It was not easy compiling these lists. In my quest for perfection, many likely candidates have fallen by the wayside. Please comment if you don’t agree.

The Best

1. Duel
A big, scary, anonymous juggernaut following an average Joe in a horrifically-styled 1970s coupe. Duel is the best car chase ever because it’s not about high-speed, turbocharged automobiles driving around crowded roads. It’s just two cars, going at it in the middle of nowhere. We couldn’t find a clip, so here’s a homage.

2. The French Connection
Gene Hackman is great in this scene. For most of the chase he wears the expression of a dad trying to parallel park. Director William Friedkin insisted on sitting inside a bus to make sure he had a good shot when a vehicle piled into the side of it.

3. Ronin
When you have Robert De Niro executing a handbrake turn to avoid an oncoming vehicle, at speed, in the centre of Paris, and that’s not even the middle of your car chase, you know you’re on to a good thing. De Niro apparently enjoyed it so much that he refused to ever make a good film again.

4. Bullitt
What marks this one out is the number of mistakes the drivers make. Steve McQueen is not an infallible superhero who can take corners at hyper-speed. Right at the beginning he piles straight into another car, then has to execute near enough a three-point turn to continue his pursuit and there’s a VW Beetle in virtually every shot.

5. The Italian Job
In the space of a few minutes, a trio of Minis are indelibly etched into cinema history. Choreographed more like a ballet than a car chase, there’s some delightful moments of to-ing and fro-ing between the daft cops and deft robbers.

6. The Bourne Identity
As with the fifth entry on this list, the key to the brilliance of this sequence is the use of the Mini’s tiny dimensions to negotiate stairs and other places where cars don’t really belong.

7. Terminator 2
Don’t worry about Jingle All The Way, Arnie. Forget about Kindergarten Cop, Arnie. You dropped 50-feet, on a Harley, on to solid concrete, and kept your balance. Well, you didn’t, it was a stunt man, but that’s by the by.

8. The Blues Brothers
The epic car pile-up is the most famous, but this chase better captures the spirit of the film. It seems to be an exercise in how many glass shopfronts a car can smash through, but that’s okay. It also contains the best line in any car chase: ‘Lots of space in this mall.’

9. Back To The Future
Back in the days when Libyan! terrorists were considered a threat, Robert Zemeckis had Michael J. Fox drive a Delorean in a circle, around an empty car park, evading a rocket launcher-wielding nuclear arms dealer in a VW camper van.

10. Goldfinger
Notable for being the only car chase where James Bond is allowed to get back in his car (and drive!) after he has been caught by the bad guys. Also notable for the initial chase scene, where Sean Connery becomes ever more exasperated as his ever more elaborate gadgetry fails to work.

The Worst

1. The Love Bug
I like Herbie a lot, I think he’s a cool little car. But I can’t forgive the outrageously bad races in this movie, and all the sequels that follow. There’s only so far nostalgia can take you. The trouble with a Beetle, even a magical Beetle, is that it does 0-60 in 3 days. Just plain no good.

2. The Man With The Golden Gun
This should be in the best ever car chases, what with the first ‘aerial twist’ done on film. The problem is, being a Roger Moore Bond movie, they go and ruin it by including a ridiculous penny-whistle noise. We’ve added to the annoyance with this clip as James May from Top Gear is talking about it.

3. Mission: Impossible II
John Woo directs almost entirely in slow-motion, the cheeky foreplay between Ethan Hunt and his latest catch going horribly wrong as her Audi and his Porsche are locked together in a deathly embrace. Tom Cruise actually flicks his hair.

4. Die Another Day
So here’s the set up: Bond, in an Aston Martin, on ice. How can it go wrong? Don’t ask me, I’m still trying to figure it out. No matter how many times I watch it I just cannot get excited.

5. Groundhog Day
Here we see Bill Murray doing what must be at least 15 miles an hour in order to evade the police, whose cars must have been electronically limited to snail’s pace by the manufacturer, which in turn must have been a go-kart manufacturer.

6. Gone In 60 Seconds
I’m tried to recall a single detail about the final car chase from this movie, and all I could remember was the worst CGI car jump of all time. So I watched it again just now, and all I can remember is the worst CGI car jump of all time.

7. Bad Boys II
Another Michael Bay duffer, and this one is even worse than the Rock. Primary fault, as usual, should lie with Martin Lawrence. Everything in this chase has been done before, and done better.

8. The Rock
Some people really like this chase. I don’t. Except for the immortal Sean Connery line, ‘I’m only borrowing your Humvee!’ this chase has no redeeming features: it’s banal, it’s over the top, and it features Nicolas Cage looking intense.

9. The Matrix: Reloaded
The problem with the Matrix chase is not that seemingly impossible stunts are pulled off - after all, they’re in the Matrix. The problem is that they chose a Chrysler as the getaway car.

10. Die Hard With A Vengeance
Fresh from success with Pulp Fiction, Samuel L Jackson ruins what could have been a perfectly serviceable car chase by shouting and wearing granny glasses.