Here are 10 movies that destroyed the most cars

Unsurprisingly, we kick off with a Fast & Furious themed entry, only the second film in the series with a relatively pedestrian 130 cars totalled during filming. Some decent motors on display in the movie, including a Mazda RX-7, R34 GT-R and a Honda S2000, all performing impossible feats of acrobatics. A nice… family of cars, you might never say.

Any Die Hard movies that came after the original Die Hard were strictly unnecessary after the first one, though the fifth entry certainly brought some serious machinery… and promptly annihilated it. Stuff like a G-Wagen, Unimog and a custom-built military truck simply known as the ‘MRAP’. Oh, and a few E65 BMW 7s.

The what-now? The second of director H.B. Halicki’s trilogy of car movies – a trilogy that included the original Gone in 60 Seconds – and one that goes a bit meta (films within a film, anyone?). Halicki apparently used his own car collection for the movie. Ouchy.

Before the series really ramped up the spectacle came the fourth instalment, though 190 real cars being totalled in the service of a film that made gajillions at the box office is nothing to be sniffed at.

Laugh all you want, but you have to admire the sheer chutzpah of a film that happily throws fully-built, customised cars out of a cargo plane for a few minutes worth of footage. Real cars. Zero CGI. “Everyone was shocked when they found out we threw real cars out of the plane,” car co-ordinator Dennis McCarthy told TopGear.com at the time.

Quite a few real cars, as it turns out.

The Fast connoisseur’s choice, this one, dealing as it does with Japan’s drift scene. Indeed, it can count one Christopher Nolan as a fan (just imagine a Nolan-based FF movie) who prefers its “original recipe”. Yes, it’s cheesy. Yes, it’s still a fun watch.

The fifth instalment of the Fast & Furious franchise was a bit of a gamechanger for the series, moving away from the car-heavy movies that came before to a more obvious blockbuster/heist philosophy that has served it very well indeed. 

Though, not the poor cars that have been destroyed along the way.

Younger viewers may not remember the hype when the second of The Matrix movies was released, but the highway chase was one of the most spectacular ever committed to film. Sure, it had CGI cherries but General Motors lent the production a lot of very real cars. Which were promptly destroyed.

Is it any wonder that a movie series that began as a look at California’s street racing culture and morphed into one about heists and throwing cars out of planes and really tall buildings is on this list many times over?

The top spot goes to a rather surprising entry – Michael Bay’s slow burning, captivating 2011 drama Dark of the Moon. It is a film that attempts to deal with the very meaning of life itself, and the concept of humanity- no, hang on.

It’s a Michael Bay film about transforming robot warriors caught in a war. Guinness World Records has verified a whopping 532 motors met their end in service to Bay’s automotive battle royale.