After filming the “Furious 7” mountain-highway chase on Colorado’s Monarch Pass, the car crew stowed its crashed cars in the parking lot of the small nearby Monarch Ski Resort. Mr. Jansen had two days to remove them so the resort could prepare for its opening season. “We probably destroyed 40-plus vehicles just shooting that sequence,” Mr. McCarthy says.
In the early days of car-chase movies, producers arranged to haul the smashed cars to junkyards and forgot about them. This is what happened to Steve McQueen’s wrecked Mustang in 1968’s “Bullitt,” according to the historical car website MustangSpecs.com. (A second Mustang, used mostly for the high-speed driving scenes, wound up in the hands of collectors.) Of the 300 highflying Dodge Chargers that rotated into production as the orange General Lee in the “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show in the early 1980s, many were recycled into set cars for the background of the show. Others went to the junkyard, sometimes not for long. “There were people down in the South that would actually go to the junkyards and try to restore them,” recalls Craig R. Baxley, a veteran stunt coordinator and director who worked on the show.
As car-chase movies have evolved from cult classics to multimillion-dollar franchises, Hollywood car wranglers have strengthened their policies for disposing of smashed cars. Nobody wants to be sued when a fan makes off with a restored Mini Cooper from “The Bourne Identity” and drives it down a flight of stairs. “I don’t handle anything that has a roll cage in it, like a stunt car—we will automatically get rid of them,” says Ray Claridge, president of 39-year-old Cinema Vehicles Services in Los Angeles, which recycles and junks cars destroyed or damaged in films. “I don’t like the liability issues.”