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Cars in Taylor Swift Music VideosOur Favorite Movie Car Mistakes
From continuity errors to outright mistakes, even the best car movies can get things wrong.
Big Screen Automotive Errors
Movie making has always been an ambitious business. Technical and logistical challenges abound. Some of those challenges can be rather mundane, like feeding the cast and crew on location, while others are dizzyingly complex, like planning the shoot for a chase scene involving dozens of cars and hundreds of extras. Even after principal photography is done and filmmakers move to post-production, things aren’t necessarily easy as editors and directors painstakingly piece together a coherent story from sometimes hundreds of hours of footage.
It’s easy in all that chaos for mistakes to be made. Continuity errors are common and include things like eternal cigarettes that never seem to burn down, characters that miraculously heal from injury, or inexplicable wardrobe changes from shot to shot. Then there are out and out flubs like the famous stormtrooper hitting his head on a door in Star Wars. Anachronisms where cars, clothing, or technology of one era appear in different and inaccurate time periods, like Marty’s 1959 Gibson in 1955 in Back to the Future.
Adding cars into the mix allows for a proliferation of technical details to potentially go awry, as we’ll see below. Movies have a long tradition of getting cars wrong. It’s hard to keep track of the times we’ve seen cars driven backwards at 60+mph (Drive and Den of Thieves 2, just to name two off the top of my head), a single bullet explodes a gas tank, or a ’68 model year in a movie set in 1963. Below is just a sample of some of the many movie car errors immortalized on film.
Braveheart & Lord of the Rings – Extreme Anachronism
It’s one thing to have a car from one year appear too early in the fictional timeline, but cars in medieval times takes things to absurd extremes. Our first example comes from Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, set in 13th century Scotland. In one of the movie’s many rousing battle scenes a car can be seen behind the horses of a cavalry charge. Director Peter Jackson did his best to correct a similar error in the opening to his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Off in the hills of Hobbiton a car was roaming the background. Jackson wiped the car out digitally, but faint puffs of dust from the dirt road can still be seen in some shots.
North by Northwest – Taxi and Police Rides
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is a classic thriller most famous for Cary Grant getting chased down by a biplane. Despite Hitchcock’s virtuosity, the director left in more than a few errors, automotive and otherwise. One simple continuity error involves a taxi ride. Outside the Plaza Hotel in New York, Grant flags down a red and yellow ’58 Ford Custom taxi, when he gets out in front of the UN building, it’s a white and yellow ’57 Custom. In another scene, Grant has been arrested by the police. In the police car, Grant, the seasoned actor that he is, leans when the driver turns the wheel, only the less experienced actor playing the police officer next to him in the back seat doesn’t lean…until Grant knocks into him. Bonus: North by Northwest’s most famous error comes in the restaurant scene when *spoiler* Grant is shot. A boy sitting at a table in the background plugs his ears prior to the gun going off.
Vanishing Point – Challenger to Camaro
*Spoilers* In the cult thriller Vanishing Point, down and out former cop Kowalski is on the run from the law in his white Challenger. The movie’s climactic scene sees Kowalski drive at top speed into a pair of bulldozers. If you look closely though, you’ll see the car used in the shot isn’t a Challenger but a 1967 Camaro instead.
Smokey & the Bandit – ’76 Trans Am in Disguise
Smokey & the Bandit made icons out of both Burt Reynolds and the black and gold Pontiac Trans Am Firebird. While it may look like Burt is driving a new 1977 model year Trans Am the cars used in filming were in fact 1976 models as the new ’77 wasn’t out yet. In a bid to stoke excitement for the new car, GM sent the newly revised ’77 model front ends to the film’s production crew to swap onto the movie cars.
American Graffiti – Falfa’s ’55 Chevy
American Graffiti was George Lucas’s nostalgia-soaked looked back at the California car culture of his youth. The ostensible villain of the movie is Bob Falfa, played by Harrison Ford, who drives a black 1955 Chevy hotrod. *Spoiler* In the concluding race, Falfa’s ’55 Chevy flips into a ditch and explodes. When the car tips over you can see it’s an automatic transmission not a four-speed. The trunk also pops open during the crash but is then closed in the subsequent shot when the car explodes.
Bond Cars
With decades of James Bond movies going back to the 1960s, there’s dozens of different automotive errors we could have chosen but here are two of our favorites. The first is from Goldfinger, Odd Job takes a 1964 Lincoln Continental to the crusher and puts the resulting cube in the back of a Ford Ranchero. The problem should be obvious to anyone vaguely familiar with payload numbers, the ’64 Ranchero was rated to a max payload of 800 lbs. while the Continental weighed roughly 5,000 lbs. To make things even less plausible, the car was also supposed to also be carrying $1 million dollars’ worth of gold bullion in the trunk, which at 1964 prices would have weighed 1,959 lbs.
The next is a dozy of a continuity error in Diamonds Are Forever in which a 1971 Mustang Mach 1 balances on two wheels to sneak through a narrow alleyway. In the first shot, the car enters on its passenger side, but the exit shot has it balanced on its driver’s side. Either way, we love the “looks fake but isn’t” practical stunt, similar in that regard to the famous corkscrew jumping AMC Hornet in The Man with the Golden Gun.
DeLorean Time Machine Goes 88 mph
We all know that Doc Brown’s Time Machine in Back to the Future needs to hit 88 mph in order to time travel. Those familiar with the DeLorean DMC-12 also know that that car wasn’t capable of hitting that speed and, in fact, its speedometer only went to 85 mph. To account for this discrepancy, the production crew swapping in a different speedometer dial that went to 95 mph.
Twister’s RAM Metamorphosis
In the 1995 smash hit Twister, Bill Paxton drives a red RAM 1500 that magically morphs in different shots into a 2500 and even in one is badged as a 3500 V10. Chrysler had provided a slew of brand new ’95 model year trucks for production and they were used without much thought to continuity. Of the movie’s many scenes of destruction include several involving damage to the red RAM pickup which displays a Christine-like ability to self-heal, even from shot to shot, once repairing its windshield and coming out mostly unscathed despite driving through a house tossed about by the tornado.
No Country for Old Men – Ford Bronco that Never Was
The Coen Brother’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men isn’t short on detail. Like how to hide a million dollars in cash in a motel ventilation system (tent poles) or the best distraction for robbing a pharmacy (an exploding Mercury Zepher). One minor detail overlooked becomes glaringly obvious to anyone unduly obsessed with 1980s 4x4s. In the aftermath of a desert shootout, Josh Brolin’ Moss finds half a dozen bullet-riddled 4x4s and their former owners (also bullet riddled). One of those trucks is a 1981 Bronco oddly with both a blue oval and FORD across the lip of the hood. Of course, both the Bronco and F-Series traded the FORD for the center grille blue oval in visual updates for the 1982 model year, meaning there are no factory trucks with both. While technically an “error,” the truck in question is actually pretty cool as clearly a 1982 or later model with pre’82 hood.
Bullitt – Charger Respawning Hubcaps
Steve McQueen’s thriller Bullitt elevated itself from forgettable to indelible with the inclusion of one of the best chase scenes of all time and cat and mouse between a black Dodge Charger and a Highland Green fastback Mustang. The stunt driving is the stuff of legend, and the chase holds up to this day; all except the Charger’s uncanny ability to regenerate hubcaps. In numerous hard turns throughout the sequence, the Charger loses a hubcap. We counted seven in total, including two *spoiler* in the sequence’s final crash.
Tony Stark’s V8 Audi E-Tron
We all know how much billionaire Tony Stark loves to tinker so perhaps it makes sense when he rolls up in Avengers: Endgame in his Audi E-tron (an EV) it’s emitting a distinctive V8 rumble. Clearly Iron Man was into doing the opposite of an EV swap, right? That or the sound editor thought a faint hum wasn’t going to work on the big screen.
Wrong Year, Pal! Goodfellas, Indy 3, & Once Upon a Time…
Martin Scorsese’s Goodfella is about as perfect as a movie gets, so not to nitpick, but we clearly saw a 1965 Impala in a scene set in 1963. (Take that Marty!). Spielberg is likewise a movie-making giant, but Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade features a VW Kübelwagen while set in 1938, two years before the German equivalent of the jeep was developed.
The Fast and the Furious – Noss, Dual Nitrous, & 3 min ¼ miles
Obviously, we could do a whole article just dedicated to all the times the Fast & Furious franchise got something cringingly wrong. But for the purposes of this article, we’ll stick with the original. According to the movie’s technical advisor, Craig Lieberman (who also built some of the cars featured in the film), he offered copious notes for modifying the script to ensure the characters sounded like car guys. Many of those notes were ignored as when the Mitsubishi Eclipse’s engine bay is described as having a “cool air intake, nitrous fogger system, t4 turbo, AIC controller, direct port nitrous injection…” Two nitrous systems? Cool dude….
Speaking of nitrous, perhaps the most durable flub is when nitrous oxide is referred to as “Noss.” Prior to this, it was colloquially “nitrous.” After Paul Walker’s questionable line reading, it was forever after noss. As becomes relevant later on, nitrous oxide is, per the latter part of the name, an oxidizer which increases combustion under pressure, it is not, in itself explosive.
As improbable as a four-way drag race is, we found the time dilation of the movie’s set-piece race even less realistic. Those “ten second” cars sure take quite a while to make their quarter mile run, roughly three minutes of screen time. Despite the cringy dialogue and lack of technical accuracy, it’s hard to dispute the impact that The Fast & the Furious had on modern car culture.
