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Actual crash test of a Pinto.
"Behind you, the car quietly bursts into flames. That's just the way it is with cars sometimes."
Any significant damage to a vehicle, particularly falling off a cliff, is liable to result in a large explosion even though real cars rarely explode. This is a subset of Stuff Blowing Up. Evidently, TV cars run on nitroglycerine instead of petrol.
Police cars in Hot Pursuit would do well to remember that Every Car Is A Pinto.
While cars are the most common, it seems that any form of transport has a good chance of exploding into a huge ball of flames and debris if it's shot at or wrecked. Aircraft, railroad locomotives, ships, pretty much anything bigger and more mechanically complex than a bread box. Sometimes, this happens to cars that are plunging off cliffs and haven't hit anything yet.
Since Star Wars, this trope has moved into space. Weapons cause aliens, spacecraft, even entire planets to explode like propane tanks. There are possible Techno Babble reasons for this, of course.
If the massive numbers of parodies and Lampshade Hangings in recent years is any indication, this is on its way to being a Discredited Trope.
The Pinto was a car put out by Ford in the early 70's. The gas tank was easy to damage in a rear-end collision and this often led to the damaged car going up in flames. Ford knew about the lethal flaw but decided fixing it was too expensive, leading to some rather infamous litigation that ended up costing them a good deal of money - but still less than the cost of a recall - and public relations clout. Make a "backfiring strategy" joke at your own peril.
It should be pointed out that not even every Pinto was a Pinto in this sense- 1971-76 coupes and hatchbacks had the above-mentioned defect; a fix was made beginning from 1977 (look for a heavy plastic shield between the gas tank and differential). The wagon model, with the gas tank farther from the rear bumper and a completely different filler neck, was no better or worse than any other small car from The Seventies.
This trope is often parodied: parodies generally ensure that there is a singular flying wheel. There is also a variation where the vehicle doesn't explode on impact, allowing the occupants to live long enough to see a trail of fuel flowing towards an ignition source.
Compare Made Of Explodium.
Examples:
Anime
- In Speed Racer, there was a car that flew off of a cliff in every episode, which exploded in a violent manner. Since racing is the whole point of the show, one would think that they'd have the tracks a little bit further away from cliffs.
- Or active volcanoes, for that matter.
- In the Mazin Kaiser OVA, Prof. Yumi and Roll inexplicably survive this without burns.
- In the Seto No Hanayome OVA. A tanker truck crashes into a building and doesn't explode immediately, but it does start leaking and has somehow caused a fire to start in the building. Eventually it explodes.
- Daryl Surat of the Anime World Order podcast mentions this trope in reference to the General's helicopter exploding in Baoh. If anything, though, this trope is justified in that the General shot an explosive round ("easily capable of destroying an entire troop carrier!") at Baoh, and Baoh simply caught the bullet and tossed it back at him.
- In the 42nd episode of Pretty Cure, a variation of this trope results from a bad guy pressing Cure Black's Berserk Button, leading her to destroy an entire subway car with her Battle Aura, making this instance Every Subway Car Is A Pinto.
- In Case Closed, one member of the shadow organization eludes the FBI by shooting out the gas tank of the other car aiming backwards via the side view mirror.
- Subverted in Gunsmith Cats: A villain drives off a raising bridge and her car explodes in midair. Two of the protagonists stare slack-jawed in amazement for a moment before suspecting that the third one had something to do with it. She smiles and shows that she's holding a remote detonator.
- Black Lagoon. Certain cars there will explode if they tip over.
- Subverted in the first episode of Code Geass. The truck the terrorists are driving only blows up when the driver pulls the switch to detonate it purposely, despite ramming into numerous objects and even falling through the floor of a subway tunnel.
Comic Books
- In the Don Rosa story "Guardians of the Lost Library", Donald Duck watches a succession of television shows that repeatedly feature the hero's transport catching on fire, be it a car, a speedboat, or even a horse.
- Lampshaded rather neatly by Cyclops of the X-Men. "Blowing up a car is a lot harder than it looks in the movies. Puncturing both sides of a fuel tank to draw in the proper amount of oxygen is a million-to-one shot. Thankfully, I'm a pretty good shot." And, kaboom. He then makes a mental note to send a cheque to the owner. The inconsistencies involving the nature of his Eye Beams (which is sometimes depicted as heat and other times as concussive) are not mentioned.
- While a purely concussive beam will not ignite gasoline, if the puncture was in line with a sufficiently hot part of the engine, or a live wire, all bets are off. And Cyke does have very good aim...
- In fact, in the X-Men Legends video games, you need to have either Cyclops or Storm in your party in order to weld in certain spots. Not exactly canon, but oh well.
- Used in the climax of Batman: Hush when the titular villain fires a single bullet at the Batmobile which promptly explodes. Justified moments later when Hush remarks that Batman hadn't noticed him strapping C4 to it.
- Since when does C4 explode from gunfire? Someone Did Not Do The Research I just did..
- First off, C4 can and does explode from impact trauma; Vietnam-era G.I.'s that used C4 to cook with found this out the hard way if they tried to stamp the fire out. Second, maybe Hush just used a detonator.
- Played straight, then subverted in a GI Joe issue where Scarlett, ordered to kill a Joe as a way to prove her loyalty to Cobra, shot a sniper round at them, but intentionally missed, hitting the engine compartment of their Jeep, which subsequently explodes, and two immolated Joes climb out of the car, staggar a bit, then collapse. It's later revealed to the reader that the Joes knew the shot was coming, had been wearing fire-protective gear, and exploded the car themselves in a Xanatos Gambit.
- In the Dark Tower comic, Alain blows up a large number of oil tankers by shooting them with a machine gun. In the books, however, this trope was averted; when Susan suggested that plan of action, Roland explained that crude oil isn't nearly as volatile as most people think.
- A large number of car crashes in the Tintin books fall into this trope.
Commercials
- A recent Domino's Pizza Commercial has a flaming crossbow bolt hit the delivery driver's car, which promptly explodes. The delivery person is surprisingly not upset by this turn of events.
Film
- Jerry Bruckheimer is a frequent offender.
- Directly subverted in Drowning Mona; title cards at the beginning even explicitly point out that every character in the movie drives a Pinto, and vehicular sabotage is a key plot point. However, none of them actually explode.
- They don't explode because they were Yugos, not Pintos.
- Repeatedly parodied in Last Action Hero. A man is thrown from a moving car into an ice cream truck which then explodes for absolutely no reason. Another car jumps off a bridge and explodes in midair, also for seemingly no reason. Additionally, when Jack Slater ends up shooting a taxi multiple times in the real world, he is quite surprised that it does not blow up and wonders about a world where all the cars are bulletproof.
- Also parodied in Top Secret! — an East German army vehicle is wildly out of control, until the driver realizes he's on a collision course with a Pinto that is inexplicably standing out by itself in the middle of an open field. In East Germany. (In a land of Trabants, the man with a Pinto is king?) Through dint of heroic effort, the driver wrestles his vehicle to a stop — almost. His front bumper ever-so-gently *pings* the rear bumper of the Pinto — the contact depicted aurally with a small bell — upon which the car promptly explodes and takes out both vehicles.
- Takes out the guards. La Resistance commandeer the Merc immediately afterwards and drive off in it (still burning). "You have to hand it to the Germans, they make great cars."
- In The Naked Gun, a car-chase ends with the pursued villain crashing his car into the side of a semi-truck. Explosion #1. Then, straddling the flaming remains of his vehicle, he runs into an army missile being towed on a trailer. Explosion #2. Now riding the missile, he plows in through the front door of a fireworks factory. EXPLOSION NUMBER THREE, as Frank Drebin unsuccessfully attempts to shoo away gawking spectators: "Move along! There's nothing to see here!"
- Towards the end of American Psycho (the movie), Patrick is involved in a shootout with the police. He shoots at them and misses, hitting their squad cars, which explode in a humongous fireball. Patrick just stares at his gun with an utterly confused expression, giving evidence that the incident was just another product of his insane mind.
- The Chase: Near the end, one of the main characters, wanting to show the police she's serious, shoots a landed helicopter with one shot from a 9mm handgun. It promptly blows up.
- In Total Recall, Arnie uses a taxi ("JohnnyCab") to flee from the bad guys. He has to sabotage the robotic driver, though, and drive the car himself. Once he arrives at his destination, he leaves the taxi, but the robotic driver shorts out and the car starts moving forward. It narrowly misses Arnie, then hits a wall at a very moderate speed and blows up. This has plot consequences, as the bad guys are informed a car has blown up and show up at the place, thus discovering Arnie is headed for Mars.
- The 1981 cheeseball movie Condorman contained a chase scene that may be the penultimate example of this trope. During the chase scene, the protagonists flee from a fleet of black sports cars driven by the KGB's vehicular stunt division (or whatever they are). Excluding the car driven by the leader of the pack (who survives for future encounters), every single car that receives any sort of collateral damage worse than a sideswipe explodes into flames. Instantaneously. In one case it explodes in midair, before any collision has occurred. Guess the director was impatient...
- In Deep Impact, the astronomer who discovers a comet capable of ending humanity races from his observatory to tell the world, only to run off the side of the road. On the very first bounce against the rocks on the way down the cliff, the car explodes in spectacular fashion.
- Averted in Terminator 2; the police cars hit by Arnie's minigun were surprisingly non-explosive. Those hit by his grenade launcher are another story.
- Earlier in the same film, the T-1000's hijacked semi-truck crashes headlong into a concrete bridge, ruptures its fuel tanks and explodes. This despite the fact spilled diesel fuel is not explosive. (As Myth Busters found out, you can't even light it with a blow torch.)
- Which is a shame, considering the production crew took the time to explicitly show the fuel spewing from the tank, and sparks zapping off the mangled electrical system.
- Averted in Pearl Harbor. A convertible driven by Rafe and Danny is strafed by a Japanese Zero, but it doesn't explode. Ironically, the Zero would have been firing a mix of tracer, incendiary, armor piercing, and high explosive rounds specifically designed to blow apart air frames and rupture gas tanks, so it's likely that the car really would have exploded in real life.
- Earlier James Bond films had this happen fairly frequently. Goldfinger has a moment where a car drives over a cliff and while it's just hanging in midair, it blows up in a spectacular fireball. Not after it hits anything, but when it's just about 15 feet past the cliff. This trope was abandoned fairly quickly in the series (except when explosives were concerned).
- In Die Another Day, when the hovercraft at the beginning collide into trees, they crumple up (as if they made of cardboard and tin foil) and burst into flames. They're driving over a mine-field, so things exploding with little to no warning does make a little more sense in that scene.
- This is justified in The Living Daylights with an exploding jeep that went off a cliff. The explosives contained in the rear were on fire previously.
- But not really, as modern explosives won't readily detonate in fire. They require a pressure wave from a detonator to explode. The detonator itself is usually electric and also won't explode spontaneously in a fire. But we will give them credit for trying.
- Parodied in Night At The Museum. The toy car that the two little model guys (A Roman soldier and a cowboy from the diorama room) are driving flips over a snowbank and inexplicably explodes. They're assumed dead until we see them all smoky and climbing the steps of the museum in time to not get turned into ash.
- In True Lies, a van carrying a group of terrorists is attacked on a bridge by Marine Harriers, leaving it teetering at the end of the destroyed bridge. The van finally tips over (with help from a little birdie), and barely hits the water before exploding in a massive fireball.
- Especially after it falls a whopping ten feet.
- Even worse in this movie, the scene where snowmobiles explode massively after hitting trees.
- This troper imagines that escape vehicles driven by evil terrorists would have explosives in them.
- The German Edgar Wallace Spoof Der Wixxer has a scene where two bicycles collide in mid-air (E.T. reference included) and explode.
- The sequel even features STAIRLIFTS exploding on impact.
- In Fools Gold, a small bike driven by Matthew McConaughey goes off a cliff and explodes in an absurdly massive fireball.
- Subverted, intentionally or otherwise, in the film Cherry 2000, when a gang of wasteland marauders pushes a captured van off a cliff into a deep pit. The mangled van crunches to earth, the camera lingers, and... nothing happens. Perhaps the FX crew's explosives failed to detonate?
- Meanwhile, at the end of the horror flick The Car when the titular vehicle goes over a cliff, it really blows up, belching forth a devil's head mushroom cloud.
- In this case, at the bottom of the cliff was a very large pile of dynamite.
- Played straight in the movie Always, (a remake of a earlier film called A Man Named Joe) - We see Richard Dreyfus - in a A-20 Havoc medium bomber-turned-firefighting-plane, mind you - make a impossible move to save a buddy's plane (a PBY Catalina), which has had a engine catch fire. He flies impossibly close to the buddy's plane, and dumps his tank on the on-fire engine, dousing it. We then see a shot of a flaming splinter imbedded in the Havoc's wing. The two pilots look at each other - then BOOM! Never mind that the A-20 was a medium bomber from WWII and designed to be able to survive bullets through the wing...one flaming splinter is all it takes to make the plane explode. From the fuselage, natch.
- In the chase scene in Hudson Hawk, an ambulance driven by the bad guys hits a mound of dirt and explodes in mid-air. Although, given this was a movie with a talking crucifix and David Caruso, one may think it's not to be taken seriously.
- Die Hard 2 had a plane crash and explode in a fireball... despite one of the reasons it tried to land in the first place was because it was running out of fuel.
- Actually, unless the plane has a fuel inerting system (which is still uncommon), an almost empty fuel tank is more dangerous, since the fuel vapors mixed with air are actually explosive, and there is less space for them if the tank is full.
- Ong Bak The Thai Warrior had a memorable chase scene involving tri-wheeled, golf cart-like taxis (Tuk Tuks), which explode rather dramatically one by one.
- Paycheck has a scene where the bad guys are in a car, chasing the protagonist on a motorcycle. The protagonist rides through a pipe to small for the car, and the car explodes in classic style on impact.
- John Woo, Paycheck's director, has used this trope a number of times in his career:
- At one point during the big shootout in the beach house from The Killer, Chow Yun-Fat's title character blasts the hell out of a car to cover the escape of his maverick cop partner and his love interest. Eventually, the gas tank goes up and the car goes kaboom.
- Chow Yun-Fat's Tequila blows up several motorcycles with what appear to be explosive shells from his shotgun during the big warehouse shootout from Hard Boiled.
- Blast up a vehicle badly enough in the game Stranglehold and it will go boom in classic John Woo style.
- Vanishing Point: Kowalski's suicide crash at the end. Not only does the car explode before hitting the roadblock, but the Challenger is replaced with a Camaro for the explosion.
- In Deja Vu, Denzel Washington drives the car with the bomb in it off of the ferry. Every car his car bumps into on the way off explodes massively.
- The infamous "Garbage Day" sequence from Silent Night Deadly Night 2 includes Ricky shooting at an approaching car. He punctures the radiator, and the car swerves to avoid him, hitting a ramp and flipping over. It flips back onto its tires and then explodes
 , starting with the passenger compartment.
- Averted in Hulk (the first big budget film, by Ang Lee), where the military vehicles smashed by the Hulk conspicuously fail to explode... although cynics might says this was a case of Never Say Die rather than attempted realism.
- Played arrow-straight by The Incredible Hulk (the 2008 film that didn't suck). In the final fight scene between Hulk and The Abomination, cars occasionally blew up in anticipation of being hit.
- The Last Boy Scout, has a car fall upside down in a pool before exploding. The villain aboard survives.
- Subversion from the original The Italian Job: All together now - "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"
- Also aversion later on, when the Minis are jettisoned. Only the last one catches fire.
- This Troper always thought they had some extra explosives left over from the heist, and simply stuffed them all in the last car with the fuse burning. What else were they going to them?
- If it happens in a film viewed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, you can bet they will comment. One of the most notable examples is in Space Mutiny in which two vehicles that can only be described as a cross between golf carts and floor cleaners crash into each other while doing speeds of about three miles an hour resulting in a huge explosion.
Mike: Wow, big explosion for a tiny electric cart.
Crow: Yeah he shouldn't have been carrying that case of cleaning fluid and nitroglycerin and gelignite in there.
Tom: Plus he microwaved an egg at the same time.
- Oddly reversed in Riding With Death, in which we are told that a truck is carrying a compound so unstable, that it could take out an entire town. When it finally does explode, it's relatively tame.
- The So Bad Its Good disaster movie The Swarm had one scene where an ambulance crashed through a plate glass window, at which point it promptly exploded.
- Justified in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The truck which Indy thinks Marion is in blows up after he knocks it over, but it was shown in a previous shot to be packed with explosives.
- The 747 at the start of Final Destination blows up in a very Pinto-esque manner only a few seconds after takeoff. The problem isn't that the sequence is impossible it's just that the NTSB animation of the real TWA 800 explosion is a million times scarier than the cartoon blow up in the movie.
- Not to mention the premonition in 2, where pretty much every car blows up. The only two I can't think of is the police car, which had a log smash through the windshield, and Cat's car, which I think just flipped after hitting a log. Apparently, Death likes his lightshows.
- Thunderbirds Are Go mixed this with Made Of Explodium—both the first Zero-X and the chopper on which the Hood escapes explode when they hit water.
- The trope is possibly referred to in the movie Speed; when Annie gets asked if she can drive the bus (which is wired up to explode if it drops below 50mph) she replies "Yeah, it's just like driving a really big Pinto."
- And it explodes like a really big Pinto, along with the plane it collides with.
- Which was filled with fuel in anticipation of a scheduled takeoff. It doesn't help that the bus was rigged with a bomb that, due to flagging sleep, was about to go boom anyway. Yay protechnics!
- In a scene cut from Iron Man, a small Humongous Mecha is hit by an expensive car and is knocked into a hydrogen-powered bus. The bus explodes. In the final cut of the movie, the bus explodes after that same Humongous Mecha fires a rocket into it, which is easier to understand. The second-to-last scene before the credits actually mentions the bus explosion in a stream of news text.
- Another exploding bus is found in the 2007 Transformers movie. Bonecrusher (one of the baddies) rollerblades THROUGH a bus, causing it to split in half and explode in flames.
- Though, the rest of the film seems to avert this trope. Any damaged car simply is smashed, and doesn't explode.
- Parodied and quite possibly justified in Undercover Brother where a pair of mooks drive a golf cart very slowly into some gas cannisters. There is a small delay, and then the whole thing explodes violently.
- Surprisingly subverted by The Blues Brothers. More police cars than actually probably exist in the United States and Europe combined are smashed and crashed with wild abandon, but they very rarely explode.
- Appears in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. When the research trailer and the SUV fall off the cliff, they both violently explode. Strangely, the SUV's explosion is actually bigger than that of the trailer.
- Justified in Carrie. When Billy and Chris' car explodes after rolling over several times, it's strongly implied that Carrie had made it explode.
- In the 2009 Made For TV Movie of The Last Templar, a rickety old pickup truck plows through a state of the art SUV causing the SUV to explode while the pickup truck emerges unharmed.
- MST 3 K showcases this in Escape 2000, vans explode in giant balls of flame after being hit by mere shotgun shells and pistol bullets. Not even high explosive rounds would do the amount of damage these bullets do. The trope even extends to a helicopter in the movie, as the hero Trash is able to blow it up with a regular pistol. At least American movies generally use high caliber bullets when they cause cars and helicopters to blow up.
- In the full-length film version of The Grinch, at one point the Grinch attempts to flee on a tiny car and ultimately spins out and crashes. Upon crashing the car, the Grinch flees from the inevitable giant fireball.
- In the classic Steve McQueen movie Bullitt, the iconic car chase ends with the villains' car suffering this fate. It was justified, however, because the car was forced off the road and ran into a row of gasoline pumps.
- In the WWII movie Where Eagles Dare a car bursts into flames in mid air and another does so just rolling down an incline before reaching the cliff, and it was rolling on its wheels.
- Averted in the Speed Racer movie. The cars constantly crash, jump, flip, smash, and attack each other while racing at insane speeds. only the most intense crashes (head-on into a solid structure at high speed) result in an explosion.
- Brazenly subverted in Duel. A tanker truck (with "Flammable" prominently displayed on the side), after attempting to ram the protagonist off the road for the entire movie, is itself run off a cliff. The protagonist runs to the cliff, waiting for the inevitable explosion. And... nothing happens. Fade to black, roll credits.
- Billy Madison: In one of the most well remembered scenes from the movie, the entire O'Doyle family is driving down the road chanting "O'Doyle rules!" over and over again. The car hits the banana peel that a guy threw out the window of a bus earlier in the movie, inexplicably causing the car to skid out of control and fly off a cliff (all while the family continues to chant "O'Doyle Rules!"). Though it isn't shown directly, the car inexplicably explodes in a loud explosion off screen.
- In Back To The Future Part III a steam locomotive gets its boiler supercharged to the limit of its pressure capacity and then explodes in a quite realistically violent manner after it goes hurtling off a cliff. Steam locomotives occasionally exploded spectacularly in real life, sometimes hurling pieces of themselves tremendous distances.
- Averted in the first film with the Libyans' van, which merely tips over after hitting the photo booth. On the other hand, this does create a bit of a Plot Hole, since the terrorists are treated as no longer being a threat after this even though they apparently survived.
- Averted in Woody Allen's Sleeper, wherein Woody Allen's character pushes a Volkswagen Beetle he'd used as a getaway car off a tall cliff into a lake to throw off pursuit. The car lands almost completely intact and the water turns out to be only a few inches deep.
- Averted in Blue Thunder, where several vehicles, including cars, helicopters, and jet fighters, noticeably fail to explode despite being
shot blown apart by the titular Black Helicopter's 20mm rotary cannon. This is possibly a result of Thou Shalt Not Kill on Frank Murphy's part, as the inhabitants of each vehicle are all shown to survive. The sole exception, of course, being Cochrane, whose helicopter blows up spectacularly in the climax.
- Played straight in the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan at the end when the wounded Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) defiantly empties his pistol into an oncoming German tank, which explodes in spectacular fashion. As Miller stares in wonder an Allied aircraft swoops overhead, revealing that the tank had been destroyed from above.
- Averted in the 2006 Bond film Casino Royale in the Miami Airport sequence in which a small tanker truck is rigged with a remote detonator, riddled with bullets, crashes through barriers, and nearly overturns under a large jet aircraft (spewing aviation fuel all the while) but never explodes.
- Several cars crash and improbably explode during the car chase scenes in Ronin.
- The Avengers. Mrs. Peel's car blows up after taking damage from attacking flying robot insects. Noteworthy in that the explosion takes place several minutes after the damage occurs and without any warning.
- Lampshaded in The Toxic Avenger IV. After the car flips into the air, Evil Kabukiman notes that American cars that flip into the air and crash down always explode. Evil Toxie and Evil Kabukiman get out of the car quickly and as noted, it explodes.
- A variation of this appears in Van Helsing, where a completely innocuous horse-drawn carriage is seen to explode.
- In Doomsday every car is a Pinto... except the Bentley.
- It's actually a surprise in Der Clown – Payday that only one police car explodes under machine gun fire, and that none of the police cars in the handgrenades on the Autobahn scene explodes upon impact on the tarmac.
- Parodied in Loaded Weapon 1, Colt and Luger both commandeer two bicycles, which promptly explode. Later the pair hail a taxi, which also explodes for no reason.
- Spoofed in the Affectionate Parody Blaxploitation film Black Dynamite, in which a car flies off a cliff and explodes long before it hits the ground.
- If you look close enough, the Corvette in xXx explodes a split-second before hitting the ground.
- The countless cars blown up by the helicopter-mounted Gatling are Truth In Television, though. Even the U.S. President's limousine would explode if shot with dozens of explosive rounds per second.
- Let's not forget Pinto snowmobiles and a Pinto boat. The latter should definitely not have anything explosive in its bow, would this be Real Life.
- In the movie The Great Raid, a truck operated by a Japanese soldier is hit with bullets as it is coming out of a garage. The truck bursts into flames. At the same time, Japanese soldiers quickly evacuate the back of the truck. A little bit of fridge logic makes you wonder why the Japanese soldiers were loaded in the truck that was parked in the garage.
- The Matrix Reloaded:
- The Rastafarian albino twins' SUV after Morpheus shot its gas tank on the freeway overpass.
- The two semi trucks after they collided on the freeway (apparently their diesel fuel spilled and ignited. So Yeah.).
- Trinity's motorcycle after she dropped it into the building.
Literature
- Parodied in a scene in the Discworld novel Soul Music, in which a horse-drawn carriage tumbles down a mountainside and explodes, after which — "because there are certain conventions, even in tragedy" — a burning wheel rolls out of the wreckage. Yes, the burning wheel is a consistent staple of the series.
- This trope occasionally turns up in pulp literature, proving (as though proof were needed) that modern genre writers, like modern movie-makers, gain much of their creative background from television, rather than real life, real literature, or real research. In one scene from a novel currently in the bookstores, the heroine is chased by bad guys on cross-country motorcycles. Not just once, but twice, a motorcycle hits a tree and explodes in a ball of fire. This would only be possible with a small motorcycle if the entire frame and both tires were full of napalm instead of air. Even then, it would probably need an igniter.
- The Humongous Mecha in Battle Tech novels explode, despite being powered by fusion reactors which in real life would shut down cleanly rather than going up as they'd no longer be able to sustain the nuclear reaction. The phenomenon is referred to as "stackpoling" after Michael A. Stackpole, who was particularly fond of it. (Ironically, fusion engines in the board game itself do not normally explode...except when explicitly using an optional rule intended to mimic the novels in turn.)
- This actually became such an issue it was discussed at length in a source book which vainly attempts to explain how this could possibly happen. If I recall one explanation was something like if the reactor was penetrated rapidly while still running air would get into it and then expand explosively... or something, honestly none of it really sounded very plausible and it came off as very Voodoo Shark'ish. In one particularly hilarious example they used they totally retconed one incident where some ships bombed a fusion reactor. (Which of course exploded like a nuclear bomb...) See what "really" happened was that the ships bombed the plant which had snow on the roof which then fell into a giant vat of liquid sodium that happened to be next to the reactor and THAT exploded like a nuclear bomb... Because that's way more plausible!
- Can be partially justified though, in that while the 'Mechs are fusion-powered, most often for heat reasons the weapons are NOT, and the ammo has to be stored somewhere...Battle Tech even allows for this in the rules by allowing players to use a item in their 'Mechs called CASE, which confines ammo explosions to the part of the 'Mech they happen in, rather than allowing the explosions to travel to (and damage) other parts of the 'Mech.
- The part about ammo exploding when the 'Mech is damaged is a case of Truth in Television, as this happens in Real Life when a vehicle that carries ammo gets too hot for whatever reason. The soldiers refer to this as the ammo "cooking off" in a vehicle on-fire. This is what contributed to the reputation that the Sheridan light tank had in Vietnam, where it was referred to as a "deathtrap" by the men who used it. A fifty-pound mine could penetrate the floor of the tank, and as the shell propellant was stored in bags instead of shell casings...well, when a mine hit it, it often was just too bad for the crew.
- Stephanie Plum is very hard on cars. She seems to get them shot up, wrecked, set on fire, or blown up approximately once a book (on average). Uncle Sandor's 1953 Buick, on the other hand, is seemingly indestructible.
- Lampshaded in the Jerry Ahern novel The Takers where the hero Josh Culhane (a writer of action adventure novels) witnesses his brother shotgunned off the road.
"His car went over the embankment and it caught fire. Big fallacy in movies and books like I write – cars don't always explode and catch on fire when they do a nosedive, you know but, uh, but his did..."
- Justified in Marooned In Realtime, when Della Lu reveals that she carries two tonnes of antimatter so that no one sane will attack her from close range. Brierson is skeptical of this strategy.
- John Dies At The End: The good guys shoot at a car's gas tank to kill some nasties. This simply puts a hole in the gas tank, and they have to light the gas manually.
- Parodied in Bill Fitzurgh's "Pest Control", whose protagonist actually drives a Pinto. When some armed assassins open fire on him, the narration notes they could save time and effort by simply rear-ending his car. They don't. The car is blown up, though.
- Harry Turtledove does this in his Alternate History WWII novels- there are multiple instances where truck convoys or civilian cars are set on fire by machine gun fire (which should just stop them or kill the occupants). Of course, as mentioned above, this also realistically happens when vehicles are strafed by fighters, which fire ammunition designed to turn Every Car into A Pinto.
Live Action TV
- This was a staple of cheesy 1970s and -80s action shows (TJ Hooker, Starsky And Hutch, etc).
- Babylon 5 has many notorious scenes where a spacecraft is hit, seems OK for a moment, then goes off like it was made of nitrocellulose.
- MythBusters throughly disproved this trope's real life existence when they shot up a car in an attempt to deliberately set off the gas tank — to no avail. In a later episode, they revisited the myth and were able to set the fuel on fire with a tracer round, though it still did not explode.
- That said, if they're investigating a myth where there's even the slightest chance of an explosion, they will go out of their way to make sure it happens one way or another. A semi accurate description of the show's practices is, "Let's try it again, only with 50 pounds of TNT."
- Later, in the Viewers Choice Special, they blow up a car the Real way (after having some hollywood fun). And the singular flying wheel can be seen bouncing and rolling back onscreen from the bottom right.
- In yet another episode, they try to detonate a gas tank from a burning trail of leaking gasoline (such as seen in movies like Payback), again to no avail. Even with a fire raging inside the tank, it refused to explode.
- And if the car's moving faster than about two miles an hour, the flame will never catch up with it.
- And in yet another myth (The Dynamite Cement Truck Myth) they use inadvisable amounts of dynamite to
blow up absolutely annihilate a cement truck.
- In a recent episode of 24, a helicopter survives the shockwave from a nuclear explosion to crash on the roof of a two-story house, intact. When it tumbles off the house, however, it explodes in a dramatic fireball.
- The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica averts this, showing many scenes of Vipers and Cylon fighters simply breaking up with a minimal explosion (from the missile warhead or explosive tipped ammunition). The most memorable example of this aversion is from the mini-series: Cylon missiles impact the cockpits of the new Vipers, which causes the pilot to be blown out to space, leaving the rest of the Viper more or less intact.
- Parodied in Doctor Who, 'The Sontaran Stratagem': The Doctor is actually disappointed when the autopilot in the car he's just jumped out of self-destructs with a tiny 'phut' instead of taking the whole car with it. According to The Other Wiki, the writer originally wanted to play the trope straight, but backed down to save money and lampoon the trope.
- At least one episode of Walker Texas Ranger, and probably more besides that, had a particularly bad instance of this: Walker confronts a car full of gang members by calmly walking out into the street, drawing his gun, and firing a single shot into the hood, setting it on fire and out of control.
- This happens in nearly every episode of the show, but one of the worst is when a villain, in making his getaway, barely so much as taps another car on his way out of the area, only for said car to explode spectacularly. What makes it worse, is that a few scenes later, Walker's truck survives a grenade exploding under it with the only damage being the front bumper falling off.
- That's because his truck runs on Awesome, which is, as we all know, non-flammable.
- Directly addressed and averted in an episode of Burn Notice, as Michael's Helpful Explanatory Voice-Over tells us: "Most people think that shooting the gas tank of a vehicle makes it explode. Unless the car is on fire, you'll just spill a few of bucks worth of gas. An explosion requires something extra... like a few bags of acetone peroxide taped to the gas tank."
- Then he proceeds to shoot the gas tank, put on his glasses, and do an Unflinching Walk away from the scene.
- Played with in an episode of Due South. Fraser and Ray (the second one) are driving a flaming car down the street— just go with it - and Fraser insists, "It's very, very rare that a car ever actually explodes." Two seconds later... the car explodes. Sort of.
- In the episode "The Man Who Knew Too Little," Ian (who is a compulsive liar) says, "Are you aware that the gas tank in this particular make of car explodes on impact?" Later, Fraser, Vecchio and Ian have two bad guys shooting at them and have only One Bullet Left to kill both of them with:
Fraser: When I was flipping through the service manual of your car, I discovered that your gas tank is only eleven inches from your rear fender.
Vecchio: You opened my manual?
Fraser: Only for three seconds. Now one bullet can penetrate the tank and spark an explosion.
Ian: I was right?
Vecchio: Yeah, and if you're lucky you can take that information to the grave.
- Lampshaded in The Listener, first episode. Title character says that cars don't explode when on fire, and then it did.
- In season one of Smallville, Clark manages to blow up a gas canister by throwing a screwdriver at it. No naked flames, no sparks, just a screwdriver. What. The. Hell.
- Every car Clark seems to come in contact with explodes for no apparent reason other than "it lookes real neat on camera."
- Subverted in Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia when Mac and Charlie try to fake their own deaths by creating a goodbye video and then trying to blow up the car they said they were in. They try speeding into a brick wall, shooting the gas tank of the car and even using a grenade to blow up the car, but nothing works.
- The X Files Season 4 Episode 12 - Leonard Betts' retreating car blows up after Mulder and Scully each shoot one bullet in its general direction. Admittedly Betts was trying to fake his death, but there's no mention of the car being packed with fuel cans or something.
- Alarm Fur Cobra 11, every episode.
- In an episode of Scrubs, the Janitor bets his van against Cox's sports car that he can get a date with Elliot "Blonde Doctor" Reed. Cox only accepted the bet for the joy of destroying Janitor's van in front of him. When Cox eventually wins the bet he ties a brick to the gas pedal and crashes the van into a wall. Ted assures the Janitor that the damage is minimal and it can easily be fixed when the van explodes spectacularly.
- Also, in the episode My Unicorn, while on a model plane field, Matthew Perry's character dive-bombs his plane at JD, causing it to crash and not only burst into flame, but explode.
JD: "What an odd sized explosion."
- Tle Listener, first episode. In the first 4 minutes
- Look out! Cliff!
- Variant in Bang Bang It's Reeves And Mortimer: one of the more surreal recurring sketches (and that's really saying something) involved the duo in a car where, at some point, Bob would hit a button that made the bonnet and boot lid blast off into the air - when they landed in a field, they would then detonate in absurdly large explosions.
Tabletop Games
- The rules of Diana Warrior Princess clearly state that every vehicle "going down" explodes and catches fire, even submarines.
- The new World Of Darkness provides rules for both regular vehicular damage and "dramatic" vehicular damage. Cars are far more likely to blow up in the latter case.
- Warhammer 40000 has every tank being a Pinto. Assuming, of course, you shoot it with a railgun.
- Assuming, of course, you get the dice rolls to destroy it. And even then, you might only damage it. Tanks like the Leman Russ and Land Raider have reputations for being hard to destroy for a reason, you know.
- Vehicles in Paranoia will do this if the GM thinks they should. Of course, in Paranoia, even the shoe polish is Made Of Explodium, so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.
Video Games
- The cars in many racing games explode on impact. Pole Position is especially famous for this, where running into a billboard or even clipping an opponent's tire turns your car into a fireball. Pole Position II carried this a step further, with car parts spewing out of the exploding wreckage.
- The Grand Theft Auto series of games fulfills this trope nicely, in that every vehicle will explode when damaged enough, even if it's from a guy standing on top of the car and stomping on the hood. Later games allow for cars (and trucks, motorcycles, helicopters, tanks, and anything else with a motor in it) to explode instantly if shot in the gas tank, and even a completely undamaged car will explode if it rolls onto its roof. Though maybe this is why there is little heat from the owners when you rob them of their forms of transportation. All wheels vehicles tend to spontaneously lose at least one wheel.
- If you are able to steal a tank in GTA III (and other games of the series as well) even grazing a nearby car at relatively low speeds causes enough damage for the car to explode on impact. If you can call it that. More like touching. The tank, on the other hand, remains unaffected. Great fun for driving down highways in the wrong direction.
- It should be noted that a tank will eventually explode from damage. They're not invulnerable, they just have extremely high endurance.
- In GTA: San Andreas, shooting a car or bike's gas tank cap will cause it to explode, which is ridiculous because the tank is almost nowhere near the cap (not that the tank itself will explode if shot). One of the cars exploded when you shot its rear license plate - the Real Life car it was based on had the filler cap behind the rear plate.
- Oddly, in SA, driving a car over a hundred foot cliff does nothing...if it lands square on all four wheels. But, as noted, one bullet to the cap...
- Averted in GTA IV. Now when a car suffers massive damage, the engine just dies and grinds to a halt. Cars still explode if you shoot them, though.
- It seems to require large amounts of damage being done to the car’s engine, which makes sense. It IS possible to make a car explode by crashing it but chances are the engine will cut out long before you do enough damage. This is noticeably prominent in certain missions however, where the cars of your foes appear to be made out of C4 and cardboard for dramatic effect.
- One of the most ridiculous examples is in GTA III, where a typical M16 Assault rifle can destroy almost any vehicle in as little as 3 to 4 shots.
- GTA 2 had cars exploding quite nicely after sufficient damage, too. One of my favourite tricks was to invoke the invincibility cheat code, get a LOT of cars together, and ...
- One should exercise caution when firing near vehicles in the Hunter The Reckoning series of games. Stray gunfire can easily set off the many abandoned cars.
- In the Burnout series, crashes and explosions are integral to the game. "Crash Junctions" challenge you to cause as much damage as possible by plowing into traffic. Starting with Burnout 3: Takedown, certain junctions have explosives strategically placed, making your car explode and creating even more havoc if you can hit them. Once enough cars have crashed, your car can explode yet again. Burnout: Revenge carries the idea even further; when your car crashes during a race, a perfectly timed explosion can turn the tables on a rival. Note that you get to STEER your burning wrack in mid-air because Burnout is just that awesome.
- Burnout Paradis allows you to turn any stretch of road into a Crash Junction. Simply turn on Crash mode, and your car will suddenly flip into the air and begin running into crap. Even worse, most of the stuff you can run into will have at least minor explosions, but god help you if you run into a bus or a tanker truck.
- In the Halo series, various armored military vehicles will spectacularly explode when they suffer sufficient damage from gunfire or plasma weapons; in Halo 3, it is even possible to make heavily-armored battle tanks explode by simply boarding them and punching them several times.
- Which is handwaved by giving Master Chief enough Super Strength to turn a person's skull to mush with one punch, and then giving him Powered Armor which amplifies the wearer's strength tenfold. While Master Chief might be able to tear a tank apart with his bare hands, his fists shouldn't be high-explosive weaponry.
- There's also the part where he can flip aforementioned battle tank over with all the fanfare of flipping a coin, without so much of a sound. In fact, in Halo 3 if you manage to get one of them upside down(no small task), you can flip the massive 'Elephant' troop carriers that appear on several maps, which often ends with them hilariously dancing around as they bounce off of terrain. Of course, the elephant flipping is somewhat less than canon. Even the prompt message in the game says something to the effect of "Press X to... Wait, what? How'd you do that?"
- In fact, if MC is killed while in a vehicle, it will often suffer Critical Existence Failure and explode, no matter what cosmetic shape it is in.
- Cars in Scarface: The World is Yours follow this trope, probably due to its GTA roots. Oddly enough, boats also suffer from Pinto Syndrome.
- Every vehicle in Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction has a health meter; when it's reduced to 20%, it automatically starts losing health, giving off flames and flashing and sending everyone nearby running for cover. Once it hits 0%, boom. Exploding vehicles deal splash damage, and thus you can even set off chain reactions if you weaken its neighbors enough. The sequel will reportedly use a more realistic damage system.
- It doesn't. Somewhat annoying when you are just trying to use a light vehicle to get to places quickly...
- For real fun in the first game, turn on God Mode, shoot a car enough to get it to that 20%, then quickly climb inside. Your invincibility will extend to the car, allowing you to drive a giant bomb around for pretty much as long as you want, until you ditch it at something at high speeds, bailing out at the last second.
- Every whole-looking car in Call Of Duty 4 's multiplayer is apparently packed to the rafters with explosives. Enough damage to a vehicle will cause it to burn, then violently detonate. (Inflicting a great deal of damage, such as with grenades or other explosives, makes it skip straight to the 'sploding.)
- In FEAR Extraction Point, there are times when hitting a car in any way, be it gunfire or punching, will immediately cause it to explode. Since it doesn't happen consistently, it could possibly be just a bug.
- Every machine that gets destroyed a Super Robot Wars game explodes dramatically; even units that are ostensibly biological rather than mechanical explode when destroyed.
- Subverted slightly in more recent games. In Super Robot Wars Z, for instance, each individual unit has its own "dying" animation. Biological units now bleed, pop, melt, or whatever it is they do when they run out of hit points.
- The racing game based on The Phantom Menace was a pretty good racing game, where blowing up your vehicle was fairly easy to do. Don't worry, it's just a brief time penalty.
- Thoroughly subverted in Need For Speed. The cars in that game are indestructible, and so is the major scenery. If you hit a street sign, you tear it out of the ground, but if you hit a railing or a lamp-post, you stop right there.
- Most Wanted and Carbon, however, play it to some degree: damaged squad cars don't explode, but they do puff out black smoke.
- Despite a general scarcity of explosive weapons in Supreme Commander} (assuming UEF gauss cannons are simply kinetic-energy weapons and the various Aeon energy weapons are non-explosive), every unit and structure in the game goes out with a bang. Particular units helpfully tagged as "volatile" explode in an area of effect detonation.
- Possibly justified, actually. Unit health is designated as the units' armor, and the explosion could be the units' reactors suffering critical failures.
- Unfortunately, wall segments do it too. In a bright white flash. I think they were just too lazy to implement other explosion types, like "dust cloud".
- In Van Helsing, a horse-drawn carriage containing nothing but a bundle of stakes falls off a cliff and explodes — not just explodes, but a very "leaking combustible liquid" fire ensues. Cracked Magazine points out that, "If horse-drawn carriages could explode like this, well, for one thing Oregon Trail would've looked a whole lot more like Grand Theft Auto."
- It wasn't just a bundle of stakes. It was pretty clear the bundle was rigged to explode beforehand. Also, the carriage was already on fire because the lanterns were knocked over before it went over the cliff.
- There's an infamous part near the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl where you can make an Armored Carrier explode by stabbing it with a knife. Once.
- To be fair, the knife does a ridiculous amount of damage, and the APC is one of the only remaining drivable vehicles in the game. (They were cut because of bugs like this.)
- Works on helicopters too, if you can get high enough.
- In Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic The Hedgehog (the 2006 version for PS 3 and Xbox 360), whenever Shadow is in a vehicle that tips over, it simply lays on its back for a few awkward moments, then summarially explodes in a (reasonably tiny) fireball. Shadow is, naturally, unharmed as long as he has solid ground beneath him. Likewise, there are several moments in Sonic the Hedgehog where vehicles will explode for no apparent reason, such as a speedboat that blows up violently upon performing a ramped jump and a motorcycle that spontaneously explodes should Robotnik get too far away or past a certain point.
- The Simpsons Hit and Run, though a good Crazy Taxi clone, ups the ante with ANY vehicle being set to explode at some point.
- Golden Eye 007 does this for literally every object in the game. Boxes, chairs, televisions, computers, cameras, toy model helicopters, and just about anything else can and will explode when shot enough. Oh and of course cars are naturally blown up here as well. Wait, even toy model cars explode!
- This is even more absurd when you comparing to the work that inspired it: in the movie, cars are brutally smashed when the tank runs over them, but don't explode. In the game, just touch a car with the tank and it blows to smithereens.
- Everything in Starcraft blows up when it dies. Everything. Every Terran and Protoss building or vehicle (even SCVs and Probes) exploded either red/orange (Terran) or blue/white (Protoss); biological units might as well have, for all the blood involved. About the only exceptions were Zealots (Protoss soldiers in armored suits), which turned into little blue flares, and Dragoons (giant-spider Mecha), which cracked open when they died. Heck, if you killed a worker unit while it was carrying resources, the Vespene containers or minerals would go up in their own explosion.
- This troper specifically remembers that Terran units from a Barracks simply collapsed into a pile of blood... and remembers being really surprised that the Zerg drones exploded.
- Crysis make no effort to avert this trope. Most of the time. Wanna know the best way to get rid of the KPA cheap knock off of a hummer? Shoot one single bullet in the gas tank on the rear side. Wait 5 seconds. Boom. However, if you shoot the mounted missile launchers of a helicopter, it will only make a tiny explosion, and the helicopter will still be able to shoot you missiles. Nonsense at its best.
- Furthermore, your meathead marine can, like Master Chief, punch vehicles to fiery explosions, including boats.
- Lampooned in Escape from Monkey Island when a wooden catapult rolls backwards off of a cliff and explodes in a fireball.
- Just Cause loves this one. Vehicles explode if you so much as look at them funny.
- In Fallout 3, you'll find cars that explode with a mushroom cloud effect. Though the cars do run on nuclear power, any really big explosion, nuclear or non-nuclear, will produce a mushroom cloud. So in this case it's instead justified by the Rule Of Cool.
- What makes it worse is that the AI likes to use these nuclear deathtraps as cover.
- In Red Steel on the Docks multiplayer map, shooting the car with anything, anywhere, three times will make it explode and kill anyone unfortunate enough to be close to it.
- In the Arcade game Point Blank, one of the challenges is to unload 60 to 100 rounds into a parked car in approximately 15 seconds. Depending upon where you shoot the car, the windshield will break, tires will go flat, door hinges will break, and the hood will be blown off. And how do you know that you've successfully completed the challenge? The car explodes...
- And your index finger has fallen off and your G-Con trigger is knackered.
- In Far Cry 2, vehicles will take damage, resulting the engine smoking white, and then black, as well as noticeably performing worse. If, however, you leave the engine alone while it's spewing black smoke, eventually it will catch on fire. At that point, you have about ten seconds before it goes boom. Oh, and don't forget about shooting things with rockets or tossing grenades in the bed of a truck.
- Vehicles in Total Overdose, as in most driver-shooter sandboxes, will explode if sufficiently damaged, usually after a warning flickering of flames. But leaping from a vehicle in motion makes it instantly explosive on any collision, even if the vehicle has coasted to a near stop before tapping its bumper on anything.
- In the Battlefield Series, every single vehicle explodes when it suffers enough damage, turning into a blackened wreck, and then that explodes into tiny bits after it either suffers enough damage or stays there long enough.
- The Saint's Row series. Any car can become a super-heated shrapnel dispenser, even if it is shot with the weakest pistol in game.
- This troper suffered from a glitch in Saint's Row that caused vehicles to explode on contact with anything.
- True Crime: Streets of L.A. featured this, but not only in the form of cars crashing and the like: the protagonist can receive training which makes him an exceptionally good shot. Following this training, when aiming at the rear license plate the targeting reticule will turn red. If you fire, the car instantly explodes, killing everyone inside.
- Oddly, if you were in a mission that required the driver to survive, they would be unhurt in the following cutscene.
- All of the Jak And Daxter games feature vehicles that explode. (One mission in the second game even let you bring down special upgraded enemy flying tanks simply by crashing your car in the appropriate place to cause a chain reaction).
- Particularly annoying in Borderlands, due to the lethal combination of terrible driving controls (you can only steer by moving the camera), being very vulnerable to the explosion's damage, the vehicles being extremely fragile, and the "exit" animation taking a good full four seconds until you regain control, during which you're just as vulnerable to the potential explosion. In the second playthrough, they're really only useful for transportation; if you don't bail out the moment you start taking damage, you will be either killed or left vehicle-less at the very least.
Webcomics
Web Original
- In "Ayla and the Late Trevor James Goodkind" in the Whateley Universe, Phase specifically points out that gas tanks don't explode for real, like they do in movies. Just as the mutant supervillain blasts the car beside Phase and its gas tank explodes, blowing Phase across the street.
- Happens on one memorable occasion in Survival Of The Fittest - whereupon a car is crashed into a warehouse by a contestant and proceeds to explode a few seconds later. Bonus points for this causing the building to go up in a gigantic fireball too. However, it is otherwise averted.
- Mainly because the game takes place on a deserted island. This is the only occasion when cars are even used, except in the pregames, where cars appear frequently and are treated realistically.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons has parodied it many times, including an exploding milk truck and a Gremlin driven by Hans Moleman... which coasts to a stop and doesn't hit anything, but still explodes. And it's not just cars, either. At least one episode had an empty shopping cart run into a tree and burst into flames.
- In another episode, Bart claims the ridiculously run down and unsafe school bus they are in is "much better than the old bus". Cut to said bus completely immobile on some bricks only to burst into flames when a leaf falls on it.
- In yet another episode, Chief Wiggum is wearing a costume that resembles a giant beer mug to catch drunk drivers coming out of the Duff brewery tour. He is shortly thereafter knocked over, rolls down a hill, comes to a stop against a tree and then explodes.
- Then there's Homer drunkenly driving his car through soccer goal posts, which promptly explode about 5 seconds later...
- The South Park episode "Cartoon Wars" features a scene where Kyle's tricycle is driven off a cliff. The tricycle then bounces over rocks all the way down, hits the bottom... then explodes.
- Family Guy did an obligatory parody, in which Meg races a man on a horse drawn carriage. The man loses control on a sharp turn and crashes through the guard rail. The carriage bursts into flame and the horse lands upright, notices what happened to the carriage, and flashes a nervous look to the viewer just before he too explodes.
- We never find out whether said horse was a pinto, however.
- It would have been obvious if it had been. Looks like they missed that joke. Or it's possible they just didn't have the extra animation hours/money to make it that way when they finally did realize the joke.
- Taken to its extreme in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, wherein any object tossed on the ground, even gently, will explode in a fireball. This occurs so often that the characters in the show don't even notice it when it happens.
- In Gargoyles, it was almost easier to count the number of plot-relevant vehicles that did not explode on impact. A motorbike exploded and burst into flames from a fairly slow impact with a wall in the opening arc of the series, and not long after a motorcycle exploded violently after being shot in the front fender.
- Parodied in one episode of Sponge Bob Square Pants, where Squidward explodes after he falls off his bike and tumbles down a cliff.
- Futurama repeatedly parodied the science-fiction version of this trope, of course. With giant space bees, amongst other things.
Real Life
- Space shuttles and rockets during the takeoff phase tend to blow up when their fuel tanks are damaged. Thankfully, so far, Challenger has been the only US example that killed anyone.
- Space Shuttle Columbia was lost because it was travelling about Mach 3 when, because of lost heat tiles, some of the aluminium frame melted or lost strength. Air at Mach 3 is very very hard if you are not streamlined... It wasn't the fall that killed them, it was that sudden midair stop...
- Note that unmanned rockets are usually fitted with self-destruct charges so that the Range Safety Officer can deliberately blow them to bits if they go off course. So any rocket malfunction which doesn't make the rocket explode... gets the rocket blown up.
- Manned rockets also have self-destruct charges. In the Challenger accident, after it broke up (much like Columbia, it was the aerodynamic forces that destroyed the vehicle, not an explosion), the solid rocket boosters continued flying separated from the vehicle, and the RSO had to blow them up.
- All rockets, being designed to operate outside of the atmosphere, carry both fuel (say, hydrogen) and oxidizer (say, liquid oxygen). The two components are picked BECAUSE they burn together very very hot. Bad consequences if they mix and ignite in the wrong place (outside the engine) or at the wrong time. This has happened to every sort of rocket, from the pre-V2 rockets of both Robert Goddard and the VfR in Germany, to modern satellite carriers. Worse, some of them can use "hypergolic" fuel/oxidizer chemicals, which means they ignite themselves when mixed. One bad valve and FOOM!
- The Me-163 Komet was a rocket powered interceptor in World War 2 that used hypergolic fuels. These occasionally exploded on landing. And sometimes on takeoff.
- Soviet SLBMs and ICBMs used a Hydrazine derivate and N2O4 as hypergolic fuels - leading to at least one accident: when a SSBN's silo was flooded with seawater, traces of N2O4 reacted to nitric acid which damaged the fuel tanks. Just search for K-219 or Hostile Waters.
- Not only were hypergolic fuels used in Soviet ICBMs, some of the fuel components were also corrosive - a fact that, in combination with Poor Communication Kills led to the event known as the Nedelin catastrophe, claiming the lives of some 100 Soviet rocket engineers and military dignitaries.
- The TSA ban on carry-on liquids and gels is in part a precaution against homemade hypergolic bombs, following the discovery of a plot to use them on airplanes.
- This car blew up upon being hit by a train.
- In an episode of Americas Funniest Home Videos (AKA The Show Where The One Clip Of The Cute Little Kid Beats The Actually Funny Clips Every Time,)) a model airplane crashed and tumbled to a stop. There was a second-long pause, and then it exploded.
- Not having seen the video, it was either rigged to explode or using a toy rocket engine, probably running on nitromethane.
- The early versions of the World War II era M4 Sherman battle tank gained grim nicknames like "Tommycooker" (after a type of field stove and the fact that British soldiers are sometimes called "tommies") or "Ronson" (after a brand of lighter that, according to advertisements of the era, "Lights up the first time, every time!") because of their Pinto-esque tendency to burn up when hit by high-velocity rounds.
- All the early American tanks used gasoline (instead of diesel) engines, because it was easier to get them from Detroit. Most of these early tanks served with allied nations before the US joined the war, and many earned reputations (and nicknames) years before the US Army actually fielded them.
- In the early Sherman types' case, it was a combination of being gasoline-powered, and having badly placed ammo storage. A modification to 'wet storage' of rounds (basically that damage to the ammo store would flood it, preventing fire from setting the ammo off) caused a dramatic drop in crew deaths.
- Plus the adaptation of M1 Abrams with a heavy duty door sealing off the rounds when not firing and exterior panels which blow off should the ammo detonate, instead of sending the blast into the cabin.
- This troper remembers seeing one of those "REAL LIVE COP CHASES!" shows which featured a clip about a nutcase who managed to hijack a tank and drive it through a town. While total destruction did ensue (the various cars, objects, and in one case a mobile home/trailer which got in the tank's way were completely shredded without slowing it down one tiny bit), nothing actually exploded when it was intercepted by several tons of tank.
- While this trope does occur in real life sometimes, it is very rare. Sadly, Hollywood has convinced the public that it is extremely common and that crashed cars are in danger of exploding at any moment (typically, the instant the hero throws himself to the ground). Every year, dozens of car accident victims are injured further (sometimes to the point of paralysis), not by the car exploding, but by other people pulling the victim out of the car because Hollywood has taught them that cars explode and victims must be pulled out as soon as possible. DO NOT REMOVE AN ACCIDENT VICTIM FROM A WRECKED CAR UNLESS THE CAR IS ACTUALLY BURNING!
- Sometimes not even IF the car is actually burning. If a car is burning, it's usually burning at or near the engine. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't burn between the engine and the seats, including, y'know, the engine itself. (Not that I know anything about medicine, just cars.)
- It's also worth mentioning that several people get killed because they refuse to wear seat belts because of the "explosion hazard".
- The pervasion of this trope leads many people to be killed when they exit their crashed vehicle under their own power (fearing the explosion) and then get run over by other traffic. Once again kids, stay in the vehicle unless it's on fire.
- Some Truth In Television: This troper has seen many videos of race cars crashing and exploding into flames. Most spectacularly, nitromethane-powered dragsters.
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