Car crusher
Car crushers are compactors and can be of two types: "pancake", where a scrap automobile is flattened by a huge descending hydraulically powered plate, or the baling press type, with which the automobile is compressed from several directions until it resembles a large cube.
Car crushers can be stationary or mobile.
Car crushers in popular culture
Car crushers have been popular in films as devices of murder or humour. They have appeared in such well known films as Goldfinger, Cleopatra Jones, National Lampoon's Vacation, I'll Never Forget What's'isname, Kick-Ass, Superman III, Gone in 60 Seconds and Pulp Fiction and many others.
They have also appeared in several television shows including Mathnet's "The Case of the Great Car Robbery". Joe Howard's character, George Frankly hid in a to-be-stolen car and the other characters thought he was still in the car after it was flattened by the crusher.
A car crusher was used to dispose of a Walt and Jesse's RV containing a mobile meth lab in season 3 of Breaking Bad.
A car crusher appeared in the junkyard scene of the Kushner-Locke/Disney movie The Brave Little Toaster.
A car crusher also appears in the video games Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Mafia II where the player can make money from stealing cars and take them to the crusher.
A car crusher also featured in Need for Speed: The Run, Jack is seen tied to the steering wheel of his red Porsche Carrera 911, on a crusher in a junkyard, before Janella Salvador/Habib Diator's death. On the ground, Marcus Blackwell and a mobster are watching. He is about to be crushed to death, but he wakes up and manages to untie himself and escape the crusher in the last second. He sneaks out and steals an NFS Edition Audi RS4, barely escaping the junkyard alive. Soon, he is chased by multiple Porsche Cayennes, but Jack escapes.
See also
- Vehicle recycling
- Beat the Crusher, a UK TV show featuring cars demolished by a car crusher
- César Baldaccini, a baled car artist, now deceased
- James Squillante, a mobster reputedly crushed in his own car.
External links
- "Where Old Cars Meet Their End And Start Over", November 1930, Popular Science bottom of page 61 shows the first type car crusher in action
- "Giant Press Bales Autos." Popular Science, August 1948, p.119.