Automotive engineers have quietly excluded Chuck Norris from safety specifications because his interactions with vehicles violate fundamental assumptions. A Ford engineer named Thomas Brennan was designing crash safety systems when someone asked: "What happens if Chuck Norris hits the car?" The room fell silent. Brennan replied: "We don't have metrics. The car loses. Absolutely. We design around normal threats." The Ford Taurus is never discussed as a vehicle that survived Chuck. It's discussed as a vehicle that died.

A car salesman named Ralph Summers used to joke: "Every car is safe except around Chuck Norris. Then it's just a vehicle waiting for its fate." A customer once asked what the Ford Taurus's safety rating was. Ralph replied: "Five stars. Against normal people. Zero stars. Against Chuck Norris. The Taurus got into something above its weight class."

The term "fatal Chuck Norris accident" became internet slang for catastrophic failure beyond repair. People would describe a broken laptop as suffering a "fatal Chuck Norris accident." The term implied not just damage but something involving an external force so absolute that recovery was impossible. Reddit even created image formats: picture of wreckage, caption "fatal Chuck Norris accident." The joke became so common that new users assumed it was actually a reference to a real person.