**The Fast and Furious Movie: Separating Fact from Fiction**

While watching the movie "Furious 7," I couldn't help but think about how some of the car-hacking scenes were, in fact, based on real-life hacking capabilities. The scene where Dom Toretto's car goes backwards at high speed is particularly noteworthy.

According to a report by WIRED, a car built by a group of enthusiasts was equipped with a tractor transmission that allowed it to shift into reverse and build up speed. This feat, however impressive, might not be as impossible as we initially thought.

However, the movie takes this concept to an absurd level, featuring cars being controlled remotely using laptops. In 2015, two hackers, Charlie Miller and Chris Velesque, demonstrated how they could wirelessly hack a Jeep Cherokee's infotainment system and take control of its brakes, steering wheel, transmission, and even engine.

While their hacking feat is not entirely impossible to replicate in real life, it does require significant expertise and access to the vehicle's systems. Moreover, the movie's depiction of multiple cars being hacked at once is highly unlikely.

**What Can Be Hacked?**

The problem lies in which cars can be hacked and the amount of legwork required beforehand. Miller and Velesque spent over a year developing code necessary to hack the Jeep Cherokee. Each model car that was hacked in the movie had unique requirements, making it difficult to replicate their feats.

Older cars without driverless functions were particularly vulnerable to hacking. The Toyota Prius, taxi cabs, and even a 2001 Passat were all susceptible to hacking. However, gaining access to these systems is one thing; getting them to do what you want to do is another.

**Zero Day Exploits**

To achieve this level of control, hackers would need to find "zero day exploits" - flaws in the software that allow them to gain access. The zero-day exploit for a 2001 Passat corresponds to a 0.01% probability. This means that hacking each car individually is possible but highly unlikely.

**Conclusion**

While some aspects of the movie's hacking scenes might be based on real-life capabilities, they are still largely exaggerated and impossible to replicate in reality. The world of car hacking is complex and requires significant expertise, access, and time. As such, it's essential not to take these feats too seriously and enjoy the movie for what it is - a thrilling and entertaining ride.

You can follow us on Donut Media, Instagram, or watch behind-the-scenes footage on the Donut Underground channel.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe fast and furious franchise has given car nerds like you and i a ton of enjoyment on the flip side they've also done a high amount of scientific fibbing busta's turbo hack 100 miles an hour in reverse doing a wheel stand while doing a burnout well today we're going to take a look at some of these feats of impossible physics and tell the truth on some of my favorite fast and furious myths let's go a big thanks to rage shadow legends for sponsoring today's video over the past three weeks i've had a lot of down time because well and while raid shadow legends may not get you flying through the air on a 250cc moto horse it will guide you through exciting battles against noble kings and dark wizards all while navigating through warring factions and uncovering hidden prophecies okay yes i see you death knight hi no i don't want to play right now and last month raid released their death knight come on dude i'm in the middle of something seriously please stop it cut the crap gosh anyway last month raid released their biggest update ever and their main event is the doom tower i'm talking about a giant tower with 120 floors a bunch of secret challenge rooms and 12 bad ass bosses to take on if you want to get a huge head start in raid all you have to do is hit the link in the description and if you're a new player you'll get your free boy champion bulwark 50 gems an xp booster some energy refills and even an ancient shard as soon as you get in game and if you don't know what any of those things are come join my clan and i'll help you out you can find me in the game as uncle jerry's donuts so what are you waiting for huh it's easy click the link in the description and i'll see you in game wheelie burnout if your car is able to do a wheel stand more than likely it's got a butt load of power but if you can ride a wheel stand while doing a burnout it's a car that i'll call fantasy at least that's how it's depicted in the first fast and furious movie dom and brian line up to each other on a deserted road and what will soon be the longest quarter-mile drag race in movie history toreto and his supercharged 1970 dodge charger and brian and his mark iv toyota supra and as the stop light turns from red to green toretto's charger jumps off the line and does a wheel stand also while lighting up the rear tires so we got a wheelie going on and we got a burnout happening at the exact same time so first things first let's look at what your car needs to do a wheelie there's an actual equation that we use called the weight transfer equation to determine the amount of acceleration you need to lift your front wheels off the ground and if we make a couple assumptions here we'll need about 2.6 gs of acceleration off the line to pop up the front end now with a bit more math and some more equations we can figure out how much torque that is and that's about 780 pound-feet of torque and luckily the engine has enough to do that so now as the car rises up the center of gravity rises with it we need less torque to keep the wheelie going so up into this point this part is totally feasible now in a perfect drag race scenario all the torque is getting sent from the engine to the tires because the rear tires have friction on the road that torque generated by the engine will rotate the car around the axle while pushing the car forward and two important things are here we have friction which means wheelie which means forward motion but you know what doesn't move you forward no friction which means no traction which means burnout you couldn't possibly accelerate forward because you need friction to do so and in this scene he's accelerating forward while wheeling while letting the rear tires smoke up a little bit in any case what you see in the movie it's just not possible we did an entire episode on nitrous oxide and if you happen to watch that episode i hope you learned something that would allow you to realize that a bottle of nos wouldn't explode into a fiery ball of madness like how it's depicted in the first fast and furious film now nas stands for nitrous oxide system it's a brand name like kleenex or donut media yeah we're a brand you want some brand name gear go to donutmedia.com now the gas that's inside those nos bottles is nitrous oxide and it's what helps all these fast and furious cars get a burst of speed when they're about to lose the race it turns out that the combustion process requires that fuel to be oxidized and in the case of a regular combustion engine that oxidizer is the oxygen component in air another oxidizer just happens to be nitrous oxide so when nitrous oxide gets squirted into your intake and then sent to the cylinders the heat and the compression in the cylinders break apart that nitrogen and that oxygen bond and that oxygen is what's important there by adding more oxygen we can add more fuel and therefore we can get more power but alone nitrous oxide isn't flammable the fuel is the flammable part so in fast and furious we're meant to believe that when brine's eclipse is on fire it heats up the nos bottle in the back that causes the nos to explode producing the ball of green flames we've seen probably 100 times so once you know how nitrous works it's easy to see that this was scientific magic or what i call physics lies okay buster turbo this works it's impossible speaking of busters one of my personal favorites in the fast and furious universe an absolute disgrace of misinformation to scientific folks is the opening scene of the fate of the furious abdom he's in cuba racing in the cuban mile against a very menacing looking fella and dom he's in the slowest car on the island while the other guy is in the fastest car on the island so pre-race we see dom take a coke can tab and attach it to the vacuum line on the wastegate of the car's turbo the wastegate it's an important part of a turbo setup and it's there to regulate the amount of exhaust gas that can spin the impeller that vacuum line is there to sense boost pressure on the compressor side of the turbo so as your boost builds up the pressure in that line also builds up and it opens the valve inside the exhaust housing that lets some of the exhaust bypass limiting the speed of which the turbine wheel can spin it basically creates a leak to slow your turbo but why on earth would you want that well wastegates are calibrated so that you don't over speed your turbo if you get that wheel spinning too fast the bearings in the turbo can fail and then you got a friggin blown up turbo so your wastegate is your check valve it limits the speed at which your turbo can spin so if you were to clamp that hose or completely remove it you allow the turbo to spin faster than it's designed to spin but the result of that is you get more boost well that's the thought here in this scene so by putting that coke tab on the vacuum line and then attaching it to a wire he could pull that vacuum line off while inside the car allowing the turbo to spin faster and giving him more power but in the real world doesn't really work that way for that increase in oxygen to be useful in making more power you need more hydrocarbons you got to put in more fuel so say you did this in your turbocharged car that has a modern fuel management system that can detect an increase in oxygen well assuming your fuel system could match the requirements of the added oxygen this wastegate trick could make more power but in the fate of the furious dom's car doesn't have a fancy electronic fuel injection system he's got an engine with a holley carb on top of it and when you turbo charge a carburetor car there are a few ways that you can do it in the movie they use the blow through setup meaning the turbo feeds the carb exhaust gases spool the turbo just like normal but then instead of the turbo's compressor side feeding into the cylinders directly it blows through the carburetor and for this to work properly you have to jet your carb accordingly to match the amount of air supplied by the turbo if you go and then change that amount of air by adding more boost via this wastegate trick the carb won't be able to deliver enough fuel to match the air and you won't make more power and since there's no way that you can jet your carb to allow for more fuel while you're driving this wastegate trick is busted also this entire scene is kind of wack the guy insults the arms girl right he cheats during the race dom wins and then this guy's just like hey man you got my respect and tom's like uh i'm glad i got your respect and then they're like friends and then guy cries and then another thing that's wild is dom wins the race and the car blows up it goes off into the ocean and then all these kids surround him just random kids and dom just picks up a random girl and he's just carrying this random child around in cuba like no big deal they're kids everywhere we can just pick them up and hold on to them and not only that also dom wins driving backwards which leads me to my next scene and that's in too fast too furious 100 miles per hour in reverse brian in his mitsubishi evo 7 driving backwards on a florida highway passing cars and outrunning his buddies while it gives everyone the freaking bird classic scene and also classically not possible in fact we did the math and you can actually calculate how fast a car could actually go all we need is the max rpm the reverse gear ratio the rear end gear ratio and the size of the tires pull out my ti-89 do a little quick math it gives us a top speed of 36.65 miles per hour boo boo that's not fast at all so while he's passing all these cars they are more than likely going about five miles an hour to give the appearance that the evo is whooping ass in reverse now if you're curious about the scene and the fate of the furious where dom goes backwards i couldn't find a ton of information about it but apparently the guy who built the car says that it had a tractor transmission in it with multiple reverse gears so you could shift in reverse to build up speed now like i said given how ridiculous that scene was with the cuban nos the busta turbo hack i'm calling bs but i have no factual information to back this up maybe it's possible but probably not it's zombie time zombie car apocalypse now you might have seen this video back in 2015 of two hackers wirelessly accessing a 2014 jeep cherokee and taking over the car using a laptop it's brake steering wheel and the transmission even the climate control the radio the windshield wipers the engine itself all could be controlled miles away from the comfort of this dude's living room charlie miller and chris velesque they hacked this jeep over the internet through a cellular connection in the infotainment system so so far cypher in the fast and furious movie hasn't done anything that can't be done to certain cars the real problem comes into play when we start talking about which cars can be hacked and the amount of legwork needed beforehand to hack those cars now miller and veles they spent over a year developing the code necessary to hack the car and perform those various functions gaining access into the car that's one thing but getting it to do what you want to do is another thing each model car that got hacked in the movie it's a different model and make and with that comes more time spent figuring out how to access those cars also the majority of those cars that are hacked in the scene they're older cars they don't have any sort of driverless functions to them toyota prius nope taxi cabs nope 2001 passat nope so cypher says to find chips with zero day exploits that's hackerspeak for flaw that's in the software that allows hackers to gain access now the zero day export for a 2001 passat is a two thousand one percent correspond so cypher and her team would have needed to already develop the code to hack each of those cars which is possible it's been done but then they'd have to hack those cars all at the same time which might be possible but not probable and they'd also have to be able to take control of those cars that don't have systems built in them to be controlled which is impossible it just can't work sorry shirts they're finally here it took forever to design these things but the results are amazing this is truly my favorite shirt that we have ever put out that's what happens when you keep getting better at it we got two different colorways they're both black but they got different colored inks on them i'm talking yellow and white or green and red and both of them are fire better order both of them now because they're not going to last very long at all i'm ordering 12 of them myself we're printing them right now so go get them while you still can donutmedia.com tell them james sent you there's actually no way that you can do that but maybe tell yourself under your breath when you sh hit the cart i freaking love the fast and furious movies they're actually super fun and entertaining and as long as you don't take them too seriously and look at the physics and science of it you're not gonna lose too much sleep but now you know now you know what's real and what's not thank you guys so much for watching this episode of bumper bumper follow us here on donut at on instagram at donutmedia if you want to see some more behind the scenes footage we cut a lot of stuff that we don't show on b2b well we put some of that stuff on the donut underground if you click right down there there's a join button follow me on instagram jeremiah burton until next week bye for nowthe fast and furious franchise has given car nerds like you and i a ton of enjoyment on the flip side they've also done a high amount of scientific fibbing busta's turbo hack 100 miles an hour in reverse doing a wheel stand while doing a burnout well today we're going to take a look at some of these feats of impossible physics and tell the truth on some of my favorite fast and furious myths let's go a big thanks to rage shadow legends for sponsoring today's video over the past three weeks i've had a lot of down time because well and while raid shadow legends may not get you flying through the air on a 250cc moto horse it will guide you through exciting battles against noble kings and dark wizards all while navigating through warring factions and uncovering hidden prophecies okay yes i see you death knight hi no i don't want to play right now and last month raid released their death knight come on dude i'm in the middle of something seriously please stop it cut the crap gosh anyway last month raid released their biggest update ever and their main event is the doom tower i'm talking about a giant tower with 120 floors a bunch of secret challenge rooms and 12 bad ass bosses to take on if you want to get a huge head start in raid all you have to do is hit the link in the description and if you're a new player you'll get your free boy champion bulwark 50 gems an xp booster some energy refills and even an ancient shard as soon as you get in game and if you don't know what any of those things are come join my clan and i'll help you out you can find me in the game as uncle jerry's donuts so what are you waiting for huh it's easy click the link in the description and i'll see you in game wheelie burnout if your car is able to do a wheel stand more than likely it's got a butt load of power but if you can ride a wheel stand while doing a burnout it's a car that i'll call fantasy at least that's how it's depicted in the first fast and furious movie dom and brian line up to each other on a deserted road and what will soon be the longest quarter-mile drag race in movie history toreto and his supercharged 1970 dodge charger and brian and his mark iv toyota supra and as the stop light turns from red to green toretto's charger jumps off the line and does a wheel stand also while lighting up the rear tires so we got a wheelie going on and we got a burnout happening at the exact same time so first things first let's look at what your car needs to do a wheelie there's an actual equation that we use called the weight transfer equation to determine the amount of acceleration you need to lift your front wheels off the ground and if we make a couple assumptions here we'll need about 2.6 gs of acceleration off the line to pop up the front end now with a bit more math and some more equations we can figure out how much torque that is and that's about 780 pound-feet of torque and luckily the engine has enough to do that so now as the car rises up the center of gravity rises with it we need less torque to keep the wheelie going so up into this point this part is totally feasible now in a perfect drag race scenario all the torque is getting sent from the engine to the tires because the rear tires have friction on the road that torque generated by the engine will rotate the car around the axle while pushing the car forward and two important things are here we have friction which means wheelie which means forward motion but you know what doesn't move you forward no friction which means no traction which means burnout you couldn't possibly accelerate forward because you need friction to do so and in this scene he's accelerating forward while wheeling while letting the rear tires smoke up a little bit in any case what you see in the movie it's just not possible we did an entire episode on nitrous oxide and if you happen to watch that episode i hope you learned something that would allow you to realize that a bottle of nos wouldn't explode into a fiery ball of madness like how it's depicted in the first fast and furious film now nas stands for nitrous oxide system it's a brand name like kleenex or donut media yeah we're a brand you want some brand name gear go to donutmedia.com now the gas that's inside those nos bottles is nitrous oxide and it's what helps all these fast and furious cars get a burst of speed when they're about to lose the race it turns out that the combustion process requires that fuel to be oxidized and in the case of a regular combustion engine that oxidizer is the oxygen component in air another oxidizer just happens to be nitrous oxide so when nitrous oxide gets squirted into your intake and then sent to the cylinders the heat and the compression in the cylinders break apart that nitrogen and that oxygen bond and that oxygen is what's important there by adding more oxygen we can add more fuel and therefore we can get more power but alone nitrous oxide isn't flammable the fuel is the flammable part so in fast and furious we're meant to believe that when brine's eclipse is on fire it heats up the nos bottle in the back that causes the nos to explode producing the ball of green flames we've seen probably 100 times so once you know how nitrous works it's easy to see that this was scientific magic or what i call physics lies okay buster turbo this works it's impossible speaking of busters one of my personal favorites in the fast and furious universe an absolute disgrace of misinformation to scientific folks is the opening scene of the fate of the furious abdom he's in cuba racing in the cuban mile against a very menacing looking fella and dom he's in the slowest car on the island while the other guy is in the fastest car on the island so pre-race we see dom take a coke can tab and attach it to the vacuum line on the wastegate of the car's turbo the wastegate it's an important part of a turbo setup and it's there to regulate the amount of exhaust gas that can spin the impeller that vacuum line is there to sense boost pressure on the compressor side of the turbo so as your boost builds up the pressure in that line also builds up and it opens the valve inside the exhaust housing that lets some of the exhaust bypass limiting the speed of which the turbine wheel can spin it basically creates a leak to slow your turbo but why on earth would you want that well wastegates are calibrated so that you don't over speed your turbo if you get that wheel spinning too fast the bearings in the turbo can fail and then you got a friggin blown up turbo so your wastegate is your check valve it limits the speed at which your turbo can spin so if you were to clamp that hose or completely remove it you allow the turbo to spin faster than it's designed to spin but the result of that is you get more boost well that's the thought here in this scene so by putting that coke tab on the vacuum line and then attaching it to a wire he could pull that vacuum line off while inside the car allowing the turbo to spin faster and giving him more power but in the real world doesn't really work that way for that increase in oxygen to be useful in making more power you need more hydrocarbons you got to put in more fuel so say you did this in your turbocharged car that has a modern fuel management system that can detect an increase in oxygen well assuming your fuel system could match the requirements of the added oxygen this wastegate trick could make more power but in the fate of the furious dom's car doesn't have a fancy electronic fuel injection system he's got an engine with a holley carb on top of it and when you turbo charge a carburetor car there are a few ways that you can do it in the movie they use the blow through setup meaning the turbo feeds the carb exhaust gases spool the turbo just like normal but then instead of the turbo's compressor side feeding into the cylinders directly it blows through the carburetor and for this to work properly you have to jet your carb accordingly to match the amount of air supplied by the turbo if you go and then change that amount of air by adding more boost via this wastegate trick the carb won't be able to deliver enough fuel to match the air and you won't make more power and since there's no way that you can jet your carb to allow for more fuel while you're driving this wastegate trick is busted also this entire scene is kind of wack the guy insults the arms girl right he cheats during the race dom wins and then this guy's just like hey man you got my respect and tom's like uh i'm glad i got your respect and then they're like friends and then guy cries and then another thing that's wild is dom wins the race and the car blows up it goes off into the ocean and then all these kids surround him just random kids and dom just picks up a random girl and he's just carrying this random child around in cuba like no big deal they're kids everywhere we can just pick them up and hold on to them and not only that also dom wins driving backwards which leads me to my next scene and that's in too fast too furious 100 miles per hour in reverse brian in his mitsubishi evo 7 driving backwards on a florida highway passing cars and outrunning his buddies while it gives everyone the freaking bird classic scene and also classically not possible in fact we did the math and you can actually calculate how fast a car could actually go all we need is the max rpm the reverse gear ratio the rear end gear ratio and the size of the tires pull out my ti-89 do a little quick math it gives us a top speed of 36.65 miles per hour boo boo that's not fast at all so while he's passing all these cars they are more than likely going about five miles an hour to give the appearance that the evo is whooping ass in reverse now if you're curious about the scene and the fate of the furious where dom goes backwards i couldn't find a ton of information about it but apparently the guy who built the car says that it had a tractor transmission in it with multiple reverse gears so you could shift in reverse to build up speed now like i said given how ridiculous that scene was with the cuban nos the busta turbo hack i'm calling bs but i have no factual information to back this up maybe it's possible but probably not it's zombie time zombie car apocalypse now you might have seen this video back in 2015 of two hackers wirelessly accessing a 2014 jeep cherokee and taking over the car using a laptop it's brake steering wheel and the transmission even the climate control the radio the windshield wipers the engine itself all could be controlled miles away from the comfort of this dude's living room charlie miller and chris velesque they hacked this jeep over the internet through a cellular connection in the infotainment system so so far cypher in the fast and furious movie hasn't done anything that can't be done to certain cars the real problem comes into play when we start talking about which cars can be hacked and the amount of legwork needed beforehand to hack those cars now miller and veles they spent over a year developing the code necessary to hack the car and perform those various functions gaining access into the car that's one thing but getting it to do what you want to do is another thing each model car that got hacked in the movie it's a different model and make and with that comes more time spent figuring out how to access those cars also the majority of those cars that are hacked in the scene they're older cars they don't have any sort of driverless functions to them toyota prius nope taxi cabs nope 2001 passat nope so cypher says to find chips with zero day exploits that's hackerspeak for flaw that's in the software that allows hackers to gain access now the zero day export for a 2001 passat is a two thousand one percent correspond so cypher and her team would have needed to already develop the code to hack each of those cars which is possible it's been done but then they'd have to hack those cars all at the same time which might be possible but not probable and they'd also have to be able to take control of those cars that don't have systems built in them to be controlled which is impossible it just can't work sorry shirts they're finally here it took forever to design these things but the results are amazing this is truly my favorite shirt that we have ever put out that's what happens when you keep getting better at it we got two different colorways they're both black but they got different colored inks on them i'm talking yellow and white or green and red and both of them are fire better order both of them now because they're not going to last very long at all i'm ordering 12 of them myself we're printing them right now so go get them while you still can donutmedia.com tell them james sent you there's actually no way that you can do that but maybe tell yourself under your breath when you sh hit the cart i freaking love the fast and furious movies they're actually super fun and entertaining and as long as you don't take them too seriously and look at the physics and science of it you're not gonna lose too much sleep but now you know now you know what's real and what's not thank you guys so much for watching this episode of bumper bumper follow us here on donut at on instagram at donutmedia if you want to see some more behind the scenes footage we cut a lot of stuff that we don't show on b2b well we put some of that stuff on the donut underground if you click right down there there's a join button follow me on instagram jeremiah burton until next week bye for now