The 10 Best Car Chases of All Time

Nothing brings the excitement to a movie quite like a great car chase – when done right, a vehicular pursuit can be the centerpiece to any action film. So let’s take a look at some of the greatest – Here are my picks for 10 of the Best Car Chases of All Time

10 – The Biggest Spectacle 

A good car chase usually includes a sense of big ol’ ridiculous scale, like the chase through San Francisco in The Rock or Gone in 60 Seconds or even the zany driving in The Italian Job but none did this better than Mad Max Fury Road. 

This is a movie that’s basically just one big car chase, but specifically we’re talking about the first act car chase, the one you probably picture in your head when you think of this film. Can a car chase alone move a movie over the line to an Oscar nomination for best picture? Before seeing Mad Max: Fury Road, we’d probably have a harder time answering yes to that, but this movie was a massive revelation into how compelling car action can really be.

The spectacle of flaming rocket powered desert hotrod customs, booming drums, and the one and only doof warrior on the shred-mobile all hurtling in one direction make Mad Max: Fury Road impossible to ignore. 

George Miller’s big action comeback was solidified by how chaotic and kinetic this scene from the movie’s first act was shot, with the stakes of how dangerous Furiosa’s diverting her war rig from the group and making her desert crossing to save the women she rescued really is.

There is a lot going on in this fast-moving scene and that’s really why it’s the biggest spectacle – you got high stakes, pounding music, shooting flames, car to car vaulters, hand to hand fighting, the Doof Warrior, rusty projectiles, road hazards, filthy versions of Ben Hur chariot spikes, guns, rockets, spinning saw blades, soo many explosions, we even witness a guy huffing paint.

Miller keeps the chaos followable because he shot it from character points of view and shots following the direction of the action delivered by the demolition derby convoy.  With people being forced off moving vehicles or getting blown into fiery bits, the problem of a massive dust and lightning storm becomes almost a relief (well, to everyone except Max, who’s still trapped outside.

And this 20 minutes of hell is not the climax scene, it is only the beginning of this wild ride. It sets the stakes, and collectively raises audience adrenaline for what’s to come in one of the best car movies ever made. 

9 – The Car Chase That Made Car Chases Cool

Mad Max is undeniably cool but when did wrecking cars at scale get cool in the first place? That brings us to 1968’s Bullitt. Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang chased by hitmen in a Dodge Charger. At first the Charger is trailing the Mustang, but then our hero flips the script and winds up chasing his pursuers. 

Winding through the hilly streets of San Francisco, we get great practical photography of some pretty cool stunts – out here jumping cars and drifting way before Dominic Toretto was even born. Actually is that true? How old even is he supposed to be? Not the point – what IS the point? Bullitt was ahead of its time, movie car chase-wise.

Director Peter Yates put cameras in the cars themselves, giving audiences an intense suspenseful scene. And any time you set out to make something cool, having Steve McQueen in it is a pretty great start – he does a lot of heavy lifting in these interior shots.

The chase winds all around the city, giving a sense of scale to how far they’re really going. And in the end, it’s hard to tell which is more insanely dangerous, the hitman blasting away, car-to-car with a 12 gauge or the massive explosion the hero causes at the end of the scene. \

Either way, it’s here where Bullitt taught Hollywood a lesson it has not since forgotten: Blowing stuff up is frickin’ awesome. You don’t even have to see the actual car go up. As long as something goes boom, your audience is gonna love it. 

8 – The Chase That Made The “Car Guy” A Thing

If there’s such a thing as a “Car Guy” in movies, Steve McQueen has to be first in line for the title – or at least he was one of the first to cast himself in that mold. But another cool Car Guy Pioneer that may be a little overlooked? Barry Newman’s Kowalski – the protagonist in 1971’s Vanishing Point. 

First of all, the 1970 Dodge Charger Kowalski drives throughout the movie – a car that will make another appearance later down this list, sit tight for that – is incredible. This guy gets chased across America as he kind of Dukes of Hazard’s his way through interstates, back roads and salt flats before finishing the spectacle in a ball of flames, why? Because blowing stuff up is awwwessoooome, that’s right.

But in spite of the fiery ending, Kowalski is a perfect “Car Guy,” who is almost an infallible superhero once he steps behind the wheel. Kowalski is unbeatable. He even gets into a fistfight and wins without even getting out of his carseat. Even in his final act, Kowalski only ended this grand chase because HE chose to end it. 

With an explosion, of course.

7 – Record-Setting Destruction

If you’re sensing a bit of a pattern here, you’re right. I like my car chases messy. The more crashes and explosions, the better. And if we’re just talking volume, the amount of destruction, The Blues Brothers has to make this list because of how many cars they destroyed while making the movie – the budget just for the car chase made Blues Brothers one of the most expensive comedies of all time. 

They destroyed one hundred and three cars in this movie. This was a record when Blues Brothers was made back in 1980, and that record stood until 1998 when the sequel Blues Brothers 2000 beat that record and destroyed one hundred and four. That record then stood until 2009, when G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra destroyed one hundred and 12. 

Back to Blues Brothers – when I say “destroyed” I don’t even mean “blown up” either. Take the final shot of the Bluesmobile, for instance.  They rigged it to do that of course, after working on it for months. They used 13 different “hero cars” as the Blues Mobile and 60 more were bought and used as the cop cars and the ones that didn’t get destroyed on camera, got destroyed anyway.

6 – The Guilty Pleasure

Speaking of destroying cars, this one is a personal choice – Condorman, the 1981 superhero movie that was WAY ahead of its time, featured an awesome car chase that was a perfect blend of cool practical driving stunts and some SUPER janky special effects. 

For the uninitiated, Condorman was the code name and superspy alias for Woody Wilkins, a comic book writer and artist approached by the C.I.A. to help with a mission and later to help Russian agent Natalia Rambova defect to the U.S.

Woody convinces the C.I.A. to fund and build the crazy gadgets he writes into his comic books, which leads to a cool boat chase and a flight over Monaco with a sets of Condor wings but the car chase is really the best part of this movie. Russian henchmen chase Woody and Natlia through the Yugoslavian countryside in Porsche 911s while our hero is stuck in a little shack on wheels – except it’s not.

Woody pushes some buttons that I think must have looked really high tech in 1981 and the truck gives way to reveal the Condor Car, a super sleek and fast, loaded up with superspy weapons and also it’s a hovercraft. 

Watching this scene in 2023 is super fun, the special effects used here are VERY much a product of their time but there are also some really fun driving stunts in this, performed by the Porches, of course, not the Condor Car.

Most of those Porsches get torched as Woody dispatches them throughout the chase, but the final sequence of the Condor Car-turned-hovercraft racing down the dock and Woody pushes buttons is pretty WTF-inducing.

In a good way.

5- T2 Judgement Day – Big vs Small 

I’ve gone on at length about big explosions and destruction but there IS more to a great chase scene than just the loud booms. Practical stunts play a huge role and the next one I wanna talk about features a well-known stunt where a tiny dirtbike is running from a rampaging giant truck.

The first big vehicle chase in Terminator 2: Judgement Day is iconic. I mean how many times have you watched the T-1000 jump that big rig? Exactly. A ton. Lots to love about this chase. 

The real draw here is the size differential at work – John Connor on the dirtbike, later joined by the Arnie’s T-800 and the unstoppable liquid murder android has the big rig after throwing the driver out of the cabin. 

This chase rules because there are several moments where you think it’s over and John is in the clear but nope, the T-1000 is Skynet’s most relentless cybernetic assassin yet. And that’s part of the allure of the whole Terminator franchise – what are you gonna do when an unstoppable machine has marked you for termination? 

Of course it’s handy to have a reprogrammed T-800 on your side to get you through it. Of course he’s the difference-maker but the coolest part of this chase is that first crash as the truck crashes through the wall and into the spillway. What a way to reinforce that your villain is deadly and your protagonist is screwed? This is a pretty great way to do it. 

4 – Best Out-of-the-Car Stunt

You know what, that’s enough of being in the car, let’s get out of the car for a second and look at a stunt the performer didn’t even get airbag protection for. 

2007’s Death Proof is another movie that does a great job setting up how deadly the villian is, though he’s not a time-traveling killer android from the future. So I guess that’s a plus. 

This movie permanently altered the way I ride in a car, thanks to the insane car crash scene earlier in the movie, but it’s the final chase that gives us one of the best stunts we’ve ever seen in a car chase. 

This is stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who, in the movie, plays stuntwoman Zoe Bell. This is where that white 1970 Dodge Challenger pops up again. She’s interested in buying the car and why? Because it’s the same kind as the one that was in Vanishing Point, which YOU already know about because we already covered that. 

Actually that’s not really why. What she REALLY has in mind is THIS little bit of insanity, a stunt she calls “Ship’s Mast” where she uses two belts to hang on the outside of the car as her friends tear around rural Tennesee and look…this stunt is crazy enough on its own, do not try this at home or…anywhere else. Of course the danger gets ramped way up once Kurt Russel’s villain gets involved and at that point, it makes this chase scene that much more intense.

There’s a happy ending in it for everyone except Kurt Russell’s character, which is still a happy ending for the audience, which is NOT the way we thought this one would end. 

3 – The Wrong Way

And since we’re on the topic of things going the wrong way, let’s talk about The Matrix Reloaded. Maybe not the most beloved Matrix movie, thanks to The Architect and his ‘errgo’ and ‘vis a vis’ baloney, the best action scene in this movie is not the fight pitting Neo versus a bunch of Agent Smiths, because it doesn’t hold up the way you remember it – but the freeway chase does. 

I submit the wrong-way-on-the-freeway action scene as the film’s best action set piece. This scene still slaps, especially once Trinity and the Keymaker start zooming past oncoming traffic as they run from the agents.

At one time, The Matrix franchise was the one to look to for leaps forward in visual effects – Neo’s bullet time thing from the first movie was in like every action movie after that for at least a decade but what makes this race special is the blend of computer-generated and practical effects. 

The city of Akron, Ohio was ready to let the Wachowskis use a length of freeway under construction to shoot the scene but they ultimately balked at the idea as they felt it would instead be easier to build their own. That way they were able to dial in the moves each real car had to do in order to shoot it. The result was nothing short of spectacular. 

But like I said, a big part of the Matrix is the blend of the real stunts with cool VFX, because even with their own personal length of freeway, a shot like Neo’s final escape with Morpheus and the Keymaker wouldn’t be possible at all.

2 – Another Happy Landing

And if we’re talking movies with a LOT of heavy VFX, you know I have to throw a Star War in there, and I know what you’re thinking – Star Wars doesn’t really “do” cars. But we’re not talking X-Wings and TIE Fighters here. A speeder is the in-galaxy car equivalent and 2002’s Attack of the Clones has a very notable chase involving one when Obi-Wan and Anakin gotta protect Padme Amidala from an assassin, who tries to off Padme as she sleeps but Obi-Wan and Anakin step in to stop it.

And the chase is on – George Lucas very much patterned it after sequences from American Graffiti, is the only chase on this list that exists in a 4-Dimensional space. All the other chases here involve actual cars with actual tires and actual roads. Star Wars speeders don’t have any of those things, and that allows this chase to go in directions a standard car chase can’t. 

Aided of course by some heavy, heavy visual effects through this entire movie, the chase eventually goes extra vehicular as Anakin Skywalker leaps onto the exact speeder piloted by the assassin he’s chasing and after a quick little skirmish, he forces the speeder down, so no, Obi-Wan, it’s not another happy landing. At least not for the assassin, anyway

Yes, Anakin has the Force so that basically means he has space magic super powers, which help him do all of this. And even though this chase appears in one of the lowest ranked Star Wars movies on just about everybody’s list, this chase is one of the things about this movie I enjoy when I rewatch as often as I do. 

1. – Re-Defining The Fast Franchise

Of course, to finish this thing off, I have to include a chase from the Fast Franchise. I still really love the big chase scene in the first film, but that was the old Fast Franchise and the way these movies are made now really don’t resemble this old style. 

One of my favorite things about the Fast saga is that it starts out following this heist crew who does the most just to boost some obsolete consumer electronics and nowadays they’re a family who literally drive cars in space. It’s all the same story somehow. But the Rio chase in Fast 5 was the one that turned the entire franchise into what it’s known for today. 

Paul Walker’s final Fast movie was Fast 7 so he’s on board for this one – and once you get to the big chase, Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs is actually helping the Fast family pull this off, just the start of his long and fruitful working relationship with Vin Deisel.

That was a joke, in case that wasn’t clear.

Not a joke, however? The plan to steal an entire bank vault from police headquarters using Dodge Chargers. When the Fast Saga first launched, it was an action franchise, sure, but it was a bit more…grounded? What was once just cops and robbers in cars turned into a globe-trotting adventure where the Fast family is dealing with ATF, FBI, CIA, DSS, and all kinds of other agencies ID’d by their three-letter acronyms. 

But more importantly, this is where the stunts start to get crazy. I mean they were always crazy, the big heist in the very first Fast movie was crazy, especially when you think about how little they accomplished by stealing DVD players. Not the point, but if, while watching Tej and Roman literally drive a car in space in F9, you wondered, :”How did we get to this?”

The Rio chase in Fast 5 is how we got to this. 

Fast 5 was the movie that took Dom, Brian and the family and transformed them from being cool-guy crooks who can drive good to full blown superheroes behind the wheel of a car. And the stakes only get ramped up from here.

Jesse B. Gill is a senior video producer for IGN. Watch him totally neglect his social media presence on Twitter at @jessebgill.