12 Crazy Car Scenes That Give the ‘Fast and Furious’ Movies a Run For Their Money

Furious 7’s skyscraper jump looks impossible because it almost was. W Motors built ten replica Lykan HyperSports for the stunt, and six were destroyed getting the shot. The flight between Abu Dhabi towers was actually filmed on an Atlanta soundstage, using real glass and a real stunt driver rather than pure CGI. Here’s how the franchise’s most talked-about scene actually came together.

Whether itâ€™s trains, planes, or automobiles, speeding vehicles have made for some of the best nail-biting, jaw-dropping moments in cinematic history. Entire franchises have been built around car crashes and explosions that, while defying the laws of physics, have reinforced the magic of Hollywood. Thereâ€™s probably no greater testament to this than theÂ Fast and the Furious franchise, which never ceases to amaze when it comes to wonderfully ridiculous car-related stunts. I thought it would be impossible to top 2015â€™s Furious 7, which features the late Paul Walker and Vin Diesel crashing a red W Motors Lukan Hypersport through not one, not two, but three skyscrapers in Abu Dubai, but The Fate of the Furious could certainly unseat its predecessor.

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Vin Diesel and Paul Walker never actually flew a supercar between three real skyscrapers — but for years, the internet argued about it as if they had. The truth behind Furious 7’s most jaw-dropping stunt is stranger than the fiction: a fleet of near-identical replica cars, a soundstage in Atlanta, and a director willing to smash through forty-foot glass walls with practical effects rather than trust a green screen. Only a handful of those cars survived filming intact. So how do you fake three buildings’ worth of destruction and still get an audience to believe every second of it?

Ten Cars Built, Six Destroyed

Exotic cars don’t submit to stunt work gracefully, so productions rarely risk the only example of one. For the Etihad Towers sequence, W Motors — the boutique Lebanese manufacturer behind the real Lykan HyperSport — built ten fiberglass-bodied replicas specifically for Furious 7. From the outside they were indistinguishable from the original, but underneath the skin they were stripped-down stunt platforms running far less exotic drivetrains, built to survive repeated crash takes rather than top speed runs. Nine of those ten replicas didn’t make it to the wrap party — they were destroyed accomplishing exactly what they were built for. Only one battered survivor rolled off set, stunt damage and all, and it went home to become a mascot at W Motors’ own shop.

Why Practical Effects Still Beat CGI

The illusion of a car sailing between three Abu Dhabi skyscrapers was never going to happen with a real car and real buildings, so the production didn’t try. Crews instead constructed multiple 40-foot-tall glass-and-steel building facades inside an Atlanta soundstage, and a professional stunt driver actually drove a Lykan replica through each one at speed, shattering real glass for the camera. Visual effects artists then stitched those practical crashes together with CGI cityscapes to sell the height and distance. It’s a formula the Fast and Furious franchise has leaned on since its earliest street-racing days: real cars, real drivers, real destruction wherever possible, with computers filling in only what physics won’t allow.

From Street Racing Drama to a Global Heist Franchise

What began in 2001 as a modest story about illegal street racing in Los Angeles grew, over more than two decades and a long run of sequels, into one of the highest-grossing action franchises in movie history, expanding its scope from quarter-mile drag races to bank vaults, submarines, and eventually outer space. That evolution let the filmmakers keep escalating the vehicular stunts scene after scene, because a franchise built around cars needed genuinely new automotive spectacle to top what came before, rather than simply repeating the same drag race formula each installment.

The Dodge Charger as the Franchise’s Signature Car

No single vehicle is more closely associated with the series than the Dodge Charger, particularly the black 1970 model driven by Dominic Toretto, a car that has appeared across multiple films in different states of build and even been rebuilt more than once for specific stunt sequences. Production teams have used real, heavily reinforced Chargers for many of the practical driving shots, while stunt doubles of the car absorb the abuse that would total an unmodified vintage muscle car in a single take.

Practical Stunts Over Computer Trickery

Part of what has kept the franchise’s car culture credibility intact with enthusiasts is its reputation for favoring real cars and real stunt drivers over purely digital effects whenever a sequence can physically be pulled off. Professional stunt coordinators plan these sequences with the same precision as a race team, accounting for weight distribution, tire compound, and ramp angles long before a camera rolls, and computer-generated effects are typically reserved for the moments where the laws of physics, or basic safety, simply will not allow the real thing.

Tuner Culture Got Its Hollywood Moment

Beyond the muscle cars, the franchise is credited with introducing mainstream American audiences to Japanese tuner culture, showcasing modified imports like the Toyota Supra and Nissan Skyline GT-R at a time when that scene existed largely in enthusiast magazines and grassroots meets. That exposure helped fuel a surge of interest in import tuning through the 2000s, and decades later, franchise-associated cars from both the muscle and import worlds routinely draw crowds at car shows purely because of their on-screen history.

Why These Scenes Keep Getting Bigger

Each new installment has had to answer a simple production challenge: audiences who have already watched a car jump between skyscrapers or outrun a submarine expect the next set piece to top it, which pushes stunt teams toward increasingly elaborate practical rigs, controlled effects, and custom-built vehicles engineered specifically for a single shot. That arms race between franchises and audience expectations is a big part of why the series has leaned so heavily into car culture as its core identity rather than treating vehicles as interchangeable props.

Real Cars, Real Consequences on Set

Because so many of the franchise’s set pieces rely on genuine automobiles rather than digital doubles, production budgets routinely account for building multiple identical copies of the same hero car, since stunt cars are frequently damaged or destroyed to get a single usable take. That willingness to sacrifice real, often expensive vehicles for a two-second shot is part of what separates the franchise’s brand of spectacle from more heavily animated action films, and it is exactly the kind of practical, car-first commitment that keeps automotive enthusiasts watching the series long after casual moviegoers moved on to other franchises.

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