It’s been 23 years since The Fast and the Furious blazed across movie screens. Let that sink in for a moment, then pour one out for Letty’s purple Nissan 240SX. More than one was used during filming, but arguably the most important version is gone forever.
Craig Lieberman, a technical advisor for the cars in the early iterations of the Fast franchise, shared the fate of the Nissan that Michelle Rodriguez drove in the first film in a recent video published to YouTube. If anyone is an expert on the Fast star cars, it’s him.
According to Lieberman, the film used three cars to play Letty’s 240SX. Two of them were stunt cars, designated Stunt One and Stunt Two. Under the hood they retained their stock drivetrains, but were dressed the part to appear for the role. The main hero car was far more interesting. It was rented by the production crew from its owner, James, who had a built SR20DET under the hood making 400 horsepower, according to Lieberman. The film crew installed a Zeal body kit and painted the car a shade of purple, though it looks magenta in the movie due to the filters used for the cameras.
The good news: The two stunt cars are alive and well. They made encore appearances (albeit with different paint jobs) as extras in 2 Fast 2 Furious, and sit in the hands of Furious Garage on YouTube. They’re currently being rebuilt to movie-spec as seen in the first film, with the channel chronicling the progress.
The main hero car, however, wasn’t so fortunate. As Lieberman explains, it went back to the owner after the first movie was finished. He returned it to silver, and it lived a glamorous life in his care with numerous magazine features to its credit. From there the 240SX jumped from owner to owner until 2009, when the last owner bought it, stripped the powertrain, and sold the chassis to a junkyard.
If this was a plot point in a recent Fast film, we’d say the car isn’t dead, as Fast characters have a history of miraculously coming back to life. But this isn’t a movie. It’s unknown exactly where or how the car met its end, but as Lieberman says in the video, it was “turned into a beer can.” Bummer.