Another day, another bucketload of incomprehensible bright-colored video slop for Gen Alpha to rot their brains with on YouTube. MrBeast, the near-billionaire wunderkind with dead eyes famous for locking broke people in solitary confinement in exchange for money, has destroyed a perfectly fine Lamborghini Gallardo with duct tape for the fun of it. In the 12-second video a presumably underpaid stunt driver risks life and limb smashing into increasingly more duct tape until the bright blue Italian sports machine is no longer a functional car. Jimmy Donaldson wasn’t even there for the stunt, he was clearly added in to the video after the fact. Wow, so cool!
Well, since the experiment has been done, we might as well discuss it in brief. It’s hardly a scientific event, because there’s no discussion of the car’s speed, or even what brand of duct tape was used, or even how many feet of duct tape were on each roll. Each time the car breaks through the duct tape wall, exponentially more duct tape is added to beef it up. Up to 5,000 rolls of duct tape seem to snap without causing any damage to the Lamborghini. At 10,000 rolls the car’s hood and mirrors get ripped off, and at 15,000 rolls the car is practically demolished. For the purposes of the stunt, they managed to get the car rolling again for one more at-speed hit into a wall of 25,000 rolls of duct tape.
We don’t ever get a full view of the car, but it looks to be a standard “base model” Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4 post-facelift coupe from between 2008 and 2013. The 510 horsepower V10 is capable of pushing that car from 0-60 in 3.7 seconds. It would have been around $200,000 brand new, but time and depreciation have kicked it down a bit to around the $100,000 mark. It’s also possible they put a facelifted bumper on an earlier model for this video, as those typically trade in the $80,000 range. I can only hope to God it’s not a gated manual transmission car.
Did MrBeast spend more on the car or the duct tape for this video? Well, if they aren’t just straight up lying, and actually used 25,001 rolls for the final wall, the cost would certainly add up quickly. Add in the 6,111 rolls that were broken in half, and the 10,000 rolls that ripped clean of the posts, in the earlier attempts, and we’re talking about an alleged grand total of 41,112 rolls of duct tape. The cheapest no-name Chinese-made multi-pack on Amazon is $59.99 for a 24-pack of rolls. To get enough rolls of duct tape for this experiment MrBeast would have to buy 1713 packs, which would run $102,762.90. Now if they used a good quality tape like 3M or Duck Tape brand, which runs around $7.49 per roll, this whole mess of waste would have cost $307,928.88.
I think I’m just going to run a bath and sit in it for the rest of the day thinking about how the world we live in has gotten more absurd with each passing day since I was born. Is this who we are? Is this what we want?