Quick Stats: Efren Ramirez actor in "Crank: High Voltage"
Daily Driver: 2008 Nissan Xterra (Efren's rating: 10 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Favorite road trip: Los Angeles to Utah
Car he learned to drive in: mid 1980s Ford Escort
First car bought: 1988 Honda Prelude 2.0Si
Efren Ramirez may have played Pedro on "Napoleon Dynamite" and inspired many real life "Vote for Pedro" T-shirts, but years before that breakthrough role, he was living "The Fast and the Furious" in real life on the highways of East Los Angeles.
"The real underground scene was on the freeways and city streets," he says, comparing the movie's desert race scenes to its inner city racing. "While you're racing you have no inclination about cops, you don't think about police officers."
Ramirez was influenced by his older brother Julio, who raced his Honda Accord, which he dropped and added lights that turned red, white, or blue with a flick of a switch. "I was like, 'Dude, that is soo cool,'" he says of his brother's Accord.
They lived in Highland Park and his brother belonged to an underground race crew that used the 210 Freeway around Pasadena to the 105 Freeway as their racetrack, although they would occasionally go to the desert to race in Palm Springs. The one thing that was off about the pseudo race car was it had an automatic transmission. "All of his friends made fun of him. They'd go, 'Come on, why do you drive an automatic?'"
Car he learned to drive in
At 16, Ramirez learned to drive in his other older brother Eddie's gray mid-80s Ford Escort, which he calls a "Frankenstein car" because it had parts from different cars.
"It was automatic and you don't really have to learn to drive an automatic, it's pretty easy," he says. "So without a license I'd be driving down the streets of Los Angeles."
Driving helped impress chicks and his brother let him borrow the car once and told Ramirez to fill it up with gas. "It was such a Frankenstein car," Ramirez says. "I was trying to visit a girl I was trying to impress. She called and said, 'Listen, I'm home and nobody's at my house right now, get over here.' I thought, 'Heck, yes!' And I thought it would be cool because I'm driving a car, not taking the bus."
The girl lived near Dodger Stadium, but the Escort failed Ramirez, in a move which could have been a scene right out of "Napoleon Dynamite." "I filled up the gas tank and I saw that one of the tires needed air. I didn't know how much air to put in tires, so I put in so much air, I drove two blocks and the tire literally exploded on Figueroa Avenue!"
Unfortunately for Ramirez, he never did go to her house that day. "The car started shaking, you hear an explosion. When the tire exploded it popped the fender out. It just flew off!" he laments. "Like a nerd, I called the girl saying, 'I can't go.' I tried to explain the situation and she just hung up on me."