Bluesmobile

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The Blues Brothers and their Dodge Monaco

The Bluesmobile is a 1974 Dodge Monaco sedan that was prominently featured in the 1980 film, The Blues Brothers . In the film, it is described as a used Mount Prospect, Illinois police car which replaced a Cadillac which Elwood Blues traded for a microphone.

In describing the car to his brother, Jake, Elwood Blues said, "It's got a cop motor, a 440-cubic-inch plant. It's got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks. It's a model made before catalytic converters so it'll run good on regular gas". The Bluesmobile has the ability to perform seemingly impossible stunts, such as jumping over an open drawbridge, flipping backwards in midair and even "flying" for very brief periods of time.

The cops do not like the car, Officer Mount, for instance, referred to it as "That shitbox Dodge".

After the extended chase from their concert gig, was a 120 mile trip to Chicago and an unspecified total distance through the streets of city being pursued by the police and neo-nazis, the Bluesmobile collapsed seconds upon arrival at the civic building that contained the tax office the Brothers needed to visit.

In the extended version of the film, Elwood parks the Bluesmobile in an electric substation that was used to power Chicago's elevated trains. In the documentary "Stories Behind the Making of the Blues Brothers", Dan Aykroyd stated that the Bluesmobile would get charged from the substation, which would explain how it would be able to do impressive stunts. In a television interview, director John Landis claimed that the chase scene beneath the elevated train tracks which briefly showed the car's speedometer with a reading of 120 miles per hour (nearly 200 km/h) was actually filmed at that speed, testament to the Monaco's police car heritage.

Twelve Monacos were used in the film, including one that was designed to simply fall apart upon its arrival at the Daley Plaza. None of the cars survived the filming.

Many replicas of the Bluesmobile have been built by collectors around the world.

The name "Bluesmobile" was also given to another former police car, a 1990 Ford LTD Crown Victoria in the 1998 sequel Blues Brothers 2000.