Totalcar – Magazine – The cars in the first two Deathly Hallows movies were really slow and weak

• One of the technical advisors of the first two Deadly Rampans talked about the cars used in the films
• They were by no means fast or seriously tuned cars
• Typically, these only had to be spectacular
• During most of the scenes, 90 km/h was not even exceeded because it was not necessary
• The scenes were made spectacular with post-production on the computer

Do you remember the early Deathly Hallows movies? These were not yet about mindless action, herd spirit hidden behind family love and the permanent rape of physics books. They featured some car culture, in the form of exciting races and tuning cars that seem tacky to today’s eyes. Back then, they looked good on the screen and we thought they were serious racing cars, but they weren’t. One of the film’s technical advisors, Craig Lieberman, talked about how slow most of the cars in the film were.

There is, for example, Brian’s (Paul Walker) Mitsubishi Eclipse from the first film, which, as wild as it looked, only made 125 horsepower at the wheels. They were able to squeeze this out of a slightly modified, two-liter naturally aspirated engine, with which the zero-to-hundredth acceleration is around 9 seconds. The black Honda Civics used in the robberies were similarly weak and slow, but at least Toretto’s (Vin Diesel) Mazda RX7 had some will. The modified Wankel-engined car produced 305 horsepower, and could accelerate from 0 to 100 somewhere between 5 and 6 seconds.

The driving dynamics were not helped by the fact that many cars had thick piping and, for the sake of the show, also carried a heavy audio system. This is probably why Vince’s Nissan Maxima took 7 seconds to go from 0 to 100, even though it was powered by a 3-liter V6 supercharged gasoline engine. In the case of the Maxima, the automatic transmission was a disadvantage, so that only about 220 horsepower went to the wheel. The most interesting car was Jesse’s Volkswagen Jetta, on which they forgot to put on the right front brake caliper during the acceleration scene. If someone is paying close attention, you can notice it. It is also interesting that it was not a serious tuning car, the two-liter, naturally aspirated gasoline engine was only capable of 150 horsepower, all of which disappeared in the same way in an automatic transmission.

By the way, there were some really powerful cars on the set: the American muscle cars, for example, actually went well. In the second film, there is a race where Brian competes with the convertible Eclipse against a Dodge Challenger: according to Craig, the Mitsubishi had no chance, even though it was a much younger technology. As he highlights at several points in the video, there was no need for fast cars, since in the recordings where people drove the cars, they almost never exceeded 90 km/h. Afterwards, during the editing, they used cinematic tricks to make the recordings spectacular, making us believe that they were really going crazy fast.

If it was necessary to go faster, remote control systems were often built into the cars. This was mainly used in scenes where a dangerous maneuver had to be performed. There were some downsides to this as well, which Craig also talked about in a video earlier.