"Hey, lady! What in thunder are you tryin' to do?!"note
"Road... Rage... BUILDING!"
— Marge Simpson, The Simpsons Hit & Run
We've all had one of those days. You're trying to get to work or get home after a hard day, and some asshole just has to cut you off in traffic. Or honk his horn at you a little too loudly. Or tailgate you. Or flash his lights at you. Or flip you off.
Now, most of the time, people know how to keep their cool, to brush things off, and be on their way.
But other times? You get this trope.
Road Rage is when someone gets pissed off on the road and proceeds to go off, which usually takes one of two forms:
- The offended driver roars off after the one who pissed them off in Drives Like Crazy fashion, seeking to either pass them, yell at them for whatever offense pissed them off, and/or worse.
- The offended driver stops their vehicle, gets out, and goes after the other driver (or a pedestrian or someone else) to yell at them, kick their ass, or worse.
This can be comedic in the right circumstances, but all too often, especially in more dramatic fare, it can be quite frightening and very, very dangerous, especially if Driving Like Crazy is involved. And as with all violent and aggressive confrontations, there's always a very good chance of the aggressor biting off a lot more than they can chew.
A British stereotype of road rage is the "white van man": a delivery driver in an unmarked white van, who is often paid according to mileage, so tries to cover as many miles as he can every day, and becomes very angry with anybody who holds him up by even a few seconds, especially Women Drivers.
Road rage
incidents are quite common in real life, and have sometimes led to deaths, either from vehicular homicide, collisions, or in some cases, even shootings carried out by one of the people involved in the incident. Because of this commonality and the violence often inherent to this trope, we must ask that no real life examples be added. The Trope Namer was a KTLA news report in 1987, although the phenomenon itself dates back much earlier.
Compare Hair-Trigger Temper, which may be one of the causes of road rage, Rage Breaking Point, for when whatever the other driver did is the final straw that sends the character in question into rage mode, and Berserk Button, if road incidents specifically set a person off. Also compare Big Honking Traffic Jam. For the other, more British meaning of "getting pissed on the road", see Drunk Driver.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Lucky Star: In episode 6 of the anime, Konata's cousin Yui is set off by someone passing her on the road, and proceeds to go full Initial D on the driver involved. Parodied since a close look at the speedometer in Yui's car shows that despite the intensity of the race, neither of them are actually driving that fast (Yui is only driving at 40 km/h, which is essentially 24-25 MPH).
- Promare: The beginning of the emergence of the Burnish and the ensuing Great World Blaze is shown right at the start of the movie, specifically focusing on one individual who becomes stressed out from being stuck in traffic all day. When he finally snaps, he takes it out on every other motorist around him, and other Burnish would emerge and follow suit.
Comic Books
- There is a Road Rage anthology of comic stories that includes a comic book adaptation of the Stephen King and Joe Hill story "Throttle" (listed below on this page).
- Preacher has a pedestrian variation when Herr Starr is stuck on an airport walkway behind an old woman with multiple suitcases with the PA constantly warning passengers to get ready for the bump at the end. He ends up screaming at her to get moving, which she does with gusto, and then he shoots the loudspeaker.
MOVING FUCKING BASTARD WALKWAY!!!
Fan Works
- In the Avatar: The Legend of Korra fic The Car Was Mad and So Was I, Korra has to bail Asami out of jail after a road-rage incident gets her arrested.
- With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: In "Vet Visits", Manolo explains to Wilhelmina that his father Carlos got road rage when the two of them were driving together and hit a cow the day before. Manolo asks if the cow can be saved and Wilhelmina has to break the news that it's too late for the cow, much to Manolo's horror.
Films – Animated
- 101 Dalmatians: When Cruella De Vil finally sees through the Labrador disguise that Pongo and company have adopted to get away from her, she goes so crazy with absolute rage that she tries to run the moving van carrying them off the road and even rams them from behind before getting t-boned by her own men.
- Inside Out is about anthropomorphized emotions living inside people's minds. Most characters have a balanced set of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. Meanwhile, a random bus driver's emotions are shown as just five different colors of Anger, all freaking out inside his mind due to being stuck in traffic, passengers being noisy, and an annoying commercial jingle being stuck in his head.
- Toy Story 1: Scud chases down Buzz Lightyear, even as far as going through a busy road. At an intersection, he ends up getting trapped in a circle of vehicles due to causing an accident, with all the drivers going berserk for causing this.
Films – Live-Action
- Invoked in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, where Ace proceeds to act like an asshole after pulling up next to a Miami Dolphins player. Ace's goal, however, isn't to get him pissed enough to do anything violent, but to get him to flip him off, since he wears his championship ring on his bird-finger, and Ace is trying to find out which guy's ring is missing the stone that he found in Snowflake's tank. The guy he's messing with doesn't have a stone missing from his ring, so he speeds off with no further incident.
- We don't know exactly what sets off the driver of the big semi in the Steven Spielberg movie Duel, but the lengths this guy goes to to go after the protagonist are truly insane.
- Big Fat Liar: Marty Wolf involuntarily rear-ends the huge tires of The Masher's monster truck; even just the slightest brush is enough for the Masher to get so pissed off that he retaliates by destroying Marty's sports car with it.
- Easy Rider infamously ends with the two surviving protagonists pissing off two redneck truckers who proceed to shoot them both right from their truck.
- Eskimo Day: On their important car journey, superstitious Shani sees a magpie, which she believes is unlucky, and tells Bevis to go around the next roundabout three times. When Bevis is just about to disobey and exit the roundabout, she yells "Nooooo!!!", and Bevis swerves back onto the roundabout, in front of the driver of a white van, who yells at them, and pursues them round the roundabout several times. Shani calls to him "I'm ever so sorry, it was a bird," infuriating the man further.
- Falling Down: The first step in the Disaster Dominoes that lead to the violent rampage of the movie is when the very, very tightly-wound Foster gets stuck in traffic and abandons his car, with Prendergast behind him. This is the Inciting Incident for him to walk into the supermarket where he smashes up the display, and attacks a pair of gang members.
- In Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Darren and Lizabeth encounter Jason on the road to Camp Forest Green (a.k.a. Crystal Lake). Darren is pissed off at the freak in the hockey mask blocking the road, and despite Lizabeth telling him to let it go, he gets the bright idea both to try to scare him by charging at him with their car and then braking at the last moment, and to get out of the car with a gun to teach him a lesson. Needless to say, it doesn't end well for either Darren or Lizabeth.
- L.A. Story: Parodied with the "open season on the L.A. Freeway" scene, where Harris and Trudi get into an A-Team Firing Car Chase Shoot-Out with a bunch of random motorists for basically no reason other than it being the first day of spring, driving home the film's portrayal of Los Angeles as Cloudcuckooland.
- Lost Highway: Soon after the film changes to the point of view of Pete, he is taken for a ride by the gangster Mr. Eddy and his two bodyguards, and after a car tailgates them before aggressively passing them, Eddy floors the gas, hitting the car from behind several times before the man pulls over, at which point Mr. Eddy flanked by his armed bodyguards beats the man senseless on the side of the road as Pete watches on with horror.
- Never Back Down: The hotheaded Jake, simmering over issues regarding his father, gets into an altercation with some drivers that ends with Jake kicking all of their asses MMA-style.
- Out for Justice: One of the early signs that Richie Madrano, the mafioso who murdered Bobby and whom Gino Felino wants vengeance on, is a psycho is when he gets out of his car and shoots a woman for telling him to move the car in question.
- Unhinged (2020): The film focuses on a mentally unstable man who goes after a woman who does not apologize to him after honking at him on the road for holding up traffic at a green light.
Literature
- The Steven Spielberg movie Duel was adapted from a Richard Matheson short story of the same name.
- One of the Inspector Wexford series, Road Rage is about a road rage incident that turns into a kidnapping, with Inspector Wexford's wife among the people taken hostage.
- In The Shining, Dick Hallorann accidentally swerves into the lane of a guy driving a Pinto after getting Danny's message, pissing the driver in question off and prompting one of Stephen King's most hilarious uses of the Narrative Profanity Filter:
The workman cut to the left, still laying on his horn, and roared around the drunkenly weaving limousine. He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo driver's soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limodriver's mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution.
- "Throttle", a story by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill, concerns a biker gang being menaced by an insane trucker out in the Nevada desert. Stephen King was primarily inspired by Richard Matheson and his story "Duel", which is detailed above.
Live-Action TV
- 9-1-1: Lone Star: In "Impulse Control", caller-of-the week Al keeps getting into bad situations due to his Hair-Trigger Temper, activated by feeling his family has been harmed in some way. On his way to anger management with his family, he gets harassed by a drunk driver for not letting him pass due to too much traffic, who then waves a gun at them and throws a beer bottle at their windshield, causing a multi-vehicle accident. Once Al learns the drunk driver was not mortally wounded and that his care has taken priority over his own family's (because his car was on fire), Al uses the driver's discarded gun to shoot him three times in the chest, in front of his own horrified family and all of the 126. Al is arrested, and Captain Owen Strand, who has been struggling with his own anger, is pushed to go back to therapy.
- Beef's inciting incident is an innocuous parking lot foul — Danny pulls out of his slot without properly checking and nearly hits Amy's car, causing her to honk at him. However, they're both in such bad moods as a result of their respective personal situations that she hits the car horn for longer than she should, and he gets angrier than he should. Danny decides to chase after her, and they try to run each other off the road, endangering other drivers in the process. And this is only the beginning of a fight that spirals into a life-destroying feud.
- Blue Bloods: When Erin takes Nicky for a driving lesson in "Warriors", it doesn't go well because Erin gets frustrated, bulling her way through heavy city traffic and leaning on the horn at the slightest provocation. Nicky ends up getting driving lessons from Jamie instead.
- Criminal Minds: In the episode "Normal", Norman Hill was a quiet, unassuming family man who had previously lost a daughter in a car accident. After a woman who looks like his wife insults him in traffic while he was incidentally transporting a shotgun as a gift, Norman takes the shotgun and shoots at the woman, who flees and crashes, almost dying. After this, Norman starts prowling at night in his car, looking for new victims, and after being dubbed "The Road Warrior" by the media, starts dressing in a leather jacket and wearing Sunglasses at Night.
- Entourage: In "Oh, Mandy" (Season 2, Episode 8), Drama gets into an altercation with an obnoxious surfer in a PT Cruiser that results in him going off and taking a golf club to the guy's car.
- Fawlty Towers: In "Gourmet Night", this is downplayed when Basil is making an important car journey, and he mutters at other motorists "Oh, get out of the way!". When his car later breaks down, he gives it a "damn good thrashing" with a tree branch.
- House of Cards (UK): A trio of yobs in a van decide to run the Prime Minister's official car off the road, and then follow up their attack in person. His armed bodyguards promptly shoot them, and the incident is made out to be a terrorist attack so their actions aren't questioned.
- Law & Order: "Aftershock" discusses a very dark version of this. The episode opens with the execution of a convicted murderer. As the episode goes on, we learn that the condemned man had raped and murdered a young woman who had rear-ended him in traffic, and even more darkly, Van Buren notes in a letter she wrote about it, "A crowd of people stood and cheered when he raped her. They were supposedly good people, and they did absolutely nothing. Then he beat her to death with a tire iron..."
- In Season 4 Episode 11 of Ozark, Marty, pissed off at how Wendy keeps making major decisions without him, gets into a violent confrontation on the road and beats the living crap out of an angry driver.
- Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G.: There is a fatal road rage incident between a white man and a black man at a traffic light, which becomes complicated when it turns out both were undercover cops, and the investigation into the incident starts to unravel the scheme of Dirty Cops working for Death Row records boss Suge Knight.
- World's Dumbest...: A frequent sight on the show. It often leads to brawls in the middle of the road.
Music
- The AI song "Mommy Teaches Me New Words" is about a kid whose mom inadvertently teaches them lots of new words when she goes into road rage.
- Insane Clown Posse: "How Many Times" has several passages in the first verse about road rage, one about someone who honks his horn and yells "Fuck you!", and another about a traffic jam that turns out to be caused by a crash that people are gawking at.
- Ludacris: "Move Bitch"
Move bitch! Get out the way!Get out the way, bitch, get out the way!Move bitch! Get out the way!Get out the way, bitch, get out the way!
- "Cars" by Gary Numan was inspired by an incident when Gary was getting accosted by some guys and had to swerve onto a sidewalk to get away.
- The Offspring: "Bad Habit" is about a guy with a bad case of road rage and a gun in his glove box.
- Your Favorite Martian: "Road Rage"
Hey man, I'm just trying to driveIt feels more like I'm trying to stay aliveThe only thing you're driving is driving me crazyAnd I'm getting Road RageI'm just trying to mergeYou better back off 'cause I'm on the vergeI'm losing my coolYeah you better get over'Cause here comes the Road Rage
Toys
- The Transformers: Road Rage (typically a red-colored version of Tracks), gets her name because when she transforms into her alt-mode, a short in her circuitry causes her to develop a Hair-Trigger Temper and attack anything she perceives as antagonizing her, even other Autobots or harmless Earthlings. Once she reverts back to robot mode, where her normal calm and collected personality reasserts itself, she becomes deeply embarrassed by the destruction she caused in vehicle mode.
Video Games
- Burnout: The whole premise of the video game series, where everyone crashes or traffic checks with each other. And its dedicated game mode "Road Rage" centers on taking down rivals, while also traffic as common fodders.
- Grand Theft Auto: Every game in the franchise has the potential for this trope. First of all, due to the open sandbox structure of the games and the tons of Video Game Cruelty Potential, there's nothing that keeps the player from being a reckless driver and deliberately ramming other vehicles. NPC drivers can also respond with road rage if the player hits them, such as cursing, getting out of their car to fight the player, or even shooting.
- Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven: Don Morello's Establishing Character Moment is him inflicting this trope on an Innocent Bystander...in broad daylight, in the presence of two police officers and numerous other witnesses, to show how powerful The Don of the Morello Crime Family actually is. Though the manner in which this happens differs between the original game and the remake.
- In the original, a random driver accidentally bumps into the rear of Morello's Silver Fletcher luxury car, denting the rear to the point of requiring a lengthy repair. Enraged by the driver's failure to stop on time, Morello repeatedly slams the poor sap to death using the hood of the driver's own car.
- In the Definitive Edition, a crooked boxer named Joey Crackers fails to move his car out of the way when a white luxury car crashes into the rear of Crackers' sedan. Crackers, initially enraged at the idiocy of the driver behind him, soon shits his pants when the driver of the other car is revealed to be his boss Marcu Morello. While initially acting reasonable to Crackers, it's immediately revealed that Morello is in fact furious at the boxer for calling him a moron, and furiously beats the poor sap to death with a tire iron.
- Need for Speed: Of course! As a video game franchise centered on illegal street racing, nothing stops you from driving recklessly, other than getting the attention of the police.
- Aptly, in the special edition of Need for Speed II, "roadrage" was a cheat code that allowed the player to have other cars on the road overturn on sounding the (otherwise useless) horn.
- Implied about Nickel in Need for Speed: Undercover. He's an Angry Black Man known for being violent and extremely dangerous on the road. And its Job named "Road Rage" puts you in a Duel Boss against him on the highway. Beat him, and he'll be even more irate, giving you a reminder that'll he''ll be "no more Mr. Nice Guy" the next time you cross paths with him.
- Spider-Man 2 (Activision): One of the recurring crimes Spider-Man can stop is a civilian in the middle of driving recklessly. He accomplishes this by punching their car until they stop, at which point they get out and berate the wall-crawler for wrecking their vehicle.
Web Animation
- Gory Toons: In "Road Rage", the first episode of the second season, Linda is set off by Wario laughing at her and Blowing a Raspberry when she's already stuck in a Big Honking Traffic Jam and having to deal with Stewie and Cartman, resulting in Linda getting out of the car and strangling him to death.
- In the Helluva Boss short "Bad Drivezo", Blitzo, in the midst of a mission with Moxxie in which they take out their target early, gets mouth-frothingly pissed when a guy in a red sports car cuts him off—in fact, he gets so pissed that he tears after him in a furious Car Chase which results in much vehicular mayhem and a number of cars getting blown to smithereens. When they finally track him down, they learn the reason he was Driving Like Crazy was so he could blow his son on his birthday, something which disgusts Blitzo and Moxxie both, the latter so much that he out-and-out shoots him.
Blitzo: That fucker. Cut. Me. Off.Moxxie: Now, sir, with all due respect, the mission was t—Blitzo: That FUCKER CUT ME OFF!!!
Webcomics
- VG Cats: Exaggerated with this comic, which has its protagonist flipping out upon one snowflake falling upon his vehicle.
- xkcd takes a more psychological approach to road rage.
Western Animation
- Amphibia: In the episode "Anne Theft Auto", Sprig invokes a road rage when he gets angry at Mrs. Croaker on the road simply because he wanted to. This comes back to bite him when he needs her help to save Anne as she deliberately drives slowly to teach him a lesson.
- Batman: The Animated Series: The episode "Joker's Favor" starts with one of these — Charlie Collins is already in a sour mood over his day being ruined when some random jerk decides to cut him off. Charlie is so incensed that he chases after the guy to give him a piece of his mind. Unfortunately for Charlie, it turns out that the "random jerk" in question was the Joker.
- Bob's Burgers: In "Christmas in the Car", Bob accidentally drives right in front of a truck that looks like a candy cane. Then Linda only makes things worse by honking the horn at the driver, Gary. He spends the rest of the episode chasing them and even runs them off the road at one point. It's later revealed at the end of the episode that he'd been having a rotten night, and this was only the straw that broke the camel's back.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Wish You Were Ed", when Jimmy was chauffeuring Sarah in a toy ride-on car, Sarah wouldn't stop giving demands, and Jimmy snaps at her and immediately apologizes, saying that it was the darn road rage.
- Goofy:
- The short "Motor Mania" is all about this trope, to the point of treating it like a Jekyll & Hyde transformation which turns Nice Guy Mr. Walker into the deranged Entitled Bastard Mr. Wheeler.
- The educational short "Freewayphobia" has Goofy portray some of the bad kinds of drivers one might find on the freeway. One is the Impatient Driver, who weaves aggressively through traffic, and when unable to pass, tailgates the car in front of him in frustration. The movie then goes into length as to why that is a very bad idea at freeway speeds.
- Gravity Falls: Invoked for laughs in "Not What He Seems". When Dipper and Mabel are getting taken away by Agent Trigger in his humvee, Mabel spots Manly Dan driving the logging truck next to them—and the Sev'ral Timez bumper sticker on the back—and writes "Sev’ral Timez is overrated" on the window to piss him off. He takes the bait, swerving his truck into the vehicle just enough to run them off the road, allowing Dipper and Mabel to escape.
- Horrid Henry: Mum develops this in "Horrid Henry Goes Fishing" when she and Peter get stuck in a gridlocked traffic jam while on their way to a department store, and it's quite understandable given that it lasts so long that they eventually run out of petrol.
Mum: WHY DO YOU NEED SUCH A GAS GUZZLER ANYWAY?! DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL MORE POWERFUL?! DOES IT?! EH?!
- The Inspector: In "Carte Blanched", the Inspector gets caught in traffic while disguising his stolen shopping cart as a car. When he talks back at a rude taxi driver, the driver of a truck in front of him steps out and pounds him, assuming the insult was directed at him.
- Justice League Action: In the short, "Driver's Ed", Stargirl gets so frustrated while trying to learn how to drive a space-car that her road rage attracts Zilius Zox’s red power ring after she separates him from it.
- Mr. Bean: The Animated Series: In "Hot Date", the Musician from a restaurant gives Irma Gobb a fancy ride in his convertible. The moment the two are about to share a kiss, a Reliant Regal rear-ends his car. Angered by the accident, he furiously beats up the driver of the Reliant.
Musician: I don't believe it! What do you think you’re doing, eh?! I don’t believe you! I can’t believe it! I only repaired this car! You’re completely mad! I will kill you! Kill you! Kill you! You maniac!
- The Owl House: In the penultimate episode "For the Future", during a talk trying to impress upon her daughter that everyone makes mistakes, Camila brings up several examples from her own life, including one time when she got road rage and ended up cursing out Luz's new school principal.
- The Simpsons:
- In "Revenge is a Dish Best Served Three Times", the Framing Device is Homer chasing the Rich Texan to beat him up because he was cut off in traffic. Marge and Lisa try to talk him out of it with their stories about how revenge is not worth it, and Bart eggs him on with his own story.
- "Marge Simpson in: 'Screaming Yellow Honkers'" has Marge develop a serious and persistent case of road rage after Homer buys her a new SUV. Her driving becomes aggressive enough that the police ultimately rescind her license, though they give it back during the climax so she can use the SUV to round up a group of escaped rhinos.
- Parodied in "Moe Baby Blues" while in bumper cars, Nelson bumps into Moe and Maggie and Moe retaliates by getting a crowbar out of the trunk and angrily pummels Nelson's bumper car.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: The driving tutorial episode "Yellow Pavement" has a scene dedicated to road rage, in which Squidward grows livid while behind the wheel. Fortunately, SpongeBob helps him cool down. Unfortunately, they cause a traffic jam, with a large, angry truck driver proceeding to beat the tar out of Squidward.