Advertisement
BBC TopGear
BBC TopGear
Subscribe to Top Gear newsletter
Sign up now for more news, reviews and exclusives from Top Gear.
Subscribe
Gaming

The most iconic cars from Need For Speed games, past and present

Prepare yourself for more wide body kits than an Essex car park - we’ve assembled racing game royalty

Need For Speed BMW M3 GTR E46
  • Need For Speed

    For the longest time, there were only three certainties in life: death, taxes, and a pretty decent new Need For Speed game every winter that’d arrive just in time to top the gaming charts for Christmas. Multiple generations of us grew up with the series, delighting in its powerslides and cop chases, not to mention all the spoilers we could whack on the back of a custom-painted, flip-flop orange and lime green Civic.

    It’s slowed down in its latter years, has old grandfather Need For Speed. The most recent release was Unbound in 2022, and before that it was Heat in 2018, with a remaster of Hot Pursuit to tide us over in the interim. But it still feels at the heart of the genre, and that’s in no small part due to the sheer number of iconic cars it’s given us over the years.

    They might not be the subtlest, the fastest, or the most aerodynamically sound. But gazing upon these vehicles is like staring into the eyes of an old friend and seeing them smile back at you. They’re our old buddies, which we either won countless races in, won countless races to eventually acquire, or coveted all game long while our big rival in the narrative drove it instead of us.

    Pink slips at the ready, then. Protective goggles on, because there’s going to be some vinyl jobs that could detach an unguarded retina, and brace yourself for an overwhelming wave of nostalgia and an urge to wake up as a teenager in the mid-Noughties. These are the icons of NFS past and present.

    Advertisement - Page continues below
  • Lamborghini Diablo SV - Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit

    Lamborghini Diablo SV - Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit

    When the series was three games deep in 1998, here’s how simple the sales pitch was: this game’s got real cars in it.

    We’d erstwhile been subsisting on a thin gruel of unlicensed racers that could only give a cautious nod to the lines of the Testarossas and Diablos we wanted to be driving. So when you saw the cover of Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit and the yellow Lamborghini Diablo SV tearing across it, your most pressing objective in life was now clear: you would be playing this game.

    SV denotes the Super Veloce spec of Lamborghini’s very fastest vehicles, and in-game that 510bhp proved very handy for evading the local law enforcement, who appeared to be completely ready to die rather than let you get away with a speeding offence.

  • BMW M3 GTR E46 - Need For Speed: Most Wanted

    BMW M3 GTR E46 - Need For Speed: Most Wanted

    2005’s Most Wanted pulled off a very clever trick: it gave you the best car in the game right at the start, then made you watch as it was taken away from you almost immediately.

    The E46 was so planted, so outrageously grippy through those high-speed freeway turns that the series loves to throw at you, it felt as though a massive injustice had taken place when the game told you that you needed to work your way through the city’s most wanted (hang on, that’s the title!) street racers in order to get it back. It lit a fire under you.

    When you were finally reunited with that simple blue and silver livery, after hours of hard graft – well, there’s never been a payoff like it in the series. And that’s despite the fact that the series would try this exact narrative device time and time again for the next two decades, returning to the ‘your perfect car just got nicked’ well until it was dry.

    Advertisement - Page continues below
  • Skyline GT-R V-Spec (R34) - Need For Speed Underground I&II

    Skyline GT-R V-Spec (R34) - Need For Speed Underground I&II

    To the window! To the wall! Till the sweat… hang on, who rights-cleared this song for a NFS game?

    Lil Jon and his East Side Boyz yelling vulgarities at you is the very first thing you experience in 2003’s NFS Underground, and whatever the ESRB may think about letting it through in retrospect, even they must concede that it’s a pretty effective way of telling you that this isn’t your dad’s NFS game. This one’s for the streets.

    Where before NFS was about road racing in licensed vehicles that looked like they’d come straight off the factory floor, these vehicles were suddenly neon-underlit, street-tuned and plastered in vinyls. And the daddy of all these edgy street racers was Eddie, who drove an R34 GTR.

    That orange GTR features prominently across Underground I and II, eventually unlockable in the first game after you beat Eddie. Only then can you enjoy its 2.6-litre, twin-turbocharged inline-six engine, and an all-wheel drive system that made even the twistiest dimly lit streets a mere victory lap.

  • Mercedes-Benz 190E - Need For Speed: Unbound

    Mercedes-Benz 190E - Need For Speed: Unbound

    A$AP Rocky designed this confrontationally customised 190E, but its appearance in 2022’s Unbound is no mere publicity stunt.

    Previously, NFS had felt a little bit adrift from car culture. It was still offering a very 2000s vision of custom tunes and relying on old mechanical frameworks which were starting to feel played out. So when this half-and-half paint job landed, it seemed to modernise the whole franchise. It’s closer to what car culture looks like in the 2020s, even if it does seem to have a couple of LinkedIn inspirational quotes on its doors.

  • Mazda RX-7 ‘Battle Machine’ - Need For Speed: ProStreet

    Mazda RX-7 ‘Battle Machine’ - Need For Speed: ProStreet

    Here’s a curious one. Throughout NFS: ProStreet’s pre-release stage, the promotional materials featured a banged-up RX-7, held together with gaffer tape and stitches, but somehow all the cooler for it. The ‘Battle Machine’ became a desirable vehicle even before the game arrived… upon which, it turned out that the car wasn’t actually in it.

    It’s not clear why. Probably the developers just used it as an art reference during production, unaware that the fanbase had become so attached to it. But over time, its no-show in ProStreet only proved to galvanise its allure.

    Players made their own versions of the car with the creation tools, although hand on heart everyone would agree it was impossible to make it look spot on with the pre-release Battle Machine. So EA included the car in the next two games - unfortunately those games happened to be 2008’s NFS Undercover, and the ill-fated MMO NFS World.

    Still, its legend lives on today, and as modern NFS’ creation tools become more sophisticated, we can build our own Battle Machines that get ever-closer to the mythical original.

  • Ferrari 512 TR - Need For Speed

    Ferrari 512 TR - Need For Speed

    Finally, let’s show some respect to the very first vehicle to feature on the cover of a NFS game: the mighty, timeless Ferrari 512 TR.

    The year was 1994. Videogame graphics looked like something an unattended toddler with some crayons would do to a wall, by modern standards. And yet against the odds, Need For Speed made a Fezza look not just recognisable but highly desirable. The car list was small but full of delicious options – not least a Supra Turbo and a Viper RT10 – but nothing could muster the same excitement as seeing an actual Ferrari in a videogame.

    Advertisement - Page continues below

More from Top Gear

Loading
See more on Gaming

Subscribe to the Top Gear Newsletter

Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, you agree to receive news, promotions and offers by email from Top Gear and BBC Studios. Your information will be used in accordance with our privacy policy.

BBC TopGear

Try BBC Top Gear Magazine

subscribe