Just how many times did Fast and the Furious characters shift gears?

After its latest installment made over $1-billion in the box office, it’s safe to say that the ‘Fast and the Furious’ movie franchise is probably one of the most iconic car flicks of this generation. But with all its exciting car chases, drama, explosions, and plot twists, there’s one very important question that keeps bugging us until this day.

Just how many times have the characters visibly shifted gears in all movies? Makes you wonder, right? In the interest of providing our readers with information, we went through each movie and counted.  Here’s the result of our “hard work.”

Fast and the Furious – the first movie of the franchise and all its action only saw a measly 16 up/down shifts. The low count can be attributed to the characters using sports cars with automatic transmission and pressing the Nitrous Oxide (NO2) button more times than we actually cared.

Meanwhile, the opening scene of its follow up movie ‘2 Fast, 2 Furious’ outdo its predecessor with a tally of 25 shifts. The rest of the film was able to squeeze in 40 more gear changes in its climax, bringing it to a grand total of 65.

Its third installment moves away from America to highlight the drifting scene. Maybe that would be one of the reasons why ‘Tokyo Drift’ only coughed up 40 shifts since drifting requires more finesse on the pedal than relying on power or NO2.

The fourth movie of the franchise ‘Fast and Furious’ only mustered up 46 gear changes as it featured its main characters again. Fast Five, on the other hand, saw a deeper take on the story and despite all the chase scenes and vehicle carnage all we got to see were 20 shifts. The franchise’s plot thickens in Fast and Furious 6, where we’re only able to see 30 gear shifts even during its infamous notoriously long runway scene.

Fast and Furious 7 again concentrated on its story and produced just 37 changes in gear, including the farewell scene of Brian O’Conner played by the late Paul Walker and Dominic Toretto played by Vin Diesel. The latest release in the franchise—Fate of the Furious—also played it down with just 31 gear shifts.

In total, all the characters of the Fast and Furious franchise changed gears 285 times. With all this work, our job isn’t done as the Fast and Furious still has two more movies in the pipeline set to hit cinemas in 2020 and 2021, respectively. We’ll make sure to update the count when we get to watch it a few years from now.