One of those venues is at Universal Studio Tours in Hollywood, Southern California, where several of the original cars remained on display for some time, although it should be noted that this does not include any of the EVO VIIs. Many of the movie cars from 2 Fast 2 Furious were also used in promotional roles at certain automotive venues. Those vehicles were returned to Mitsubishi after production and all of them were crushed.

We nowknow that that was not the case as Mitsubishi supplied real JDM right-hand-drive Lancer Evolution IX’s for the third iteration of the franchise.

The studio may have kept them long after that with the intention of using them again in a possible third film. The studio held onto the vehicles after production finished using them for promotional purposes by passing them out to many automotive magazines like Motor Trend, Sport Compact Car, etc., which in turn compiled feature articles. If I had to guess, these cars were registered in states where they don’t pay too much attention to gray market imports, wonky VIN numbers (Japanese VIN numbers are different than those in America, or Austria, for that matter).Īfter researching to the best of our ability, we have arrived at a plausible deduction. How the three EVO VIIs got past all of that and into private owners’ hands can only be speculation. It is likely that they then were to be crushed or exported, since Lancer Evolution VIIs were never sold in North America.

The motors were stock – no mods – but we had a total of four cars.Īfter the movie production was completed, the four Evolutions were to be returned to Mitsubishi Motors North America Inc., as they were all here in the U.S. These cars have confused many people over the years. This meant doing surgery to the rear taillights.Ī company called “Genera/TYC” provided the lights and Eddie Paul’s technicians did the surgery.

The problem was that the cars were EVO VIIs (EVO 7s for those that don’t understand Roman numerals) and Mitsubishi would never sell that car in the U.S., so Mitsubishi asked us to make the car look like the soon to be arriving EVO VIIIs. They intercepted a shipment of EVOs that were destined for a Rally team in Austria (this is why the cars were Left Hand Drive (LHD) by the way). Since the Lancer Evolution had not yet made it to the United States back in 2002 (when we were making this movie), Mitsubishi intervened.

Fast and furious 2 brians car