In reality, could a car explode? Yes.
But it probably would be more of a
little bit of an explosion
than more of just a straight-up regular fire.
Hello, my name is Tanner Foust.
I've been lucky enough to be a stunt driver
and race-car driver for just over 25 years.
I've had some world records,
including the longest jump in a four-wheeled vehicle,
the highest loop in a car,
and the fastest speed indoors.
Today we're going to be looking at car chases in movies
and judge how real they actually are.
That's one of the great things about sand,
is you can hit the brakes and stop so fast,
as the tires dig into the sand almost.
There's not a lot of quick response
other than braking in sand.
So you have to really be ahead of the car
and kind of start your process of turning,
start your process of accelerating early,
knowing that there's going to be a delay
before it really happens.
If they did have a driver in the car,
man, does that hurt.
A lot of times what they'll do
is they'll have a cable attached underneath the car.
It simulates as if the bumper
hit something and flipped over,
but really it's a cable that snaps,
and it really helps the car do a front flip.
I've done stuff like that before on a cable,
and the shock is really quite aggressive.
They have some tools that they can hook up
that will soften the blow a little bit,
but that looked like a hard one.
There are a couple challenges when you're driving
in the desert or driving in sand like this.
One is the visibility.
It can't be underestimated how horrible it is
to lose complete visibility, even for just a moment.
These aren't really built
and capable desert machines.
They're really kind of maybe put together for art
and also for some hydraulics and some action.
Sometimes even a Polaris RZR,
like a little buggy that's lightweight
with a huge amount of suspension travel,
can cover ground in the desert faster
than just about anything.
Trophy trucks, which weigh about
five times as much as a RZR
but also have five times the horsepower,
are quicker in a lot of scenarios,
but usually smaller, lighter
with a lot of travel is better.
But certainly the effects guys had a handful with this clip.
Pulling the top off of the car,
once it's off and you're in the sand,
it's not like asphalt,
where when metal hits asphalt, it skips and slides.
Once it hits the sand, that would've been something
you wanted to steer completely clear of.
And they would've had a lot of safety built around that.
Difficult to work in the dirt like that,
not just for visibility,
but if anything goes wrong
or when a car rolls in the dirt,
it's a much more violent roll than the asphalt.
A very small touch in the wrong place
could have a big injury.
I'd give it an 8.
That's a surprisingly dangerous scene.
One of my favorite things is to drive on the ice.
You can actually have a lot of control on ice
when you're going into it knowing how slippery it is.
You still have the same weight machine,
still has the same horsepower,
the same brakes and everything,
but you have very, very little grip
connecting you to the surface.
So you just have to really think ahead on the ice.
When the car flips over, it's quite aggressive,
gets a very big pop and a very big rotation.
Believable that it would come back and land on the tires,
not super believable that the driver wouldn't get whiplash
or his head wouldn't bounce right out of the window.
But the fact that it's ice means
that you're keeping your speed the whole time,
even though you're sliding on your roof.
In a straight line, you can go very, very fast.
80, 100 miles an hour.
But for a corner that maybe you could take
40 miles an hour in the dry,
you may have to slow down
to 5 or 10 miles an hour on the ice.
That to me looks like my version of Disneyland.
The colder the ice is, the more traction it has.
Once ice gets closer to melting temperature,
it gets more slippery once it gets a layer of water on it.
So the warmer the ice,
if you're going to use studs or spikes on the tires,
the taller they would need to be.
But it would be difficult to get traction
if they ever did have ice
with actually water on top of it.
So I imagine it was some sort of different surface.
Those are massive spikes.
So, in reality they would've been a third that size
at the very most.
If I had those spikes ready to go in tires,
I'd leave them out all the time
and just be digging away.
I think a lot of the dynamics
of them sliding around on ice were really beautiful
and done completely practically.
So I'd give it an 8½ for realism.
This brings back a lot of memories, I'll be honest.
Driving the 350Z right there, the gray 350Z.
Drifting is definitely not the fast way through a corner.
Certainly not as fast
as what a drifter would call grip driving,
which is what you normally see a race car
do through a corner.
It's really an expression, or an attitude, or a lifestyle.
It looks faster on film in a lot of ways.
When a car is sliding and making tire smoke,
it kind of equates to power.
All of these cars had such different traction
and such different power
that getting them to match up together
was actually a little tricky.
Bumps that you get in an urban setting
going through city streets,
over manholes, over crosswalks and paint,
make it a little bit tricky,
but I was competing in Formula Drift,
as was another one of the drivers that you saw there,
so we could get the cars very close together.
That was, like, 60 miles an hour
in reverse in that 350Z.
And that was one of the scariest things.
It doesn't look scary at all,
but that was one of the scariest things,
is going backwards that fast over bumps,
the car can really easily get chucked sideways.
"Tokyo Drift" for realism
I think is a solid 9½.
We loved bringing drifting onto the screen
as a bit of an underground sport turning mainstream.
Driving on narrow streets,
especially old European cities like this,
they have supersharp curbs.
Any little mistake is a wheel broken.
The driver has to be super precise when doing drifting
in tight quarters like that.
The car is very bespoke,
based on the Aston Martin DB5,
but the capability of the actual stunt car
needs to go higher than the stock DB5 would be.
In this case, they actually built a car from scratch
designed around the stunts that it had to do.
I know that they had to add traction to the cobblestones
because they were so slippery.
They actually spread a soda over those to make it sticky
and allow the car to have more grip.
It seemed to work, because the car moves really well,
slides around, and goes real fast on those cobblestones.
So, a car, to do that maneuver,
would've had a strong suspension,
possibly a skid plate in case it did bottom out.
When you come film in a place like that,
they would have to save the cobblestones
because those are historic things.
So they would've had to make sure the car was tall enough
that it didn't bottom out and scrape those stones.
And then it would've had to have a hand brake,
kind of like the emergency brake in your car
but much more powerful, so that when you pulled it,
it actually locked up the back tires.
And when the DB5 got to the bottom of the stairs
and slid the back of the car out,
the driver would simply lock up the back tires
to start the slide, let go of the hand brake,
and go to the gas and then have a nice beautiful drift
down those cobblestone roads.
Could you take a stock DB5
and drive it down those stairs? Sure.
Could you do the doughnuts? Probably not.
In order to do actually a traditional doughnut like that,
it needs a rear-wheel-drive car
with enough power to spin the tires;
wheel speed needs to be over 30, 40 miles an hour,
so that's over a couple hundred horsepower;
and have some sort of limited-slip differential
or something that's between the two rear tires
that doesn't allow one tire to spin freely
and the other one not to spin.
As the stunt driver,
it would've been a little difficult,
because once you are lost in the smoke
and having to drive out of it
without crashing into people or cars,
that would've been tricky.
Taking away from the machine guns in the car,
just the driving itself, it's done very practically.
So I'd give it an 8 out of 10.
You wouldn't really be able to flick it up
onto the two wheels.
You maybe could do that with a Jeep
or some sort of tall SUV with a higher center of gravity,
but with a performance car like this little Audi here,
you would need some sort of a ramp
to get it up on the two wheels.
It looks like it would've been tough to sell that speed.
Skiing a car is not fast.
And usually you're really only doing 25, 30 miles an hour.
There are guys that have world records skiing cars.
Maximum speed they can do is in the 30s.
It's really, really unstable up there.
The skill that the car needs to have
is it needs to not allow all the power
to just be lost on those tires that are in the air.
And then doing it this long,
you need to have fuel pickup in the fuel cell
or in the gas tank that is on the bottom side
so it doesn't just start
sucking air into the engine and kill the engine.
If you look just after the truck,
you actually see the car is kind of crabbing.
It doesn't really drive perfectly straight when it skis.
It certainly is not easy,
and very, very easy to damage a car
just by going a little bit too far.
Rally racing through the forest
is a big part of Audi's history, actually,
hearkening back to their old Audi Quattro racing days.
It's all good.
I haven't seen a car take a drop like that
and then just explode spontaneously.
If you had a stock car and sent it off of a cliff
and a gas tank were to rupture,
then you could ignite it.
In reality, could a car explode? Yes.
But it probably would be more
of a little bit of an explosion
than more of just a straight-up regular fire.
This sequence doesn't feel that real to me.
So I would give it a 6 or 6½.
Buddy: I got them, don't worry.
Being based in a video game,
I just love that they still had stunt guys
doing the real driving anyway.
In real life, you could dodge
those kind of obstacles that quick.
It's just that getting the timing right
would be almost lucky
and then doing it more than once
would not be that possible.
So the speed of the car is very realistic.
But the actual obstacles bouncing at him,
all of those were put in in post.
Driving up steep hills can be super tricky.
That's one thing you forget,
is when you're on a really steep incline,
you have gravity working with you
when you go to the brakes.
It's working against you when you're accelerating.
In this particular case,
I don't think they drove up a hill,
and all of the pitch and incline that you see
is just done from camera angle and from computer graphics.
That jump looked real to me.
Even the way the front bumper popped off
looked very realistic.
I actually had to call Brent Fletcher, the driver,
to see if the jump was real.
He said they didn't jump the car.
On realism, I'd give it a 6.
But because it is in a video game
and it's not supposed to be real, I'll give it a 7.
Benji: What are we gonna do?!
Uh ...
I love the fact that Tom Cruise and his hand movement
with the hand brake and the steering wheel
and where he's looking is all correct.
It's exactly what you would do in the car.
Gun!
Newer cars, like the one in this clip,
usually have a speed limiter in reverse.
Somewhere around 20, 25 miles an hour
will be the maximum they'll be allowed to drive.
But they would've done that just to get some
of those drive-bys at a realistic 40, 45 miles an hour.
Which in reverse is super, super fast.
Hang on!
That makes me almost want to be sick.
I don't think there was a driver in that car.
That's a lot of speed to carry
that much momentum in the air,
probably over 50, 55 miles an hour.
The risk is, when it jumps,
if it rotates over and lands on the roof,
that's just too much of a risk
to put actually somebody in there.
I would give it an 8.
It gets a high score because Tom,
I know he did a lot of the driving himself.
Ah!
Look at it!
The jump is ridiculously big,
and true to "Dukes of Hazzard" style
from the '70s and '80s,
all the actors do is just a little head bounce,
and then they're fine.
This was my first movie that I ever worked on.
There was nobody in the car.
They had 26 General Lees to launch,
and they just hoped one of them flew
and landed in kind of a realistic way.
Jumping a car is pretty hard,
because in the air you can't control much
about the attitude of the car.
Like, a motorcycle you can pitch quite a bit up and down,
because the weight of the tires is such a big percentage
of the overall size and weight of the bike.
With a car, it's not like that.
You can control a little bit in the air,
but it's more about how it takes off on the ramp.
The longer the ramp,
usually the better chance you have of flying
with the nose kind of up.
"Dukes of Hazzard," it was a whole team
of stuntpeople putting this together,
so everything was real.
Occasionally there wasn't somebody in the car.
I'd give it a 9½ out of 10 for realism.
Bandit: That's not good.
Pontiac Firebird Trans Am was not ideal off-road at all.
Just look at the exhaust pipes getting
peppered by rocks from the back tires
and hanging down behind the back tires.
But it screamed America at the time.
That landing looked rough.
He just hits it, and you can see in the shot,
that it looks like he comes up a bit short
and blows sand everywhere.
They didn't have a lot of technology built into the cars,
and they didn't hire race-car drivers to do the stunts.
They would sometimes just have to say, "This looks good,
the wind is coming out of the right direction,
and just do it."
So it was pretty gutsy, and it involved
a lot of just intrinsic experience know-how
to have a long career in stunts, which I respect.
That's a 10 out of 10.
If you think you couldn't see in dust,
that's the thing you don't even realize,
is that that is just completely blind.
No visibility whatsoever.
I imagine that they had something
keeping it on a specific line,
and that line of stuff would not be
solid enough to stop it.
I think it's all completely practical,
the way that that car dropped off of there.
But the front tires are suspended in air,
and the only thing holding the car up is the rear,
and the springs are pushing the rear of the car up.
So that's why cars tend to nose over.
The slower you're going,
the longer the back tires are by themselves.
The car was just going too slow to really jump flat.
Realistic to do all that in one?
With that big drop where the car probably endo'd?
Not very realistic.
There'd be an insurance conversation to be had for sure.
I think they had to piece this one together quite a bit.
For realism, I'd give this a 9.
I think my favorite movie car-chase scene, strangely,
is "Tokyo Drift." "Fast and Furious."
Having been close to that one
and seeing how many stuntpeople it took
to put together all those scenes where you're
in a car chase drifting through oncoming traffic,
it was incredible, I think,
what actually went out on-screen.
Thanks for watching.
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