Magic Brakes

Quite often, during a chase scene, the prey will find himself the victim of a brake failure. There are many reasons this could happen: his brake lines have been cut by the villain, rough terrain has damaged the car, or My Car Hates Me and has decided that now would be a good time for them to randomly fail.

Losing your brakes is indeed a dangerous thing to have happen, but TV likes to up the danger by assuming that brakes are magical devices which hold in check the powerful forces which a car uses to kill its driver.

Specifically, without brakes, a fictional driver loses all ability to slow the car down. They don't think to downshift, de-clutch or even take the car out of gear. Applying the parking brake doesn't help, even though is a completely separate system from the normal hydraulic brakes. Throwing the car into reverse is another idea that never occurs to anyone (but in fairness, the MythBusters have shown this would never work in the first place since most cars won't shift from a forward gear to reverse until the car has stopped moving).

Worse than that, a car without brakes will not simply fail to stop. It will accelerate out of control, even on flat ground or up a hill. The engine may rev up. The driver will also be forced to swerve back and forth a lot.

With Magic Brakes being the only thing keeping the car from quickly accelerating to top speed, it's odd that no one ever notices the brake failure until they've reached highway speed—despite any maneuvering and braking required just to get the car out of its parking spot. This is sometimes (but not often) Handwaved by having the brake line slashed, but not fully cut, so the brake fluid is slowly leaking out.

Fortunately, the magic does not kick in until the driver discovers that he has no brakes. The car will behave perfectly normally before that point, but as soon as he notices that he can't stop, the out-of-control acceleration will begin.

Of course, if there is a hairpin turn anywhere within a hundred miles, the driver will be on it at the moment the brakes decide to let go.

A note on heavy trucks and trains: air brakes on modern vehicles work opposite the way car brakes do. The brakes are set to hold themselves shut, but air pressure in the system is what opens them and lets the wheels turn. If an air line is cut, there will be no pressure to open the brakes and the vehicle won't move. Of course, this can be dangerous in its own way; if the air lines are cut while in motion, or something else goes wrong, the brakes will snap shut and cause a lockup, skidding, and perhaps a jackknifed trailer. You may see this on a highway in the form of two sets of closely-spaced rubber streaks.

Often overlaps with Brake Angrily.

Examples of Magic Brakes include:

Advertising

• Subverted in one Burger King commercial. A group of moms incensed by the restaurant's new home-style melt hire a saboteur to cut the King's brake lines. This only causes him to accidentally ram their parked cars as he backs out of his parking spot.

Anime and Manga

• Sailor Moon episode 111, where Eudial's car falls off a cliff after she discovers that her rival Mimete destroyed its brake pedal. Not only did she have enough time and distance to simply steer away, but it also raises the question how she managed to get there to begin with - not only without brakes, but also without noticing it.
  • Eudial is established as driving like an absolute lunatic; she'll do 80 driving up the stairs of a subway station. Mimette could have slashed her brake lines three episodes ago and that was just the first time she noticed.
  • The weirdest part about that whole sequence is that Mimete didn't cut the brake line: she removed the entire brake pad and the bottom portion of the car. Not only did Eudial not notice the gaping hole next to the gas pedal, but she didn't notice the snails Mimete left as a...as a...well, actually, I have no idea why she left snails in her car. The English dub didn't even seem to know, so they just said they were "acid snails" and never mentioned it again. That sequence was weird.
• First played straight and then unintentionally on two separate occasions in You're Under Arrest - In the season 2 episode A Midsummer Night's Curse, the brakes in Miyuki's Honda go out just as it reaches a crosswalk with two children crossing (The emergency brake however, did work and prevented any accidents from occurring). The other instance is in the opening to the Full Throttle season; As is typical of Studio DEEN's testament of quality, the brake pedal disappears for one frame (The scene in question is here, 2 seconds in).

Film

• Played half-straight in the first Cannonball Run film. A minor Cannonballer claims to a police officer trying to pull him over that his brakes are broken and he can't stop. After the police car pulls away to get backup, the Cannonballer discovers his brakes really are broken, leading to his truck jumping off the conveniently placed car hauler and over the single empty flatbed of the train that has everything else stopped.
• Occurs in the Tank Girl film when TG is stealing the Water & Power truck.

Jet Girl: There's a big cliff coming up on you. Now hit the brakes. Hit the brakes!
Tank Girl: Brakes aren't working, girl! Plan B!
Jet Girl: Get outta there! Quick! Jump!

• Gemini Man/Riding with Death (Movie version). Atypically, the brake failure is treated as only a moderate danger in and of itself—the danger is provided by the high explosives in the trailer and the hairpin turn just down the road. The truck does still accelerate out of control on a level road.
• In Black Dog, attention to detail on how trucks work is the film's main virtue. When a bad guy on a bike jumps onto the deckplate in-motion, and pulls off the connectors to the trailer, the protection valve on the dash of the tractor pops immediately, and the hero must get them re-connected before the air tank runs low and the brakes set.
• In Silver Streak, the conductor's plan to stop (most of) the sabotaged train and minimize the damage from the crash at the end of the film is simple: uncouple the cars, all the air lines break, and the emergency brakes set, leaving only the locomotive running out-of-control. This is actually completely accurate.
  • The same situation was played out in the film Runaway Train.
• This is how the titular character dies in Drowning Mona.

Literature

• Used in Tom Clancy's Without Remorse, when a truck going downhill loses all brakes, resulting in the driver downshifting. It did slow the truck down, but not enough...
• Borderline example in A Scanner Darkly where it's the accelerator pedal that's broken, and won't come up from the depressed position, causing the car to keep accelerating until the protagonist rips the key out of the ignition.
• crops up in one of the books that were adapted into All Creatures Great and Small of all places. Subverted in that Jim had been complaining to Siegfried about the car (which belonged to the practice) being in increasingly urgent need of having the brakes serviced for some weeks beforehand,^[1] but the part where they finally give up the ghost right at the top of a very steel hill is played straight. Of course, being in Yorkshire it would have been more of an improbable coincidence if they'd quit on him anywhere but on a hill.

Live Action TV

• Knight Rider: "Let It Be Me"
• MacGyver:
  • "Hellfire" does a good job of setting up the sequence—there's a steep gradient, a reason for the brakes to fail just at that moment, and an actual danger from the load of unstable explosives on the back of the truck—but still falls inside the trope because the people in the truck, one of whom is the famously ingenious MacGyver, can't think of anything that might slow the truck down.
  • "The Enemy Within" has a car with a punctured brake fluid cable accelerate out of control down a gentle slope for several miles while MacGyver climbs out onto the front of the car and does emergency repairs. (The driver does actually think to try the handbrake, but it's not working either.)
• Too many Soap Opera examples to list, on both sides of the Equator. Ugly Betty brought from Venezuela all the brake-cutting goodness of the original.
• Subverted in Lois and Clark, when Jimmy Olsen finds himself unable to brake he resorts to screaming for help. Superman just sits down next to him and says "Did you try this?" before turning off the ignition and handing Jimmy the key as the car comes to a complete stop.
• Justified in Smallville. When an actress's car goes out of control, it's revealed that not only did someone cut her brake line, they also tampered with her accelerator, explaining why she kept speeding up.
• A brake fluid line was accidentally cut in a Mission Impossible episode, in a remote-controlled vehicle to boot. However, they did manage to get the vehicle back in control through downshifting.
• In one episode of The Bionic Woman, Jaime finds herself in a car with the brakes cut, rolling downhill, and the gearshift rigged so she couldn't put it in park. She has to open the car door and stomp down hard with her bionic legs to stop the car.

Newspaper Comics

• Dick Tracy faced this situation at least once in the 1930s.

Western Animation

• Parodied in The Simpsons, where Marge's car's dashboard actually has a "Brakes Cut" light.
  • Even stranger, the brakes weren't actually cut: Homer just ended up draining all the brake fluid when he was trying to change the oil, and was too embarassed to mention it.
• Subverted/Parodied in an episode of American Dad, where a girl Steve is taking revenge on has her brakes go out at the top of a steep hill, only to realize that she was just stepping on the clutch.
  • Played straight in another episode when Roger cuts the brakes; the car goes in full throttle as soon as stan mentions the brakes.

Real Life

• A woman was running errands when her car's throttle became stuck open, causing her car to accelerate out of control. Attempts at braking or downshifting were only a temporary, partial solution, and in the end she had to send her car upside down into a ditch in order to stop. The tale is recounted in the Reader's Digest article, "My Car Won't Stop!"
  • This happened to me once. Shifting into neutral and hitting the brakes stopped the car. By downshifting and using the brakes, I was able to drive to the service station, even with throttle stuck open.
  • If this ever happens to you I recommend shutting off the ignition first and foremost.

1. ↑ The story predates proper vehicle roadworthiness tests by some decades