Latest News
Volvo: Safety Beyond the Star Ratings
We cover the basics of stunt driving and highlight some of the best car movie stunts of all time.
Vehicular Verisimilitude
The core of the Fast & the Furious franchise is watching cool cars do outrageously cool, and often ridiculously dangerous things. That, and of course the work of master thespian Vin Diesel waxing philosophic on the virtues of familial ties. But mostly it’s the cars and the perpetual escalation of crazy stunts, from outmaneuvering a submarine (easier than it sounds), to jumping a car from one building to another, and then another (at least as hard as it sounds).
It’s not just the Fast & the Furious either, car stunts go back to the very earliest days of cinema. Lot of the most outrageous we see today are accomplished with the help of CGI, but for most of movie history it was just the stunt coordination team and a cadre of legitimately nutty stunt drivers making it happen. The huge jumps performed in The Dukes of Hazard were why folks tuned in every week. A Bond movie isn’t be a Bond movie without some slick driving from the world’s coolest spy. And the epic conclusion to the movie-long chase in The Blues Brothers included a pileup of a record number of cars (103, only to be surpassed by The Blue Brothers 2000, with 104).
Our love of practical special effects and gusty driving inspired us to explore what techniques are involved and to highlight some of our favorite, most epic movie car stunts off all time.
Drifting
The bread and butter of stunt driving, drifting around corners looks cool, sounds cool, is cool. Stunt drivers do it either by using the handbrake in cornering and then releasing the brake and hitting the throttle to rocket out of the turn. Alternatively, drivers can clutch kick by hitting the clutch, revving the engine, and then letting the clutch out at a higher rpm.
Pit Maneuver
Not solely the province of stunt drivers, the pit maneuver is also performed by law enforcement. A pit maneuver is when a car bumps the rear quarter panel of a car they are chasing, causing the other vehicle to spin out. For experts only kids.
J-Turn/Reverse 180
Want to look like a stunt driver? You’ll have to master the J-turn to do so. This is then you drive a car in reverse at speed and flick the steering wheel to 180 the car, hit the throttle and speed off.
Jumps
Another classic car stunt is the jump. Sometime these are simple ramps for crashes in a chase, but the best are the dramatic ones where the car catches serious air (and cracks its frame on landing). These were a mainstay of The Dukes of Hazard and were the main reason the show ran through around 300 General Lee stunt cars over the course of production.
Flips
Flips can be performed in a number of ways. Some cars can actually be flipped simply by jerking the wheel at high speed, it helps for the vehicle to have a naturally high center of gravity. Other stunts call for a ramp or rail (kind of like in skateboarding) for the car to ride up on and flip. Still other stunts will make use of wires to pull the car or even air cannons to blast the car over.
Two-Wheel Driving
Two-wheel driving looks like CGI, but it’s a real stunt. Like in a flip, a ramp is often used to get a car up on two wheels and then the driver can balance on two wheels. This stunt requires high pressure in the tires and a locking differential so power can be sent to the driving wheel(s) that are still on the ground.
Movies with Great Real Car Stunts
Fast and the Furious Franchise
Sure, lots of the stunts in the Fast & the Furious series are accomplished with CGI, but a lot of the coolest stunts are done with real drivers in real cars. For example, Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift famous parking garage drift scene is all legit, gymkhana-esque sickness performed by some seriously talented stunt drivers.
Terminator 3
The Terminator saga is another series with more than its share of great visual effects and stunt work. For car stunts, the crane scene stands out for its level of destruction and the level of preparation and execution required to pull it off.
Ronin
John Frankenheimer’s now classic thriller, Ronin, features multiple car chases in the narrow streets of Paris, Nice, and La Turbie, France. These chase scenes have it all: flips, drifts, pileups, explosions, even driving against traffic through a tunnel. And all of it practical effects.
Baby Driver
Baby Driver became something of an instant classic among car fans particularly for its opening getaway sequence. With a rip-roaring soundtrack and some of the tightest drifting you ever see on screen, the stunt driving in Baby Driver is a big reason why vape-smoking teenagers love the WRX STI so darn much. And we can’t blame them.
Bond Flicks
The number of wild car stunts in Bond movies could be an article unto itself. But to keep things brief, we’ll mention two of the most notable here. The first is from The Man with the Golden Gun where Bond, play this time by Roger Moore, does a corkscrew jump over a river. The jump looks like it must have been faked somehow, heck, it even comes with a corny slide whistle sound effect. But no, the jump was indeed real. The second comes decades later from Casino Royal, when Bond, played by Daniel Craig, swerves and flips his Aston Martin DBS. The shot set a Guinness World Record for the number of barrel rolls executed in a single car stunt at seven rotations.
The Dark Knight
There’s a lot to love about Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. There’s Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance as the Joker, there’s the Tumbler, one of the best Batmobiles ever, and then there’s that truck flip stunt. The end-over-end flip of a semitruck stands as one of the coolest and most memorable movie car stunts of all time. Who cares if you can even see the puff of the air cannon used to flip the massive truck? It’s epic all the same.
For more great car stunts, check out our list of the greatest car movie chases of all time.
