Free Wheel

Wheels on fire, rolling down the road

—Surreal Theme Tune to Absolutely Fabulous

When a car is wrecked (or explodes), often a lone wheel will be seen rolling (or flying) away from the vehicle. Since Every Car Is a Pinto, it may well be on fire. This is pretty much a Dead Horse Trope (if not a Dead Unicorn Trope), so expect to almost only see it in parodies.

Also often seen after an Offscreen Crash, rolling into view from Behind the Black and gradually wobbling to a halt.

The vehicular equivalent of Smoldering Shoes.

Not to be confused with Freewheelers, which was a 70s British kids' drama series.

Examples of Free Wheel include:

Advertising

Parodied in an Australian insurance advertisement from around the late 1970s or early 1980s, where a wheel comes loose from a moving car and leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. It's still rolling at the end of the advert.

Anime and Manga

Played absolutely, unashamedly straight in just about every episode of Speed Racer ever.
In the Cold Open of The Castle of Cagliostro, the casino staff's cars fall apart as a result of Vehicular Sabotage. A wheel from one rolls away and hits the bumper of the one car that had remained intact thus far, causing it to collapse. Additionally, when the car carrying the thugs chasing Clarice crashes, one of its wheels goes flying.

Comic Books

"The Wheel", a story in the DC Comics Anthology Comic The Witching Hour, has this happen with a wrecked carriage. In this case, the wheel survived because it was "haunted" and indeed had caused the crash in the first place.

Film

Terminator 2 after the truck is shot.
In The Titfield Thunderbolt when the railway's locomotive is derailed.
In Airplane! we see a hubcap rolling across the tarmac after an ambulance crashes.
In the fourth Final Destination film, the first victim of Death's damage-control dies when a burning tire from the (unseen) mass pileup is flung clear out of the stadium and plummets down onto her in the parking lot.
In the Monsters, Inc. short film "Mike's New Car", when he finally zooms offscreen and crashes, five of the six wheels come bouncing back, followed by the sixth one which is just rolling.
In the New Zealand-made action film Never Say Die, a fleet of police cars drives into a one-way bus tunnel to pursue the protagonists - not realising that there actually is a bus heading towards them. Predictably, a wheel can be seen rolling out of the tunnel not long after.
It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World - Terry-Thomas's Jeep, its front end damaged by an off-road swerve, rides more and more erratically until it goes into a tunnel with a large smash - a single wheel rolls out the other end, followed by the rest of the Jeep that finally rolls over and dies.
One of the more visible continuity goofs in Diamonds Are Forever is the loose wheel from the moon buggy that bounces through the chase while the buggy continues on with all its wheels.

Newspaper Comics

In this^{[dead link]} Garfield strip, Jon wound up crashing while roller skating. One of the stray wheels from his skates bounces past Garfield.

Literature

Terry Pratchett's Soul Music hangs a lampshade on it when describing the carriage crash that kills the heroine's parents. In fact, due to Discworld‍'‍s Law Of Narrative Causality, this happens in every single crash. Not just the ones featured in the books - every one.

Then the oil from the coach lamps ignites and there is a second explosion, out of which rolls -- because there are certain conventions, even in tragedy -- a burning wheel.

- Analogously, whenever a waiter drops plates or some similar accident occurs, there is always one undamaged plate that rolls out of the wreckage (as mentioned in Hogfather).

Live-Action TV

The Reliant Robin in Mr. Bean repeatedly does this as a Running Gag.
Several times on Top Gear - for example, when Clarkson tries to use his Spiked Wheels in the "alternative police car" challenge.
One Leverage episode uses it for misdirection: it'd be natural to think that the camera's focusing on the wheel rolling out of the wreckage just because that's a standard convention for filming car explosions, but it's actually because that wheel is where all the money got hidden...
This happened on an early NCIS episode. We see Gibbs diving to avoid a car bomb blast, then a flaming tire lands next to him.
Often done as a gag on Canada's Worst Driver.

Music Videos

Happens in the Gorillaz Music Video "19-2000"

Video Games

Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun had this; upon the destruction/death of a vehicle, it would spawn a random assortment of debris items that would go flying off, such as explosive gas tanks, chunks of armour plating, and so on. Wheeled vehicles could spawn rogue wheels, of course.
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, at the end of one of the chariot-driving sequences.
The intro for the old Driving Game Ignition has a car race across the screen, crash off-screen, and a wheel from the car rolls back into the camera's view, forming part of the game's logo.
An exploding Runner or Racer in Borderlands will usually throw off at least one of these (of the "on fire" variant).
The intro sequence of Day of the Tentacle has the car wreck offscreen with a bouncing wheel.

Web Original

In Red vs. Blue: Revelation Episode 4, after the Meta blasts the Red's Warthog into wreckage, a stray burning tire from it rolls over Grif as he gets up.

Western Animation

Parodied in The Simpsons. After Abe crashes Homer's car and consequently has to walk along the neighborhood, a hub cap manages to roll alongside him, even though the crash happened the previous day. Abe just tells it to "go home", and it seems to oblige.
Also parodied in Futurama where a tire can be seen flying away from an exploding spaceship.
- Maybe not necessarily a parody if the tire came from the ship's landing gear.
  - Knowing Futurama? It was probably both.

Real Life

This is fairly common in car crashes in general.