Awesome Crashes

If there’s one thing you can rely on action movies and TV shows for, it’s car crashes. While some filmmakers have moved on to using CGI for crash effects, practical vehicle stunt work is still the most convincing. Insider got together with J.E.M. FX to explain the tricks required to create controlled vehicular mayhem on screen.

YouTube channel Handmade features models of cars that were individually hand-built out of Plasticine clay. The artist behind the camera uses a plastic model as his form, then painstakingly traces and cuts out each piece of its body to create impressively accurate miniatures. And then he crash-tests them.

We’ve always enjoyed watching videos generated using the vehicle physics simulator BeamNG.Drive. This clip showcases various vehicles driving over a square-edged pit in the middle of the road. Place your bets now: which cars will make it over, and which will fall in? Need more car vs. pit action? You’ve got it.

The S has a thing for building matchstick-powered rocket engines. This time, their goal was to create two flame-shooting vehicles out of cardboard, then crash them head-on into each other to view the fiery wreckage. It took a few attempts to get them to launch at the same time, but the money shot was worth it.

YouTuber Renbricks put together this hypnotic 8-minute compilation of Hot Wheels cars crashing through a miniature rally course. We enjoyed seeing the tiny crowd of spectators as each car whizzed by and came to a crash landing in the dirt.

There’s a series of videos making the rounds that shows vehicles being launched off of a disproportionately tall bulge in the road, and they’re quite entertaining. The clips were made using the soft-body vehicle simulator BeamNG.drive, and these ones were posted by BeamNG Nation. That Cybertruck aced the landing.

MetaBallStudios is known for its infographic-style comparison videos. This time they took a slightly different approach, showing off the relative heights of different cliffs by driving a simulated car off of each one and watching how long it takes to fall to the bottom of each one.

Gnuk Animations has an obsession with LEGO trains, and likes to see what it will take to stop one from rolling down the tracks. On their TikTok channel, you’ll find videos of a LEGO train taking on spaghetti, Q-tips, Pokémon cards, paper straws, tin foil, and more.

In anticipation of its upcoming release, the producers of F9 (aka Fast & Furious 9) released this short, but jam-packed reel featuring behind-the-scenes footage of some of the movie’s most epic and explosive automotive stunts. F9 hits theaters 6.25.2021.

Among its many services, European auto club ADAC performs car safety testing. In this video, they took a break from crash-testing real-world cars to see how a LEGO Technic Porsche 911 GT3 RS would hold up in a T-bone crash with a Bugatti Chiron. The narration is in German, but it’s easy to tell you wouldn’t want to be in either car.

During the 2020 Portuguese MotoGP race, championship rider Aron Canet had a crazy close call that could have ended up much worse. Not only did he fall off of his bike at speed, but he also slid down the track for what seemed like forever, and narrowly avoided being run over by multiple racers. This guy should play the lottery.

Rally races can be incredibly dangerous. They require precise coordination between driver and co-driver to negotiate countless twists and turns along the way. One wrong move and you’re off the course or worse. In the case of this rally in Russia, it seems nobody got this corner radius right. Isn’t this the point of recce before a race?

During a police chase in McLoud, Oklahoma a cop attempted a PIT maneuver on a fleeing pickup truck, causing the vehicle to lose control and flip. But rather than stopping the criminals in their tracks, the truck righted itself and kept on driving. The cops eventually got the scofflaws though.

Plane crashes are a staple of action movies. But how realistic are the crashes depicted on screen? Insider sat down with Stephen Moss, a former investigator at the UK’s Air Accident Investigation Branch and asked for his opinion on a dozen movie air disasters. As expected, some are far more accurate than others.

Being in a car crash can be quite terrifying. But what might crashes be like if other cars were invisible? With a little visual effects trickery, Donato Sansone created this surreal sequence of car crash footage, in which one of the involved vehicles was digitally removed from the scene.

Crash testing cars has saved countless lives, but with the forces that race cars regularly face, they need to be built very differently. Safety testing center IMMI shows off their Center for Advanced Product Evaluation with the tubular chassis of a sprint car. The tests include various wall crashes, and even a ceiling drop.

Rider Johannes Fischbach hopes to someday break the record for the world’s longest mountain bike jump. He recently made an attempt off of a 140-meter (459 ft) ski jump, but unfortunately couldn’t stick the landing. Amazingly, he got up and walked away from this terrifying stunt.

While there’s lots of joy to be had in building things from LEGO, it can also be a little bit satisfying to break them apart. In this montage from Custom Bricks & Models by Ren, he recorded 1000 fps slow-motion footage of various LEGO vehicles being smashed to pieces. At least he was kind enough to put helmets on his minifigs.

(PG-13: Language) While walking down the street one morning, Ed Lawson spotted the aftermath of what appears to have been a very intoxicated driver side-swiping parked cars. But this clip is far less about the destruction and more about Lawson’s genius commentary.

Auto body mechanic Arthur Tussik shows how – with the proper skills, time, tools, and parts – a totaled car can be made to look just like new. Here, he takes a horribly smashed up BMW 7 series, and brings it back to life. We can’t speak to its structural integrity, but it looks good.

In Russia, there’s a dashcam in just about every car these days. Dmitrii Kalashnikov’s intense documentary is assembled entirely from dashcam footage, which captured everything from a meteor crashing to Earth, to gas station fires, to some of the craziest road rage ever.

This amazing remote-controlled model plane was a dead ringer for an Airbus A330-300 jetliner, and it looked absolutely fantastic flying about for the first 3+ minutes of this video. Sadly, something went horribly wrong right before landing, and the plane is no more.

BeamNG.drive is an automotive physics simulator that behaves quite realistically. In this satisfying clip from DestructionNation, watch what happens when cars, trucks, and SUVs are subjected to 100 speed bumps in a row without any effort made to slow down.

One of the cooler LEGO Technic kits out there is the Porsche 911 GT3 RS. It’s simply stunning. But that didn’t stop the guys from c’t Magazine from taking theirs and smashing it into a wall, with the help of the German automotive safety group ADAC and their crash test facility.

Footage from the 2017 Rally Islas Canarias, during which driver Tomasz Kasperczyk overshot the line coming around a bend and could have easily tumbled down a deadly cliff. Thankfully, unlike some rally courses, there’s a guard rail on this course.

If you’ve contemplated using that drone you got for Christmas to shoot action footage of athletes or race cars, DON’T. This short video from last year’s FIS Alpine slalom at Madonna di Campiglio shows skier Marcel Hirscher as he’s nearly taken out by an errant UAV.