Driving Into a Truck

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    The spy car needs to evade his pursuers, and/or make a pit stop while on the run. What to do?

    Why, drive up into the back of a conveniently waiting semi, of course! Then you can sneak past your pursuers, Right Under Their Noses! Often the truck trailer will contain a complete auto shop. Sometimes a bus, airplane or other large vehicle will be used instead.

    When the truck is moving, the main difficulty of course is the speed difference between the truck's ramp and the road.

    Common to spy shows. Marginally related to Punk in the Trunk (in the sense of stowing away in another vehicle).

    Examples of Driving Into a Truck include:

    Commercials and Advertisements

    • A Chevy "American Revolution" commercial features a car carrier truck driving around with its ramp down, and Chevys drive up behind it and then up onto it.

    Film

    • Used in The Gumball Rally to evade a police roadblock and make a pit stop.
      • Implied to have happened in Cannonball Run (which is to say, we don't actually see it happening). JJ and Victor's car (dressed up like an ambulance) is stopped in line at a roadblock which is set up specifically to catch and arrest Cannonballers. While waiting in line JJ spots a semi with an empty flatbed. Cut to a shot of the semi & flatbed with some large, ambulance-shaped object under a tarp. They sneak by the roadblock under there.
    • In Disney/Pixar's Cars, this is where Lightning McQueen lives.
    • The original The Italian Job is probably the Trope Maker. In the film, three Mini Coopers make their getaway by driving up into the back of a converted bus.
    • Hudson Hawk. The ambulance carrying Eddie and Tommy Five-Tone away from the Mayflowers drives up a ramp into a truck.
    • Never Say Never Again. While James Bond is riding a motorcycle the enemy Mooks force him to ride up a ramp into a truck so he can be captured. However, as the ramp is rising up to trap him he guns it and jumps the motorcycle over the ramp and out of the truck.
      • In n The Living Daylights, a jeep evades pursuers by driving onto the extended rear hatch of a taxiing C-130.
    • Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: Lord Scrumptious is captured by being tricked, Looney Tunes-style, into driving up into the back of a truck.
    • In Speed Zone, a speeder calls for help to a trucker hauling a empty car carrier when being pursued by a state cop. The trucker agrees. With some fancy driving the speeder loses the cop by driving aboard the car carrier... or so he thinks. The speeder unexpectedly gets a tap on his window, and the cop is there asking him for his license and registration. (Its implied that the cop has driven aboard the car carrier also.) The speeder gets out of the ticket because the truck hasn't stopped, and they all cross a state line, so the cop is now out of his jurisdiction.
    • In Serenity, the Mule escapes the Reavers by driving up the ramp into Serenity.
    • The Argo Jeep and a cargo shuttlecraft play this role in Star Trek: Nemesis. Picard even drives the Argo over a ledge in order to park it in the shuttle.
    • In Goodbye Pork Pie, Gerry, John and Shirl escape the Wellington railway yards by driving the Mini into a boxcar being shunted towards the Interislander ferry.
    • Literally done in The Blues Brothers: A police squad car jumps off the side of a freeway, smashing into the side of a passing truck. (They're doing it wrong!)

    Literature

    • In the James Bond novel Role of Honour by John Gardner, Bond is abducted when SPECTRE forces his car into the back of a truck by dropping the back door and stopping suddenly, causing Bond to drive up into the truck before he has a chance to react.

    Live Action TV

    • Knight Rider is the Trope Codifier.
      • Played with by Team Knight Rider and Knight Rider version 2 (2008), where it's a C-130 cargo plane instead.
    • MythBusters did it once, to see if it was really doable or just Hollywood magic. (It is really doable.)
    • One of the stunt challenges on Fear Factor required the participants to drive a car up the ramp of a moving truck as the last part of the challenge. Inside the truck was a ramp that would flip the car and send it flying out the side of the truck for a spectacular movie-style ending.

    Video Games

    • In the video game Spy Hunter, this is how you get your power-ups.
    • There is at least one mission in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas in which you have to do this.
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