"If it violates the laws of God and gravity, they did it twice."
— Aimes, Fast X
This page is for pointing out artistic license taken with the laws of physics and cars (and occasionally chemistry) in The Fast and the Furious film franchise. Typical tropes like Every Car Is a Pinto, Car Cushion, or Soft Glass do not need explaining. Remember, this is a work of entertainment, not a documentary.
This page is an ongoing project. Please make sure to put entries in the right folders and avoid over-generalizations, as well as accede where the physics are correct. More specific breakdowns would be appreciated.
Examples:
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Series-wide
- As this video
points out, the way Nos is depicted is completely inaccurate. It makes cars go a little faster, but that's about it. Any depiction of the world getting blurrier or "hitting lightspeed" is artistic license. - In the later films, the luxury cars take a lot of bullets over the course of a chase. At the least, they should be covered in holes. At worst, the bullets should've penetrated the cabin and hit a lot of things or people. However, one of the characters getting killed by a stray would be a pretty boring ending, so it's understandable. The only exception are the armored cars, since they're made to withstand gunfire.
The Fast and the Furious
- During his first race, the computer hooked up in Brian's car warns about the exhaust manifold... and then bolts start flying out of the floor plate instead.
- Dom tells Brian that he should be "double-clutching", which is a technique that is only meant for the crash gearboxes on tractors and really old cars (manual transmission cars were still in existence and being made in 2001) and a car like a rx7 even the US (The last approved of this car in US in 1995) would have been 6 years old at the making of this movie, making a totally possible for someone you would be using it.
- Dom warns that a flaming car is about to blow up by yelling "Nos!", but Nos is actually non-flammable, which is part of its usefulness. The car should be LESS likely to blow up than a typical Hollywood car.
2 Fast 2 Furious
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Fast and Furious
Fast Five
- The vault-dragging scene is actually more plausible than you'd think, as they actually did build a physical vault out of polymer with a plastic coating to drag through the streets for filming. However, this was probably one-fifth the weight of the actual vault.
- Rescuing Dom from the prisoner transfer bus. Brian drives in front of the bus, steps on the brakes, and gets rear-ended by the bus. However, instead of Brian's car getting wrecked and launched forward by the much bigger bus (that was also moving much faster) the bus gets flipped over instead, as if it had gone over a ramp instead of colliding with a car.
Fast and Furious 6
- Dom catches Letty by driving his car into a guardrail and launching himself upward and forward with the resulting force. However, a stop like that is more likely to propel you downward, to say nothing of the guesswork required to correctly catch someone else midair while THEY'VE also been propelled at high speed.
Furious 7
- Dom gets away with crashing into Deckard Shaw's car full-force in a game of Chicken with just a few bruises. The reality of two cars hitting each other head-on at 80+ mph might look a little different.
Fate of the Furious
- Agent Hobbs, moving a Submarine Torpedo, on ice, with his bare hands, while hanging from the side of a missile truck. Not only is it very improbable for a torpedo to slide on ice in the first place, but then Hobbs moves it. With his bare hands. It cannot be properly expressed how dumb this is and how it would never work in real life.
F9: The Fast Saga
- Electromagnets powerful enough to pull cars towards them are ... rare. A naturally occurring magnetic material can't pull much more than ninety pounds, and electronically activated magnets start disrupting electrical fields when they get too strong.
