Are exotic cars in movies "real"??

*This is my first “original” post. Please forgive me if this has been covered already; I used the search, but got zero results, so I decided to go ahead and post. *

Anyway, I’ve always wondered if rare, exotic or really expensive cars in movies are “real” or if they’re kit cars. Does anyone know?

I know that in the age of $200 million budgets, crashing a Rolls Royce isn’t that big of a deal money-wise, but it seems to be an awful waste in any event. Perhaps they used kit cars in older movies, back when Hollywood flicks had “reasonable” budgets?

I’m thinking of “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off” in particular, although I know that the super-rare Ferrari in that movie was in fact a kit car.

Thank you!

Rex

Many are kit cars…sadly many aren’t.

Dukes Of Hazzard destroyed 200 real cars.

I know that alot of cars are real…really damaged, then restored and re-used…and that at least several entrepruneurs make livings off leasing real cars to movie companies…, and many are real cars.

In one of the bond Movies with Pierce Brosnan (I think its Tommorow Never Dies) A BMW flies off of the roof and into the window of a store. This was a real BMW, and the director was a bit upset because he originally hoped he might salvage the vehicle.

It was totaled unfortunatley…

In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off the classic Ferarri was a kit car by Modena. I don’t have a cite for that; just something I read around the time the film was released.

The kit car used in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was up for auction on ebay motors a few months ago. Took a bunch of tries, as no one was bidding. I guess it either finally sold, or he withdrew it. Looked like a fun car! :smiley:

I would assume, that in the case of an exotic car simply being driven normally, its the real deal.

Stunt driving has a kit car lookalike substituted.

In the 007 movie with the BMW cited above, no kit car exists for the actual vehicle, so the real deal is sacrificed for art’s sake.

However, a rare car like a $500,000 Cobra 427 can easily be replaced by a cheaper, more plentiful kit car.

It really all depends upon what the car’s going to be used for, and how rare the car is. For example, in the TV series Nash Bridges there’s three “Cudas” that they use. One is a genuine Cuda, and they use it for shots where one would be able to tell if it was a Cuda or something else. The others are another Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth vehicle that has the same body style as the Cuda and have been modified to approximate the look of the Cuda. One is used for street shots where the car’s driving down the road, the other is used whenever they have a scene with damage (or potential damage) to the car occurs. That way, if something bad happens to the car, they can shoot around it while it’s being repaired.

In XXX, they used at least two Pontiac GTO’s. One was a hard top, and the other was a convertable.

However, this isn’t always the case. When I was a kid, growing up in Ohio, they shot a movie set in the 1950’s not too far from where I lived. They bought up a bunch of 1950’s cars and proceeded to smash them up for the movie. Many people were none too happy about that.

Finally, when they shot the movie Christine, they destroyed a number of cars, but they also used mock-ups for certain scenes.

In the case of “futuristic-looking” cars in movies, some cars are slightly modified for the movie but actually existed as production cars. Example: In Mad Max, the V8 Interceptor was a Ford “XB Falcon Hardtop”, sold in Australia from December 1973 until August 1976.

Cite: http://us.imdb.com/Trivia?0079501

What about movies where cars are completely destroyed? Like the Corvette in Con Air or the yellow sports car (Ferrari?) in The Rock?

I think “The Blues Brothers” destroyed around 100 1978 Dodge Monacos. If you look carefully in the scene where all the police cars crash under the elevated train, you will notice that, where they are supposed to say “Chicago” on one door and “Police” on the other, one of them has a plain white door, so it just says “Chicago”. I’m guessing they took some cars from previous scenes that weren’t totally destroyed, and pieced them back together.

-Andrew L

Like mentioned for Nash Bridges, most production companies have multiple copies of a car.

Dukes of Hazzard had two Chargers for show and close-up work. These were rarely driven, and kept in top-notch shape. Then they had a fleet of others, a half dozen at times, that were the “drivers”. Meaning these were the ones blowing down dirt roads or doing the bootleggers’ turn, or driving through town, etc.

These were Chargers of various years mildly modified to all look like the '68 or '69 they used, often with different engines (six bangers, 318s, some 440s for certain stunts) and some were automatic while others were manual. Some had interiors, most didn’t, most had functional doors, some didn’t. It all depended.

Then they had a couple of “jump” cars, with modified suspension, reinforced frames (or bodies anyway, the Chargers were largely unibody cars) and eight-point roll cages. Most of these also had modified 340s and 440s for the power needed for the jumps. Most jumpers were essentially ruined in one or two stunts, at which point usable parts were removed for use on the other cars.

In Miami Vice, the original Ferarri Daytona Spyder was a Corvette-based kit car. From what I understand, they never had an actual Daytona for any filming. I’ll assume they had more than one kit car, but I haven’t read that for sure.

Anyway, at the time, Ferarri was embroiled in lawsuits with kit builders, and having such a kit on a popular TV show wasn’t helping. Ferarri negiotiated with the producers to “lose” the fake (they blew it up with a rocket launcher- I don’t know what happened to the actual car) and they switched to an actual Testarossa for the rest of the series.

Here, again, they had one real Testarossa for interior and close-up shots, and two kit cars (actually special-built tube-framed stunt cars with fiberglass TR bodies) for the high-speed stunt work or anything that might cause damage.

In Con Air, I’ll assume they had multiple Corvettes- at least one for close ups, and at least one more for driving and stunts. However, I do know that, when Colm sees the car after it’s flown through the tower and crashes upside down, that IS midyear 'Vette suspension clearly seen. Whether they destroyed an actual Corvette or had a junker for the upside-down scene is unknown.

In XXX, actually they had three GTOs, all actual '67 GTOs and not LeMans’s or Tempests. A fourth was built as a promotional/show car.

Some movies used one-off show cars, or manufacturer’s exhibition cars. Demolition Man, for example, used a GM concept car (several actual ones plus some mockups for stunts) as the police cars, and a bunch of lesser-known concepts for background and “traffic” scenes.

They, of course, also used up three Olds Cutlass 442s- one a closeup/interior car, and two drivable junkers for the chase and damage scenes.

The movie Wraith used a Dodge concept car that was also used as a land-speed test racer. Again, they had the one original as the closeup car, one drivable mockup for race scenes, and one undrivable dummy for crash scenes.

The movie and TV industries habit of wrecking neat cars is something that has declined in the last decade or so. Once they wrecked actual musclecars and other nice cars. Take a look at the original “Gone in 60 seconds”. One scene where a police car slides into parked new Cadillacs at a dealership really damaged many brand new Cadillacs (albeit it wasn’t supposed to damage quite the number of cars it did).

The use of mock-ups and fixed up clunkers is mostly the norm nowadays. A few years back Tim Allen had a beam crush his Chevy Nomad on Home Improvement. He apparently received many angry letters scolding him for wrecking a classic and in a later show he showed how they had used a patched up junkyard car for the actual damage scene and that the real car was unharmed.

I must admit my hart still stops when a classic seems to be wrecked, even though I know it is probably either a mock-up, CGI, or a junkyard clunker beyond salvation. Sometimes I go down in the garage and pat my '71 Vette and promise that will never happen to it. :slight_smile:

/Markus

The customized '59 Impala destroyed in The Road Warrior was evidently a clunker.

BTW: $40K will buy you your very own [url="http://adcache.collectorcartraderonline.com/10/5/6/29363956.htm"Interceptor mockup.

:smack: I can’t believe I forgot to mention this! The Tucker that rolls over in Tucker: The Man and His Dream, is a Studebaker, that was customized to look like a Tucker. The car was chosen because the particular Studebaker already looks a lot like a Tucker and needed only a few fiberglass panels and other minor touches to look like a Tucker. In one of the trailers for the movie, they goofed, and when the car rolls over, you can see the driveshaft! (The Tucker was rear engined and thus had no driveshaft.)