It’s the season of pumpkin spice (cinnamon) and ghosts (apparitions of the dead, like Adrian). Yes, Halloween is upon us, and that had us thinking—what are the scariest cars out there?
Now, I could trawl though horror movies for a bunch of “scary” cars driven by murderers and torturers from fiction, but that wouldn’t be very interesting. To me, specifically, because I’m not interested in horror movies. But it would also be boring for you, because movie cars aren’t actually scary.
Instead, I want to talk about cars that are actually scary, in very real terms. The ones that put you on edge. The ones that give you that sickening chill in your chest the very second you see them. These cars are not only terrifying, but they’re very, very real. Don’t worry, though, we’ll start out slow. The scariest ones are at the bottom.
The Unmarked Police Car
You’re feeling good. You’re out on the open road, there’s nobody around, and your favorite hype song just came on the radio. You flick a quick glance in the rear view—all clear. You drop the hammer and feel the thrill as the needle smacks the redline. This is what it’s all about, until…
…you round the kink in the road. There’s a black sedan parked awkwardly on the shoulder, and its facing in your direction. You’re already panicking, off the throttle and trying to slow down as inconspicuously as possible. The headlights flick on, it rolls forward, and as you pass…Â it rips a turn and flicks on to the highway behind you. You know its over before the reds and blues hit your mirrors. You’re in the shit now.
Many drivers have been caught out by an unmarked car at a moment of indiscretion. In Australia, thousands fell victim to unassuming Holden Commodore sedans with an extra antenna or two on the back. In the US, a seemingly-civilian Crown Victoria might have snagged you in decades past; today, it’s more likely to be some kind of bulky black SUV. Meanwhile, a handful of states get around restrictions on unmarked police vehicles by instead creating so-called “ghost cars”—police cruisers with white-on-white or black-on-black decals that are difficult, but not impossible, to see.
Regular police cars are bad enough. The unmarked ones are so much scarier. You know if one of these is rolling up on you, you’re about to have a bad time.
A Busted-Ass Nissan Altima
Nissan built the Altima to meet a market need. People needed simple, humble transportation with five seats, a trunk, and performance on a par with a bowl of oatmeal. What they created by accident was of the fastest vehicles on the road. It’s all thanks to a certain type of driver that is drawn to these things like a moth to the flame that will eventually claim its life.
The reason the Altima is to be feared all comes down to finance. As covered by Hello Road, Nissan Altima drivers have some of the worst credit scores out there. Basically, this was the car to buy if you have poor impulse control, no money, and no understanding of consequences in even the simplest form.
That’s why these cars need to be treated with caution. A clean Altima with all its windows intact, parked outside a supermarket? Probably not a huge risk. A Nissan Altima doing 90 in the emergency lane with a headlight punched out and a cloud of dust, oil smoke, and debris billowing in its wake? That’s Satan’s chariot incarnate. If you value your life, get the hell out of harm’s way.
The Red Bull Racing RB20
Red Bull Racing spawned from the ashes of the hopeless Jaguar team, and became World Championship winners within a decade. They’ve since collected many titles more, and remained at the pointy end of the grid consistently over the years. In 2024, they hit the Formula 1 grid with their latest contender, the RB20. It might look like a regular race car, but in the wrong hands, it’s a fearsome thing.
Those hands would be those of Max Verstappen, Red Bull’s lead driver and current championship leader Verstappen has made endless headlines of late with his shove-em-off driving style and unrepentant attitude. On Sunday, he brought the same moves to bear against championship rival Lando Norris. barging the McLaren driver off the circuit as he attempted to hold on to second place early in the Mexican Grand Prix. It’s not the first time the two have come to grief, either. The Austin race was just as bad, and Norris even ended up with heavy damage after a similar incident back in Austria.
Amazing battle between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris on lap 10!#F1 #Formula1 #MexcioGPpic.twitter.com/27Jo2x7Czs
— Extreme Cars (@extremecars__) October 27, 2024
Thus far, Max and the RB20 have been unchained, free to wildly thrash across the circuit with little heed for the safety or racing lines of others. That could be changing, with Verstappen subject to multiple heavy penalties in Mexico. The question on everyone’s minds—will F1’s stewards tame this aggression, or will Verstappen be back to his worst in Brazil? For now, the RB20 remains a dreadful sight for those that must try to pass it.
That Car Parked Outside Your House
You’re a good citizen. You work a good job and you bought a good house. You’ve got your little bit of land in this world and you take pride in looking after it. Only, some jagaloon has broken the golden social contract of the suburbs. They’ve parked in front of your house.
That’s your bit of road. That’s for your cars and your friends. Who is this interloper? This blow-in from out of town? This deranged, probably violent freak who is probably casing your house and planning to rob you and your neighbors? It’s an outrage!
You’ve already left three notes at ever-increasing levels of passive aggression. You never see the car come, you never see it go. You only see that it moves, now and then, parking in ever so slightly different parts of your territory. You know they mean to do you harm. You just don’t know when. You kiss your wife goodnight, but you don’t sleep. You peer through the curtains and see it parked there, taunting you. Tomorrow, you’ve decided, you’re going to buy a gun.
That Van Parked On The Grass
You’re out for a walk in your neighborhood, taking Rover for a stroll. It’s a crisp evening, and you shudder as the wind whips up, clutching your arms closer to your body for warmth. You’re coming up to that dodgy house that’s always got a bunch of cars parked on the grass. You catch a glimpse of something moving as you pass by. You hurry along, eyes dead ahead. Rover’s barking and tugging at his leash now, trying to pull you back. He saw what you saw. There’s a girl in the van. She’s banging on the glass. She looks scared. She wants out.
Without missing a step, you tug Rover along. It’s a bad neighborhood, you think to yourself, as you zip your jacket up further and brace against the cold. Best mind your own business.
BONUS SCARES From The Gang:
Adrian, Your Goth Uncle
The car you went and looked at, but didn’t buy, andis then parked outside your flat a few weeks later. That’s scary. That happened to me.
… Also the car that follows you for so long because they are upset with your driving so you have to pull up next to a police car. That also happened to me.
Mark, Shitbox Showdown Referee
Scariest car I’ve ever encountered was a 1980 Ford Mustang, two-tone blue and white, with a 200 ci inline-six and an automatic, owned and maniacally driven by my friend Jon back in college. Did you know a Mustang of that age could do 110? Yeah, the cop was surprised too. I think he let Jon off with a warning because he thought there was something wrong with his radar gun.
I made the mistake of driving it once. The brake pedal did nothing until the last 1/4 inch of travel, at which point it locked up the rear wheels. It had no heat. The steering wheel was pointed at about 10:00 when it was going straight, and yet it pulled to the left. And sometimes you had to two-foot it at stoplights to keep it from stalling, but other times the gas pedal would just stick at whatever position it was at.
It did nothing at all well, but kept doing it for two years, during which time I think the hood was opened twice, both times by me, to make sure the damn thing had oil in it. And yet, it just kept going, like Michael Myers. Nothing could kill that car.
Laurence (He’s Australian)
Scary out my way is seeing a BMW 5 series or X5 west of Dubbo. Guaranteed to be a cop, nobody out here owns them otherwise.
Image credits: Hello Road via YouTube screenshot, Sanch684 CC BY-SA 4.0, Liauzh CC BY-SA 4.0, Lewin Day
At this point, Tesla drivers get a wide berth. Not all etc etc but an awful lot of them in my area are young techies who make up for their general obliviousness by stabbing the throttle as soon as they notice they’ve missed something. Combine that with the build quality issues and you’ve got something that flips from road block to hyperkinetic projectile a little too quickly and often for my comfort.
Cars don’t scare me but drivers in these categories do:
Speed racer wannabe’s in Chargers/Challengers who think they have to drive aggressively to justify their purchase.
4WD owners who think it means snow, ice, wet leaves, and water standing in the road aren’t reasons to drive cautiously.
Uninsured drivers who neither care nor suffer consequences when they crash into other motorists.
People who lost their license due to DUI’s that now ride a weaving path on a moped.
I actually had a similar experience as Adrian. Sold my 260Z and several years and moves later, I walk out the door of my apartment and it’s staring at me (the front door was perpendicular to the street). Turned out to have been dropped off to the guy upstairs who did automotive welding and he drove it home for the night. Not sure why he was taking customer cars home, but not my business. It was scary because it was the only car I owned where there was a mutual hatred and that I was most happy to be rid of . . . maybe second most—I was pretty happy to get rid of that damn Camry. Even an unreliable Z in avocado green with a black vinyl roof is better than an oil-burning Camry with the world’s worst seats.
Beyond cop-type cars, especially those driven like cops, I can’t say too many cars scare me. I guess, maybe in a general sense, any kind of shitty “tuner” car or stanced abomination nearly always driven poorly, though I think I’d qualify them more as annoying than scary. Bad drivers used to be more identifiable by vehicle and could be further broken down by the type of bad driver they’d be by vehicle, but any type can be in just about anything now. CRVs are the worst in numbers by far, but are more often of the frustratingly indecisive and fearful type than dangerous (though those traits can be dangerous, they’re much less so than the weaving maniacs, tailgaters, or wandering dopes/phone users). Dump trucks scare me for the shit they kick up at my car, but I’m not sure scare is really the right word there, either.
Oh the damn highway robbers. I can’t stand the mobile revenue generators that are unmarked or ghost cars
In the 1990s, there was an unmarked SC State Trooper in the Myrtle Beach area with a black Fox body Ford Mustang with a Police Interceptor engine and the NC (yes, NC, not SC) vanity plate GOTCHA that nailed tourists left and right.
My department has a couple Subaru legacys that we use as fugitive night units, and we often have our prisoner transport minivan borrowed by other units for the same reason. Nothing like having six kitted out officers pile oit of a random minivan to snag a violent fugitive before he knows what’s happening.
Personally the ones that scare me around here are the overly make-uped soccer moms weaving all over the road while the text behind the wheel of the 4 door long bed lifted 4×4 mall crawler. I’ve lost count of how many of those I’ve watched drop a wheel off the road beside a pedestrian, or rear end the little old lady in her buick waiting at the stop sign.
PUT THE CELL PHONE DOWN DAMN IT!!!
Man, the cell phones have become a real problem. Can spot them immediately – car is gradually slowing down and drifting to the side, sudden correction, slow and drift. Put the fucking thing down or pull over – I don’t care if you’re on the clock, you’ll make up the time by actually driving whenever you’re done with whatever the fuck you’re doing in there.
The beige Ram 1500 that rear-ended me and knocked me out cold for five minutes.
The scariest cars you can’t identify. Like serial killers, they look normal, but there’s something very wrong going on inside.
Specifically, they’re driven by someone:
a) uninsured
b) more interested in their cell phone than driving the vehicle
c) inebriated
d) some combination of the above
Here in the San Francisco’s East Bay (Oakland and several other cities) that driver of that clapped out Altima is known for having Big Altima Energy (BAE). The driver does not know fear. The Altima was often the vehicle of choice for smash and grabs (which have slowed down a lot).
Don’t get me wrong, I have owned an Altima SE-R and occasionally exhibited BAE but I had the common sense to sell it once it was totaled the second time.
Seems like they have all graduated to Infiniti’s lately though, haven’t they?
As well as older salvaged-titled Lexus LS’s, IS’s and mostly GS’s, too.
The slammed Civic with busted-axle camber and stretched tires that ran my green light and was about 20 feet from turning me into gore yesterday.
In parking lots, a beige or burgundy Buick or Avalon, or any older model Camry with an aftermarket carriage roof can be pretty damn scary. If you’re walking along on foot and the reverse lights come on, stop what you’re doing and take cover, because that thing is at high risk of lurching back unpredictably regardless of what or who is behind it and nothing in the vicinity is safe until the driver makes it to the road.
There’s nothing more terrifying than the Altima. Although, a clapped out Infiniti G35/37 comes pretty goddamn close. They’re almost always piloted by some low IQ/low credit score shitbird with a blatant disregard for traffic laws. Z Cars aren’t much better. Basically, I try to steer clear of anything with a VQ.
All Corollas.
They all do terrifying unpredictable things on the road. I try to avoid them when ever I see one.
And Camrys, well all Toyotas.
They have the most clueless drivers.
As a trucker, the scariest car is the chase car. That is a DOT enforcement vehicle purposely staged just past the weigh scale just waiting on you to blow the scale. Weigh scales love to flip the sign from closed to open just as a truck passes, and that chase car hunts you down to make your life hell for failure to obey.
Wouldn’t they be able to Contest that with a dashcam?
A G37 in Baltimore with Virginia tags. That means the car has whatever remains of 328 horsepower and no insurance. (And I’m a proud G37 owner.)
Any car in Baltimore with printed paper tags that are very floppy or have half the paper tag covered up. It was wild during Covid. I once saw 3 cars run up the wrong way on Pennsylvania Avenue to get to the side street to Branch Ave, SE to avoid waiting 5 minutes for the light. I was praying the whole time that they made it, so I didn’t die in a 100+ combined speed collision. People loved to floor it from Pennsylvania Ave West from Branch Ave to Alabama due to the dip and hill.
A nun in a red Ford Taurus. She was an incredibly dangerous driver, full “Jesus take the wheel because I’m not going to” level of attention combined with extremely aggressive throttle usage and a general disdain for signals.
The scary things? Well, one, she was a nun, classic monster right there. Two, the cops WOULD NOT PULL HER OVER. Ever. She could do the most egregious, criminal dangerous driving shit, and as soon as they saw who she was, they would drive off. This nun was untouchable.
See the nun in your mirror and you were in for pain. Would she hit you? Would she cause you to hit someone else? You were never safe. And God was not on your side.
I hate this for you but I love this story. The Nuntouchables.
Get out. You are officially persona nun grata.
Cotd
The Altima should be top of the list. Those things scare the sh** out of me. Encounters daily with them. Once had one come from the on ramp doing 35 to cut off 2 semis doing 60 and then get all the way over into the left lane, that was ending. Still doing 35. Then realized the left lane was ending so hammer down to 80 to get back in front, then slowed down again.
I had the pleasure of talking to a UPS tractor trailer driver after we both lived out a code brown. There was a cube of Styrofoam, maybe 18″ to a side, right in the middle of the interstate. He was boxed in on every side and had no choice but to ram it. I told him I respected the hell out of not freaking out and destroying everything else to dodge it. He said it lifted up the tractor. How he kept it upright is beyond me but I admire professionals being professionals.
It is something we are taught. Never swerve, only controlled braking. Swerving can roll a semi, or cause injuries and death to other motorists. Hitting something may cause alot of expensive damage, but it is still cheaper than rolling a truck or the lawsuits.
Most of these including Adrian are not scary. However my nephews car he let his wife drive with his kids in the car while he drove a new Charger was scary. Asked me to transport it to a new Reno house he bought. Turning the steering wheel 180 degrees made a suggestion to the front wheels what direction. Slamming the brakes on results were a slow and leisurely stop. A nice smooth road felt like a washboard. After I arrived I informed him and my brother who sucked me into this trip I would never drive one of their vehicles again.