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No—shooting a car’s gas tank with a regular bullet won’t make it explode. Liquid gasoline doesn’t burn; only its vapor does, and only when mixed with air in a narrow flammability range (~1.4–7.6%). A standard lead bullet doesn’t carry the heat or spark to ignite that mix, as MythBusters demonstrated by pumping rounds into a Cadillac without a fireball. Incendiary or tracer rounds are a different story.
Whether you’re watching the high-octane action movies of Hollywood (James Bond franchise, I’m looking at you), or playing first-person shooter/action video games, one thing that you invariably observe (and may even enjoy) is seeing a vehicle blown to smithereens when its gas tank (oil tank) is precisely shot by a gun.
It may make for an incredible special effect, but is there any truth in that, or is it just another myth propagated by Hollywood in the minds of normal people?
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Safety Of The Gas Tank
It turns out that you’re not the only person that watches movies; government authorities do too! Since road accidents may involve vehicles experiencing unusual stress upon impact, regulatory authorities enforce strict security standards to ensure that the gas tank is adequately reinforced. Therefore, if something does happen on the road, the gas tank will not be adversely impacted due to abrasive forces or heat generated by friction following an accident (however, excessive stress poses a grave threat to the gas tank).
In other words, breaching the reinforced cover of a gas tank would itself be a challenging task, let alone setting it on fire!
Why A Fire Is Unlikely
Before an explosion you need a fire, and for a fire you need three things: fuel, heat, and an oxidiser (usually oxygen from the air). Take any one away and the fire can’t sustain itself.
Here’s the key fact most movies ignore: liquid gasoline doesn’t actually burn—only its vapor does, and only within a narrow “flammability window” of roughly 1.4–7.6% gasoline vapor in air. A full tank is too rich (the headspace is saturated with vapor and starved of oxygen) and won’t ignite. A nearly empty tank is, paradoxically, the more dangerous one—the headspace can drift into that explosive ratio. But even then, the bullet itself has to deliver enough heat to act as an ignition source. A standard lead-cored bullet doesn’t; it punches a hole and exits, mostly cool, then liquid fuel pours out the bottom.
The Problem Of The Bullet
Regular bullets, i.e., the bullets that go in guns that are most commonly used and depicted in movies, are not made to ignite fires! These bullets are not powerful enough to cause an ignition and consequently set off an explosion. To prove this, the Mythbusters team unleashed an unrelenting barrage of bullets at the gas tank of a Cadillac to see whether an explosion would follow. Alas, despite how much we all hoped to see it, there was none!
If a barrage of bullets couldn’t trigger an explosion, how the heck could a single bullet from a revolver do it so easily, even if the shooter were a trained intelligence agent?
The exception is incendiary or tracer rounds—not the same thing as armor-piercing. Incendiary bullets contain a chemical (typically phosphorus, magnesium, or thermite-style mixes) that ignites on impact; tracer rounds carry a slow-burning pyrotechnic compound that lights up the trajectory and stays hot enough to start a fire when it hits something flammable. Either can ignite an exposed fuel-air mix. But even with those, MythBusters found it usually takes several rounds plus a near-empty tank to get a sustained fire, not the instant Hollywood fireball.
To conclude, there is no component in a regular bullet that could cause an explosion. It might be possible when high-power firearms are used, but it’s definitely not going to be as simple as taking aim at the gas tank and shooting a single bullet to turn a car into a raging fireball.
