Have you ever been watching a movie and seen someone do something in a car that drove you crazy—because you, as an enthusiast, knew it was impossible? Whether it’s a technical detail that feels like a slap in the face to anyone who’s ever held a wrench; a driving technique that’s being used for looks rather for actual speed; or a movie’s inability to properly identify the vehicles shown on screen, Hollywood has a history of playing fast and loose with automotive representation.
Here are 11 of the weirdest, funniest, and most annoying goofs and high-octane errors guaranteed to grind your gears.
Fast and Furious: The Mystery of the Missing Brakes
The Fast and Furious franchise catches a lot of flack for its over-the-top depictions of automotive anarchy, but even the lower-budget early entries into the franchise had more than a few head-scratchers when it came to the cars on screen. Of these, perhaps none is more bizarre than the missing brake calipers on Jessie’s Volkswagen Jetta. The lack of hardware is most easily seen when he lines up alongside Johnny Tran’s Honda S2000 in the desert at Race Wars.
In reality, every car used in the production had functional brakes, but the stunt cars didn’t feature the same big rotors and calipers found on the “hero,” or primary camera car (which was loaned to the production by a private owner eager to avoid it being abused). To keep the stock stoppers from looking puny on camera behind oversized rims, they simply covered up the braking system with larger fake rotors, which of course weren’t linked to calipers or pads.
Budget Cuts: When High-End Cars Are Replaced by Cheap-O Models
It’s not always in the budget to blow up an expensive car, which means movies often have to get creative when bringing fire and destruction to the screen. Occasionally, the props department can get a little lazy and forget that there might be gearheads in the audience who can easily pick up on their oopsies.
Two of the worst cases of this kind of stunt-driven oversight are separated by several decades of cinematic history. In the 1970s, Vanishing Point pinned its climax on the film’s antihero driving his supercharged Dodge Challenger directly into a police blockade made up of bulldozers, leading to his fiery death. The Mopar survived, however, because while you might blink and miss the clumsy substitution of an older Chevrolet Camaro just before impact, there’s no way you’ll misidentify the wreckage as anything other than a GM when it’s shown later.
Need For Speed is considerably more lightweight when it comes to subtext, but it employs a very similar attempt at automotive sleight of hand in a chase scene involving a Ford Mustang GT500 and a perilous jump on Detroit streets. Keep your eye on the pony car’s wheels, which switch from 22-inchers to tiny V6 Mustang rims once the car is airborne. It’s certainly cheaper to wreck a car you can pick up at the rental counter.
Twister Can’t Decide Which Dodge Ram Should Be On-Screen
Sometimes, it’s a little harder to understand why movie cars can’t stay consistent from one scene to the next, even if it’s only likely that eagle-eyed watchers will catch the differences. The movie Twister is a perfect example.
Featuring a star-making turn for Dodge’s recently introduced, and completely redesigned, full-size Ram pickup, during several of the production’s tornado chase scenes the truck flashes back and forth between being a 1500 half-ton model; a 2500 three-quarter-ton example; and even a version that’s badged as a 3500 full-ton truck with a V10 emblem.
This was due to a weird mix of stunt and hero trucks that were used while filming, all 1995 models, all provided by Chrysler. Weirdly, not a single one of those was actually a 3500, because every full-ton truck built by Chrysler at that time was a dually. Moving past the bizarre badging, Twister’s seeming disregard for continuity was also perceptible by looking at each pickup’s wheels (which changed from five-lug to eight-lug, depending on the scene) and spotting the underhang of the heavy-duty’s trucks front axle differential, which is prominent in a number of shots.
Back to the Future: The DeLorean’s Fudged Speedometer
It might seem like a nitpick to get caught up on interior details, but the producers of Back To The Future were facing down a real conundrum with their choice of hero vehicle. It turns out that when you need Marty McFly to hit 88 mph in order to open a temporal portal, it’s a problem when the car he’s driving has a speedometer that stops at—85 mph.
The DMC DeLorean used in the movie was designed during the dark days of America’s Malaise era, during which a national 55-mph speed limit was imposed—and along with it, a federal requirement that speedometers not pass the 85-mph mark. This law lasted from 1979 to 1982, which meant prop artists had to get creative and dress up the DeLorean’s dash so it could fit the plot of the film.
Fast and Furious…again: The Hemi in Dom’s Charger Dates to a Different Era
If you’re a casual Mopar fan, you probably love Dom Toretto’s brand loyalty to all things B-body. If you’re a hardcore Chrysler enthusiast, then it’s likely you were also triggered by the underhood look at the supercharged Hemi engine in the star’s torque monster Charger from the first film in the series.
It turns out that, yes, that’s a Hemi on screen, but, no, it’s not what you’d find nestled between the front fenders of an early 1970s Mopar. The engine, which was sourced from Chuck Taylor Racing, is clearly based on the original 392-cubic inch Hemi design from the 1950s, which is given away by the location of the distributor.
It’s odd that Dom’s car wouldn’t feature a built version of the very different 426-cubic-inch Hemi that was the star of the golden era of muscle, especially considering how obscure the 392 Hemi is today, and how little aftermarket support there is for it. As it turns out, that motor was only used for that one scene—once it was time to get mobile again, the Charger’s original 440-cubic-inch V8 was reinstalled and the blown mongrel Hemi was sent back to Chuck Taylor.
Bumblebee Has a High-Rise What?
It’s probably a bit much to expect automotive authenticity from a move like Transformers. But did they really have to force Megan Fox to identify Bumblebee’s engine as having a “high-rise double-pump carburetor” when it’s clearly some kind of alien independent throttle body situation? It just comes across like Star Trek technobabble.
Clueless: No One Seems to Know If Jeeps Have Airbags
Jeeps have long had a reputation as rugged, bare-bones off-roaders, which is why it’s weird when a movie makes it a point to call out safety features they clearly don’t have. The mid-’90s comedy Clueless is a prime example of this particular movie mistake, where main character Cher is bragging to her friends about the features of the Jeep TJ her daddy bought her, which apparently includes “dual side airbags.”
The vehicle on the screen clearly doesn’t even have full doors, let alone anywhere a side airbag could get stuffed. In fact, the TJ didn’t have a single airbag, period—not even for the driver.
It’s harder to give The Last Seduction a pass for its own Jeep-related airbag mix-up. The vehicle driven by the movie’s titular femme fatale is a 1987 Jeep Cherokee, a version of the XJ that is easily identifiable in terms of era due to the prominent chrome found at the front end. And yet, when this truck is crashed later on, a driver’s airbag is deployed—a safety feature the XJ wouldn’t offer until 1995, which coincidentally, is the year after the movie was released.
Death Proof’s Dodge Challenger Features an Odd Extra Part
Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof delivers some of the most white-knuckle automotive stunt-work ever committed to film, particularly in the final sequence where Zoë Bell is trapped “car surfing” on the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger while being pursued by a homicidal madman in a same-period Charger.
Muscle-car aficionados might have noticed something strange about the car used for the on-hood sequence: it’s got a set of door frames prominently welded to it. Why is this unusual? Well, the Challenger was a hardtop, which meant no door frame whatsoever. Presumably these were added for safety reasons, as the strap keeping Bell connected is looped around the frames. (Note: this author’s visit to Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios roughly 10 years ago revealed that not all of the Challengers used during production had the frame modification).
Rush: The Sparkless F1 Engine
The movie Rush, which detailed a classic era in Formula One racing, did its best to stay authentic when it came to on-track action. Dig into the nitty-gritty of how F1 powerplants were portrayed, however, and you quickly run into some glaring errors.
None of these is more prominent than the computer animation used to show the insides of race-car engines as they churned and surged their way to victory. While the eye-candy was nice, and in some ways reminiscent of early Fast and Furious antics, don’t look too closely or you’ll discover that none of these F1 mills actually have spark plugs, or even spark plug holes, to ignite the fuel that keeps those pistons pumping.
Keep Your Limbs Inside the Vehicle at All Times
Minivans are among the most practical vehicles on the road, which in the 1990s and early 2000s made them the family ride of choice. It’s also the reason Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have one parked in the driveway as the titular couple of spies in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (part of their cover as average, everyday citizens).
Unfortunately, while the Dodge Grand Caravan’s power hatch and side doors are great for loading kids and cargo, they definitely do not work unless the vehicle is in Park. The makes many of the antics seen while the couple are chased by bad guys in BMWs much more difficult for #vanlife fans to believe.
How Does Shifting Work Again?
We’re not going to dissect everything that’s wrong with movie-car shifting—there’s so many examples, we wouldn’t know whether to start with street racers in Fast and Furious moving through a dozen cogs in the space of 10 seconds or professional pilots in Ford v Ferrari shifting up a gear for more power.
Let’s just focus on a movie that really should have known better. In Days of Thunder, perhaps the best-known serious NASCAR flick, and one with a budget big enough to hire as many stock-car consultants as they could find, you’ll see numerous shots of drivers hitting clutch pedal and changing gears—action that’s problematic for two specific reasons.
The first is technical: in a NASCAR racer, the clutch pedal is only ever used to put the car in first gear while leaving pit lane. On an oval like Daytona, all other shifting is done by matching revs, which doesn’t involve clutching at all. Then there’s the fact that shifting is rare in circle-track racing (most of the race takes place in top gear). You certainly would never see a driver grab a lower gear coming out of a corner onto a straight unless they wanted to put their pistons through the hood.
Sign up for our newsletter Blind-Spot Monitor and follow our social channels on X, Tiktok and LinkedIn to stay up to date on the latest automotive news, reviews, car culture, and vehicle shopping advice.