Tropedia

  • Before making a single edit, Tropedia EXPECTS our site policy and manual of style to be followed. Failure to do so may result in deletion of contributions and blocks of users who refuse to learn to do so. Our policies can be reviewed here.
  • All images MUST now have proper attribution, those who neglect to assign at least the "fair use" licensing to an image may have it deleted. All new pages should use the preloadable templates feature on the edit page to add the appropriate basic page markup. Pages that don't do this will be subject to deletion, with or without explanation.
  • All new trope pages will be made with the "Trope Workshop" found on the "Troper Tools" menu and worked on until they have at least three examples. The Trope workshop specific templates can then be removed and it will be regarded as a regular trope page after being moved to the Main namespace. THIS SHOULD BE WORKING NOW, REPORT ANY ISSUES TO Janna2000, SelfCloak or RRabbit42. DON'T MAKE PAGES MANUALLY UNLESS A TEMPLATE IS BROKEN, AND REPORT IT THAT IS THE CASE. PAGES WILL BE DELETED OTHERWISE IF THEY ARE MISSING BASIC MARKUP.

READ MORE

Tropedia
Register
Advertisement
WikEd fancyquotesQuotesBug-silkHeadscratchersIcons-mini-icon extensionPlaying WithUseful NotesMagnifierAnalysisPhoto linkImage LinksHaiku-wide-iconHaikuLaconic

This is a car that keeps getting destroyed, mostly in comedic situations. Because Status Quo Is God, and so the joke can continue, it always gets replaced or repaired, often by an exact duplicate to make filming easier.

Compare The Chew Toy and They Killed Kenny, similar concepts that apply to characters rather than their cars. If the owner opts for the "repair" version of this trope, it may lead to the car becoming The Alleged Car. For added hilarity, try combining it with The Precious Precious Car or Watch the Paint Job.


Examples:


Anime and Manga[]

  • The Vice-Principal's beloved Toyota Cresta in Great Teacher Onizuka. Onizuka keeps on destroying it by accident.

Film — Animated[]

  • Beavis and Butthead Do America: The Movie features Tom Anderson's Camper, which suffers—in order—a broken fridge, a TV ruined by spilled cola, total destruction by flood from the Hoover Dam release, being torn apart by ATF agents, destruction in a 300 car pile-up, and being defiled by Beavis having A Date with Rosie Palms (as Cornholio).

Comic Books[]

Film — Live Action[]

  • Trish's car from Jeepers Creepers may be considered this.
  • The Dude's poor car in The Big Lebowski. It gets shot, crashed into a telephone pole, stolen by teenagers, peed in by vagrants, crashed again, smashed with a baseball bat and finally set on fire.
  • Carl Bentley's police car in Jumanji.
Cquote1

 "FINE! TAKE IT!"

Cquote2
  • It's not the same car every time, but James Bond has a habit of destroying whatever Cool Car Q has provided him.

Literature[]

  • In The Dresden Files, the running joke is that Harry's old VW bug, the "Blue Beetle," keeps getting wrecked, but Harry has an awesome mechanic who keeps reviving it. By the later books, it has five or six different colors due to replacement doors/hoods/etc. from other VW bugs. It finally gets wrecked for good in Changes.
  • In Daniel Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, Winston and Walter's biology teacher, Miss Sweet, periodically excuses one of her students from class to go and drive her car from the garage to the parking lot behind the school. A substantial fraction of the student body will then arrive in the parking lot as soon as class gets out, because they can count on her to immediately drive the car into the nearest tree.

Live Action TV[]

  • In Leverage, Hardison has gone through three different iterations of "Lucille", his spy van.
  • In Due South, Ray Vecchio drives a mint-green 1971 Buick Riviera. Unfortunately, Fraser keeps making plans that lead to it exploding, so it's not always the same mint-green 1971 Buick Riviera.
  • In Eureka, there's at least a 50% chance that any given experiment-of-the-week is going to entertainingly destroy Carter's Jeep. Henry attempts to defy this in "Up in the Air" by painting it with a protective osmium coating, but it only leads to the Jeep being literally lost in space.
    • The Jeep was brought to life in the 2011 Christmas special due to some hologram wackiness, and had choice words for Jack for its constant abuse.
  • Mr. Bean has the Reliant Regal driven by Bean's nemesis, which gets tipped over or crashed every time it shows up.
  • On Dukes of Hazzard:
    • The General Lee is an odd borderline example. It's not that the car gets wrecked all that often in-universe; the stunts they pulled with it, however, meant they had to go through 300 different cars over the course of the series for filming purposes. They eventually had to start using stock footage because that model of car was getting rarer by the stunt.
    • Played straight by the Sheriff's Office cars, which are constantly wrecked while trying to catch the Dukes.
  • Virtually all of the cars that last more than one episode of Canada's Worst Driver. The season 7 finale included a funeral for the 2009 Dodge Challenger that got used for one challenge each episode (including the Mega Challenge).
  • One episode of Monk ("Mr. Monk And The Three Julies") has Stottlemeyer's new car fall victim to this trope.
  • Not a car, but Starbug in Red Dwarf is crashed pretty much every other episode, if not more often. Even lampshaded in an episode:
Cquote1

  Kryten: Starbug was built to last, sir. This baby's crashed more times than a ZX-81.

Cquote2


Radio[]

  • The Navy Lark has a chronically crashed frigate in the form of HMS Troutbridge thanks to Navigation Officer Sub-Lieutenant Phillips. It's the only ship in the navy with a corrugated hull, and once had her entire superstructure blown clean off leaving her looking like a miniature aircraft carrier, yet she still manages to not sink and keep going.

Web Comics[]

  • Narbonic: Dave Davenport goes through many cars, some of which even get wrecked off-panel.

Web Originals[]

  • Red vs. Blue: The Chupathingy gets destroyed every time in makes an appearance.

Western Animation[]

  • Donald Duck's famous 313 has to suffer from time to time.
  • Cars owned by Goofy usually fall into this trope.
  • In Dan Vs., something happening to Dan's car is usually the reason he wants revenge on the episode's subject.
  • In DuckTales the team pilot Launchpad McQuack would crash whatever he was provided with Once an Episode - including a living condor and a gadget plane that accidently folded into a suitcase mid-flight.
  • In Men in Black: The Series, the LTD suffers from an unfortunate number of catastrophic accidents per session.
  • Kevin's car in Ben 10 Alien Force repeatedly gets destroyed in various ways.
  • The Simpsons: Whenever they buy a car in place of their Pink Sedan and Station Wagon, it will be totaled by the end of the episode (such as the Canyonero) to keep the status quo (the only exception is the snowplow Homer bought when he started his Mr. Plow business, which was repossessed because Homer never made payments on it). Homer's sedan does get severely damaged multiple times; it becomes good as new the next week, but it still shows the damage on the front fender.
  • Transformers Animated: Captain Fanzone's car.
  • In Teen Titans, Cyborg's car gets destroyed pretty much in every episode it makes an appearance in.
  • In The Penguins of Madagascar, every time something is thrown off screen with an explosion, you can hear the same guy scream "My Car!!!".
Advertisement