While everyone goes on and on about Bond’s Aston Martins, time travelling DeLoreans and Batmobiles, the real star cars in the movies and television are the ones who do the hard graft - they are the automotive extras, the cars that do the actual work and never get the credit of the shiny hero cars.
So today we salute the cars that top the Internet Movie Car Database’s obsessive list of appearances in movies and TV shows thanks to their sheer ubiquity.
Ford Crown Victoria
No doubt simply down to it being the default choice as a police cruiser and a taxi for the better part of two decades, the mighty Crown Vic takes out top billing on the Internet Movie Car Database, with a thoroughly whopping 11,717 movie appearances putting it firmly in the lead. The ancient ladder-chassis behemoth was finally put down by Ford back in 2011, but its sheer resilience has seen it staying in the starring role. Well, for background cars that is...
Toyota Corolla
Of course the world’s single biggest selling car would have to feature in a list of “most cars” in whatever form it may take. The Corolla has appeared in 11,034 movies, just 363 ahead of that other most ubiquitous of ubiquitous cars, the Volkswagen Golf. Interestingly, if you don’t count “background cars” and “cars with an unknown role”, the Corolla plummets to 12th place (the Crown Vic stays firmly in the lead though), meaning it literally is the ultimate background wallpaper car!
Volkswagen Golf
Being essentially the European Corolla it's no real surprise the Golf holds an equally impressive number of movie appearances - 10,676 to be precise. While the Beetle may have Herbie as an honest-to-goodness movie star, the Golf has done it all simply by sheer weight of background appearances.
Ford Mustang
Doing double duty as both a ubiquitous background car in US flicks and a fairly common hero car, the Mustang sits in second on the IMCDB list with a healthy 9652 appearances. The go-to car if you want something for the everyman hero to drive, Ford also churned out enough crappy ones in the 70s and 80s to supply the loveable loser role as well.
Honda Civic
The Civic's big tally of 9261 screen appearances could be attributed to its Corolla-like ubiquity and sheer background noise vibe, but it also has a bit more street cred, Mustang style, thanks to its appearances in the Fast and Furious franchise and Quentin Tarantino's habit of using a 1980 Honda Civic in a number of his films, à la Sam Raimi and his obsession with sneaking an Oldsmobile 88 into every one of his films.
Honourable mention: Ford vans
Like the Crown Vic, the Econoline (in the US) and Transit (in Europe) were a default choice, this time for delivery drivers, tradies vans, surveillance vans and creepy psychotic types in the movies, hence their strong showing here.
The number of movies and TV shows where an Econoline or Transit features - usually with people in the back watching other people/having tense conversations/screaming in terror - currently stands at 8589 for the Econoline and 8087 for the Transit, giving Ford's ubiquitous trans-Atlantic vans a combined total of 16,676, higher than that of the mighty Crown Vic!