” stop and you can hear the tires squealing for 2-3 seconds, even though, the car is mildly coming to a stop.
Any scene where the car makes a rev, it immediately has a V8 engine.
I think the scenes I hate most is when the cars actually get crazy air, land and the entire car is perfectly fine and drivable. Those car scenes need consequences. Haha!
The entire F&F franchise makes me cringe.
I think that the first 3 movies weren’t that bad afterall… 😉
From all of them the final jump on the yacht from 2F2F was the worst moment.
The best part of this F&F scene was when they dubbed Honda sounds over the Eclipse and you could hear it hit VTEC!
Anytime the General Lee would make tire chirping sounds in a scene on a dirt road…
War of the Roses, where they destroyed classic sports cars, and especially (wait for it)
The Fast and The Furious
Yeah, seeing how easy it would have been for a 80,000 lb semi (that’s 40 tons, gaijins) to just roll over widdle 3000 lb Civics. But noooooo…..
Maybe the dude had too many tickets already and was afraid of getting another ticket.
We can all agree that FATF has gotten way too weird, but still try to attach cars to it. lol.
I mean, the street races I went to as a young adult were mostly dudes… not hot chicks using their bra as a flag lol.
But I always expect exaggerations. I mean even like Knight Rider pushing a turbo button. LOL.
The car scene/stunt that annoyed me the most comes from Jakie Chan’s 1998 movie “Who Am I?”
He’s escaping with two gals in a white LanEvoIV from some goons in BMW 3’s.
At some point of the chase the Evo lands in gravel pit & gets stuck. When the asian girl sits behind the wheel she pulls the e-brake and performs a sort of heel&toe technique on the pedals. As a result all four wheels start to spin and shoot the gravel at bad guys.
But from outside it looks plain ridicioulous…
Just take a look:
https://youtu.be/nKif_tvBsyI?t=136
WOW, I need to get me and EVO IV after watching that!
Every drag race scene in the fast and furious franchise. The cars almost always do wheelies at ridiculous 45-degree angles, and there’s never any traffic on the road. For some reason this just irks me to no end.
The mountain pass scene in the original ‘The Italian Job’ where two E-Type Jaguars and what seemed to be a convertible Aston Martin DB4 are destroyed a bulldozer. For years I winced every time I saw the DB 4 attacked by the bulldozer and on every occasion , without exception, I though ‘How could they do that?’. Years later I learned that the Aston Martin was not in fact an Aston Martin, but a Lancia Flaminia, which looks very similar to the DB4 . Apparently they had a DB 4 and the plan was to have it explode as plunges into the ravine, but the charge detonated premature and destroyed the DB 4 before the scene was filmed. Unable to find a replacement in Italy, they settled on the Lancia.
So why am I angry:
1. I was angry for years because I thought they had callously destroyed a real DB 4;
2. After I learned the true story, I was initially relieved, but then became angry again because they fooled me with a fake DB 4, which meant that I was angry for years for the wrong reason, because I should have noticed the fake.
So my anger has evolved over time, and I am still angry for a reason different to my original reason, but I can now watch the scene and feel less triggered.
And here is the version with the typos removed (prepared while wearing my glasses, unlike the original):
The mountain pass scene in the original ‘The Italian Job’ where two E-Type Jaguars and what seemed to be an Aston Martin DB 4 convertible are destroyed by a bulldozer. For years I winced every time I saw the DB 4 attacked by the bulldozer, and, on every occasion, without exception, I thought ‘How could they do that?’. Years later I learned that the Aston Martin was not in fact an Aston Martin, but a Lancia Flaminia, which looks very similar to the DB 4 . Apparently they had a real DB 4 and the plan was to have it explode as it plunges into the ravine, but the charge detonated prematurely and destroyed the DB 4 before the scene was filmed. Unable to find a replacement in Italy, they settled on the Lancia.
So why am I angry:
1. I was angry for years because I thought they had callously destroyed a real DB 4;
2. After I learned the true story, I was initially relieved, but then became angry again because they fooled me with a fake DB 4, which meant that I was angry for years for the wrong reason, and because I should have noticed the fake.
So my anger has evolved over time, and I am still angry for a reason different to my original reason, but I can now watch the scene and feel less triggered.
In a franchise filled with hot garbage, the opening car chase from Fast Five is one of the worst. The gang is trying to break Vin Diesel out of jail by chasing down the prison bus that he’s riding in with an NSX, Charger, and Firebird. I forget why he’s there in the first place but it matters not. The plots of F&F movies are like lettuce in a salad. They are just filler and have no taste.
Anyway, the NSX plays chicken with the bus, forcing it to swerve into the Charger. The Charger slams on its brakes, and when the bus rear ends it at speed it flips clear over the Charger and rolls so violently and so many times every passenger on the bus would have snapped their necks. The Charger doesn’t budge an inch and escapes without a scratch.
That is not what would happen in a world governed by Newtonian physics, people! A 35,000-pound Greyhound-style coach slamming into a 3,000-pound Dodge would have crunched that Charger like an egg. Unless the car was made out of some kind of ultra dense black hole substance and actually weighed several times the bus’s weight, or had secretly burrowed some indestructable pillar into the earth’s mantle, there’s no way it’s staying planted on the road when the bus slams into it.
There are 9 movies of idiocy like this, and I’m sure there are far more offensive things in other ones, but for some reason this is the one that sticks out to me.
Oh, and the Firebird is completely wasted as it does jack squat in this scene.
The first one that has come to my mind is one scene from “The Next karate Kid”. One of the character’s has a nice like ’70-’71 Oldsmobile Cutlass. He gets called out to fight a bunch of antagonists in the movie, and I guess to prevent him leaving the fight, they blew up his car with gasoline. That’s just irks me.
A close second would be the scene from Miami Vice where they blew up Sonny Crockett’s Ferrari 365 GT/S Daytona (even if it was a corvette body kit). I don’t like seeing old cars get blown up.