Study Reveals the Movies That Destroyed the Most Cars - and the Numbers Are Wild

A study by A1 Auto Transport has revealed the movies which wrecked the most cars during production.

Recent Blockbusters Make Up Most of the Results

“People assume the cars you see destroyed in movies are random vehicles pulled off the street, but the reality is far more considered,” said Joe Webster, marketing director at A1 Auto Transport. “The majority are sourced through salvage auctions, cars that have already been written off by insurers and are at the end of their road life. Before they ever appear on camera, they're stripped down and rebuilt with roll cages, fire suppression systems, and other safety modifications to protect the stunt drivers inside.”

Unsurprisingly, modern blockbusters make up much of the results. The movie which destroyed the most cars during production – by quite some distance – was Michael Bay’s 2011 sequel Transformers: Dark of the Moon. That film destroyed an astonishing 532 vehicles. “When you're staging a battle across several city blocks, you need vehicles that look real but are built to be wrecked,” Webster said. “That means working with salvage suppliers to source cars in bulk, then modifying them so they can be safely crashed, flipped, or crushed on camera,” he explained.

Fast & Furious Franchise Took 6 of 10 Spots

Second place on the list went to another high-grossing sequel: Fast & Furious 6 (2012), which destroyed 350 cars during production. A climactic chase scene involving a bevy of cars as well as helicopters and tanks was part of the reason for the movie’s high vehicle casualty rate. “The Fast franchise built its entire identity around cars,” Webster said. “By the sixth film, stunt coordination had become a production unto itself. Sourcing that many vehicles, transporting them to the location, and prepping them for the camera takes serious logistical planning.”

Coming in third was The Matrix Reloaded, which totaled 300 vehicles in a central car chase shot on a 1.4-mile long stretch of highway built specifically for the film. A tremendous amount of care, not to mention safety planning, went into executing the acclaimed sequence. “Those 300 cars weren't just crashed; it was choreography at its finest,” Webster noted. “Every impact was planned, and every vehicle was prepped well in advance.”

Two more Furious installments rounded out the top five: Fast 5 took fourth place with a wreck total of 260 cars; and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the series’ third installment, placed fifth with a similar wreck total of 249 cars.

Fast & Furious actually took three more spots in the bottom half of the top 10. Furious 7 and the fourth installment, Fast & Furious, placed sixth and seventh, with respective wreck totals of 230 and 190. 2 Fast 2 Furious placed tenth, having wrecked 130 cars on the way to completion. At number nine was a forgotten Die Hard sequel (A Good Day to Die Hard, 132 cars).

You Probably Haven't Heard of No. 8

Most interesting is the list’s number eight, The Junkman. The Junkman is a 1982 action-comedy about assassins trying to murder a filmmaker in a Mad Max-style wasteland. It boasted a wreck total of 150 cars, well before CGI and other modern filmmaking methods came into use. “Sourcing 150 wreckable vehicles in the early '80s meant working the salvage circuit hard,” Webster said. “If it was in the shot, it was getting destroyed.”

“CGI has changed the numbers,” Webster said. “Productions from the '80s and '90s had no choice but to wreck the real thing. Today, a director can destroy a hundred cars on screen with a fraction of the physical count. The films on this list that predate modern visual effects deserve particular credit; what you see is what actually happened.”