For car nuts it’s the high point of any classic movie – the edge-of-your-seat car chase that raises the heart beat and quickens the pulse through every twist and turn.

Now car insurer Canstar has set out to discover the most thrilling cinematic car chase of all time with a scientific survey of more than 150 volunteers as they watched a selection of iconic films, measuring their heart rate (BPM) and heart rate variance (HRV) to determine an overall ‘Excitement Score’ for each film.

And the winner as ‘most exciting’? Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) topped the list as the most ‘scientifically exciting’ car chase, raising average heart rates by a whopping 25 BPM (37 per cent). One of three franchise film entries to make the list, George Miller’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece feels like one continuous car chase, the HRV measurement dropping 21 per cent, or the steepest dive of all films tested.

In second place was 1998 thriller Ronin, starring Robert De Niro, which was the oldest film to make the top 10. Tearing through the narrow streets of Paris, this chase raised pulses by 23 BPM (34 per cent), proving that precision and realism can be just as electrifying as CGI and explosions.

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Rounding out the top five were Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, and the James Bond film, Quantum of Solace.

Other key findings from the survey included that Brad Pitt’s F1 (2025) was the highest-ranked movie released in the last year, while the Fast and the Furious series had more entries in the top 25 (four) than any other franchise.

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How did Canstar measure the data? Over 150 volunteers were recruited to watch iconic car chase sequences, which were curated from global critics’ lists, Reddit suggestions, and editorial picks. Each participant was fitted with a heart rate monitor tracking BPM and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) to measure changes relative to their individual resting baseline.

BPM measures how fast the heart is beating and the bigger the jump from resting rate, the more thrilling the scene. HRV tracks the milliseconds between beats. When stressed or anxious, the variance drops, and the heart beats more consistently.

Scenes that caused the most significant drop in HRV were those that had viewers holding their breath and both metrics were combined to calculate an overall Excitement Score out of 100, with Mad Max: Fury Road earning the highest score at 94.

The full results of Canstar’s survey can be found here.