The Fast And The Furious films really know their automotive history. The series has kept a bunch of car enthusiasts and experts on retainer, essentially, to make sure that all the technical mumbo-jumbo the characters are spouting is accurate, as well as relying on their expertise when it comes to choosing the cars to highlight in the film, and making sure that the characters supposedly car experts themselves are fawning over the right models, and for the right reasons. It's not just the specifics of the modern automobile that the films make reference to, however. In the first film, Dom shows an intimate knowledge of where the industry started by misquoting Henry Ford, the man who built the T Model Ford the first popular, commercially available car, whose company exists to this day. It's Ford. He named his company after himself. At the house party, Dom says to Brian, You can have any beer you want, as long as it's a Corona, a riff on Ford's possibly apocryphal line about the different paint jobs you could give to his creations: You can have any colour you want, as long as it's black. Of course it's since transpired that the T Model was actually available in multiple colours, and the quote may have been wrongly attributed, but it's still pretty cool. And even more so when Vin Diesel appropriates it.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
