Fast & Furious Analysis: How Many Crashes Are in the Franchise? (And What's the Financial Impact?)

Editor’s note: Data will be updated on this page periodically during the collection process outlined below.

If you’ve heard of the Fast & Furious franchise, you know the movies center around three things: fast cars, family, and a lot of action. Since the first installment two decades ago about an undercover sting on some electronics thieves, the Fast saga has escalated its plotlines, budgets, and (perhaps most of all) its automotive explosions.

At FinanceBuzz, we help people find the best auto insurance. And as Fast fans were gearing up for the release of “Fast X,” the 10th installment in the franchise, we asked a question so absurd it might actually fit into a future plotline: Are any of these people even insurable?

To answer this, we’d need some help.

ISO: FinanceBuzz Fast Claims Adjuster

Last month, we put out a job posting looking for someone willing to watch all 10 Fast movies and tally the number of crashes in the franchise. We offered to pay our Fast & Furious Claims Adjuster $1,000 for their services, plus $100 to cover streaming fees, snacks, and tickets to see the new movie. Very quickly, people took notice.

After reviewing more than 50,000 applications for our job posting, we carefully assembled a team of professionals that could possibly only be outdone by the Toretto family themselves.

Meet our claims team

Patrick Shea, CPCU

Actual claims adjuster and insurance expert

Knowing we needed someone with an expert eye, when we saw that an actual claims adjuster had applied, we knew Patrick was the right choice.

Patrick’s a subject matter expert in insurance coverage and risk management who brings more than 10 years of experience adjusting claims, evaluating coverage, managing litigation, negotiating settlements, and managing front-line claim handlers.

He’s also a car aficionado who can name nearly any make and model on sight — a perfect fit for our job.

Stanford University AI Researchers

A group of very smart researchers looking to pit their AI tech against a human claims adjuster

Though we didn’t set out to hire more than one person for the role, we got an unexpected assist from academia. After finding out about the job posting, a group of Stanford researchers working in stealth on video analysis reached out and asked, “Have you thought about having AI do it?”

The group (Johann Hauswald, Franky Romero, and Caleb Winston working with Christos Kozyrakis; and Matei Zaharia) came on board to give their cutting-edge AI video recognition tool the chance to outdo our human claims expert by having AI also tally all of the Fast saga’s crashes.

John "Feits" Feitelberg, Barstool Sports

F&F movie superfan and co-host of the KFC Radio show, looking for an excuse to rewatch the movies

The surprise assistance didn’t end with Stanford. After our job posting went viral, Barstool Sports personality and co-host of the popular KFC Radio podcast/show, John “Feits” Feitelberg immediately reached out to get involved.

To say that Feits is a superfan of the Fast franchise is an understatement. After already seeing the movies countless times, Feits wanted to take part in our challenge (unpaid) in a single sitting, and livestream his efforts to share in the familial fun.

Note: This livestream is set to begin Friday, June 16 at 12:00pm EST on YouTube. 

The results: our expert

After our expert reviewed all the crashes, one thing became clear: As the ridiculousness of plotlines escalates from movie to movie, so does the car-nage. This table reflects our expert Patrick’s notes, taken while watching each of the movies.

As Patrick notes, Fast & Furious accidents have been on a significant rise. They’ve gone from nine incidents involving a mere 13 cars in the first movie, to more than 50 incidents in “Fast 9.”

In the end, Patrick tallied 320 total crashes involving approximately 667 cars. Of note, some crashes involved upwards of 50 cars, so some of the figures were estimated.

Here’s a full breakdown of the number of crashes found in each movie:

• “The Fast and the Furious” (2001): 9
• “2 Fast 2 Furious” (2003): 21
• “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift“ (2006): 21
• “Fast & Furious“ (2009): 34
• “Fast Five“ (2011): 37
• “Fast & Furious 6“ (2013): 44
• “Furious 7“ (2015): 36
• “The Fate of the Furious“ (2017): 67
• “F9“ (2021): 51
• “Fast X“ (2023): TBD

Humans vs. AI

While the research was painstaking for our claims adjuster, the Stanford Research team had different challenges to solve.

The AI model used natural language to ask the system to find clips like “car crash or collision,” “fiery car explosion,” or even “car crashing into yacht.” It then did a frame-by-frame analysis of the movies and marked time stamps where it believed there was a match.

Of note, the model returned significantly fewer results than our claims adjuster for two primary reasons:

1. In many instances, the movies didn’t actually show crashes. They might have two cars get close to each other, cut away, and use crash audio without actually showing the cars make impact. A human can infer a crash happened, but video analysis did not.
2. The model clustered together “events” which were often longer chains of crashes. It noted the crash lengths in seconds, which may have involved a few separate crashes.

Comparing results

On the crash side, the AI model was able to identify most of the major timestamps of crashes in Patrick’s data, with a few false positives. For instance, scenes that had car crash characteristics, like smoking tires, close-ups of wheels, dust on the road, and totaled cars sitting in the shop, all signaled crashes.

	Our claims adjuster	Stanford’s AI model
Total crashes	320	120
Cars with damage	667 (approximately)	Unknown
Time to review	18 hours, 22 mins	57 seconds
Cost	$1,100	$0.03

The major differences? How long it took and how much it cost. The Stanford team’s model took just 57 seconds to review all of the movies, compared to 18+ hours of runtime reviewed by our claims expert. And while we paid our expert $1,100 for his time, the Stanford team’s model cost a meager $0.03 of computing power to run.

Insuring the Fast family

So how much would it cost to insure the Toretto crew? To be clear, we doubt any insurance company would issue any of these characters a policy, but assuming the average cost of car insurance ($1,763 per year), plus the average price increase after an at-fault accident ($920 per year), we estimate the following annual premiums:

• Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel): $53,283
• Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker): $19,243
• Sean Boswell (Lucas Black): $21,083
• Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson): $15,563
• Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez): $13,723
• Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson): $10,963

Auto insurance tips (for regular families)

• Even if you're not as accident prone as the Fast family, auto insurance can be expensive. Here are six smart strategies to save money on car insurance.
• Switching car insurance may sound hard, but it’s not. Changing providers is typically easy and could help you save on premiums.
• Want in on a secret? Check out these ​​money-saving tips from car insurers.