By With Fast & Furious 6 releasing domestically tomorrow, let’s all take a look back at how great Fast Five‘s last ten minutes were. You have two Dodge Chargers pull a kajillion ton bank vault by chains, throw it around like it was made out paper mache, as they race through the streets of Rio. We all understood how there’s no way it could have worked in reality, but it was too cool to worry about.
The good folks at Vulture thought differently and sought to get a Physicist’s (Dr. Randall Kelley, a physicist at Harvard) opinion on the possibility of Fast Five‘s final act. You should definitely read the full article on Vulture for all of the math, but I’ve grabbed a few choice words here:
It’s conceivable they could accelerate with the thing… Can they accelerate as fast as the movie dictates? Probably not
[On swinging the safe like a mace] The only way that would happen is if the friction on the tires was enough to anchor the movement, and my instinct would be no…Because if it had that much momentum and the safe’s that heavy, it would just rip the car with it.
O’Connor and Toretto would need more than 198,000 horsepower to move the safe as quickly as happens in the film.
They then discover that in order to really pull a bank vault as Dom and Brian did, we would actually need 467 CARS. So yeah, you can go screw yourself science. Ruinin’ my movie.
[via Vulture]