Best James Bond cars ever, and 007's worst cars, too
The ‘casting’ of a Bond car is almost as important as who plays 007 himself. Here are the best of James’ rides, and a few of his worst…
Who will play the next James Bond? Will it be Callum Turner, Jack Lowden and Josh O’Connor? You’re reading Auto Express rather than TMZ, so we’re not going to get into such speculation. We’re more worried about what Turner/Lowden/O’Connor might be driving in the next 007 film, because the ‘casting’ of a Bond car is a big deal.
In a way, the Bond cars are like characters themselves, to the point that you might actually be a bit sad to see an on-screen death. We’re still not quite over the physics-defying final moments of the Aston Martin DBS in Casino Royale, for instance.
So, while much of the world is busy hypothesising about who we’ll next see exploiting a license to kill in the 26th Bond film, we’ll instead be pondering his next mode of transportation, and looking back at some of his best and worst cars in the previous 25 instalments, plus the best rides of the Bond baddies, too.
What will be the next Bond car?
We don’t know for sure that it’ll be an Aston Martin as James’ daily driver in Bond 26, but it seems likely. Speaking to Auto Express earlier this year, Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark affirmed the franchise’s importance in attracting people to the brand, so there’ll no doubt be efforts on its end to ensure at least one newer model features. As an aside, Hallmark admitted feeling “wildly jealous” of Aston Martin’s work with the James Bond franchise when he was CEO of Bentley, given that it was a Bentley that 007 drove in the original Ian Fleming novels.
Away from the big screen, the Bond and Aston Martin connection is continuing, with the Valhalla supercar featuring in virtual form in the video game 007: First Light. A Valhalla might be a touch conspicuous, even for Bond, so perhaps the current Vanquish might make more sense. Don’t discount the prospect of a DB5 turning up in Bond 26 at some point, as well.
For Bond’s main car, though, producers might go in an entirely different direction. It seems highly likely the new Lotus Type 135 will end up being called the ‘Esprit’. The original is almost as closely aligned with Bond as the DB5, and it would be great to see 007 driving a Lotus once more, however much that might upset Aston Martin’s marketing department.
Bond’s best cars
These are the vehicles that Bond’s next car needs to stand up to, the best James Bond cars of all time…
Aston Martin DB5, Goldfinger (1964), others
No other car is more closely associated with Bond than the DB5. It was his first company car, and its many gadgets came courtesy of MI6’s Q (famously played by Desmond Llewelyn).
For the DB5’s screen debut in Goldfinger, 007 (Sean Connery) uses tyre-slashing wheel hubs to disable the Ford Mustang of Bond girl Tilly Masterson (Tania Mallet), then tracks the Rolls-Royce of Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) to a secret factory in Austria.
But it’s on Bond’s departure from the factory where the DB5 comes into its own. Bulletproof glass and a rear shield protect him from a hail of bullets, while oil and smoke dispensers are used in a bid to shake off the baddies. When that fails, Bond turns to the machine guns behind the indicators, while a button on top of the gearlever operates the ejector seat.
The car proved so popular that it returned in Thunderball, and sales of Aston Martins were boosted by the publicity.
The DB5 is a landmark in the Bond franchise and has been revisited many times, including an improbable race against a Ferrari F355 in 1995’s GoldenEye. The DB5 has featured several times in the Daniel Craig era of bond films, briefly appearing in Casino Royale before enjoying more prominent roles in Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die.
Lotus Esprit, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
If any other car can compete with the Aston Martin DB5 for the accolade of being known as Bond’s car, it’s the white Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me. And undoubtedly it’s the car most closely associated with Roger Moore’s time as 007.
Bond is investigating the disappearance of British, Russian and American nuclear submarines, and his travels take him to Sardinia, where Q has a special car waiting for him. It has the usual range of MI6 extras, including cement-spraying jets, a mine dispenser and missiles, but the white Esprit’s main party trick is revealed when 007 is being pursued by the bad guys.
After a long jump off of a short pier, the Esprit looks doomed, but with the flick of a switch, Bond turns the supercar into a submarine and makes good his escape.
While a number of Esprits were used in the chase scene, the final car is hardly a Lotus at all. Instead, Wet Nellie, as it was affectionately known, is a wet submarine.
Producers didn’t have the budget to build a watertight submersible, and the addition of louvres on all the windows made it easy to simply drape a fibreglass Esprit shell over a wet sub. Drive for this machine came courtesy of two scuba divers, who were hidden on board!
Aston Martin DB10
Driving around in any Aston Martin feels a bit attention-grabbing for a spy, let alone one that isn’t even on sale to the public. But perhaps it is in the film’s universe. We’ve no idea. Who cares, anyway, because the Aston Martin DB10 looks amazing, and to have a brand like Aston making a car specifically for a film is pretty cool.
The company’s head of design, Marek Reichman, worked with director Sam Mendes for the car’s inception, and the result is one of the best-looking Bond cars of all time. Except it technically isn’t a Bond car. In the film, it’s supposed to be for 009, before 007 pinches it. And then dumps it in the Tiber during a Rome-set car chase.
What no one realised at the time is that underneath, the DB10 was actually a next-generation Vantage, shown on screen in its bespoke clothing more than two years before being shown to the public.
Aston Martin built 10 DB10s, keeping a couple of them. One was sold into private ownership for a whopping £2.4 million, far exceeding the £1.5 estimate, despite the fact it wasn’t road legal.
Sunbeam Alpine, Dr No (1962)
The first Bond film had a budget of less than £1m, so there was no gadget-laden Q Branch special for Sean Connery. In fact, when he arrives in Jamaica on the trail of Dr No, 007 has to settle for a rented Sunbeam Alpine.
Powered by a wheezy 80bhp 1.6-litre engine and featuring the same underpinnings as the humble Hillman Husky estate, the two-seater has barely enough puff to outrun the thirties LaSalle hearse driven by Dr No’s mysterious henchmen, the Three Blind Mice.
Fortunately, the Alpine’s nimble handling and low height save the day, allowing Bond to slip under a large crane blocking his path. The LaSalle and its occupants meet an explosive end after plunging off a cliff.
While manufacturers provided free cars in exchange for screen time in later films, Dr No’s producers had to borrow the Alpine from a local. Still, in Ian Fleming’s novel, 007 drove an even less alluring Hillman Minx saloon.
Aston Martin DBS, Casino Royale (2006)/Quantum Of Solace (2008)
For the 2006 relaunch of the franchise, Bond ditched all of the gadgets and far-fetched plotlines for something far grittier and more realistic. But Aston Martin remained the car manufacturer of choice.
New Bond Daniel Craig took to the wheel of a shiny DBS in Casino Royale – in fact, it was so new that the DBS didn’t go on sale until the year after the film was released.
Like George Lazenby’s DBS in 1969, Craig’s car was devoid of gadgets. The stunts remained, however, with a DBS sacrificed for one of the biggest single-car crashes ever in a film. Bond, in pursuit of the kidnapped Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), comes across his love interest lying in the road, and has to take evasive action. The ensuing, physics-bending crash destroys the DBS, and possibly the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, but it did land in the Guinness Book of Records for completing seven consecutive barrel rolls in the process.
Another DBS appeared in the opening sequence of Quantum of Solace, but it didn’t fare much better than its predecessor – losing its doors and having its windscreen shattered during a spectacular chase.
Ford Mustang Mach 1, Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Bond girls have always been part and parcel of the franchise, and on occasion 007 has needed to borrow their wheels to make a hasty escape.
In Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery returned as 007 on the trail of a diamond smuggling operation, and his adventures lead him to the Nevada desert and bright lights of Las Vegas.
After escaping from a top-secret research lab in a moon buggy, Bond teams up with diamond smuggler Tiffany Case (Jill St John) and drives her rented 1971 Mustang Mach 1 back to Las Vegas. It’s not long before they’re pulled over by the cops, who have been put on alert for the car. But 007 quickly takes off, and a hot pursuit ensues. After giving Nevada’s finest the runaround in a car park, Bond needs to shake one more cop before he’s free.
The final stunt has gone down in folklore as one of the worst continuity errors ever seen on the silver screen. 007 drives into a narrow alleyway, and has to put the Mustang on two wheels to get through. He manages this with ease, but while the car balances on its right tyres when it starts the stunt, it’s miraculously swapped to its left tyres at the end of the alley.
BMW Z8, The World Is Not Enough (1999)
BMW saved the best until last for its final outing in a Bond film. After the slightly limp Z3 and sober-suited 750iL, the muscular and stylish BMW Z8 roadster suited Britain’s favourite spy down to the ground.
As ever, the car came packed with a huge array of hi-tech gizmos and gadgets, to which Pierce Brosnan’s Bond is introduced by Q’s new assistant, R (played by John Cleese).
These included a special key fob that could be used to drive the car remotely, plus titanium armour to protect Bond from the flying bullets of various henchmen. Yet the most spectacular addition to the BMW was a pair of surface-to-air missiles hidden behind vents in the car’s front wings.
Unfortunately, the Z8 met a grisly end when it was chopped in two by a circular saw hanging from a helicopter belonging to Bond nemesis Elektra King. However, BMW fans shouldn’t fret, as no Z8s were harmed in the film – the roadster’s launch wasn’t until several months after its release, meaning the model on screen was mocked up using a Corvette engine and a kit-car chassis.
Citroen 2CV, For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Bond can’t always rely on a glamorous supercar and Q’s clever gadgets to get him out of a sticky situation. When Bond (Roger Moore) and Melina Havelock (Carole Bouquet) are chased down a Spanish hillside by hired assassins, they have only a humble Citroen 2CV at their disposal.
Despite its unlikely credentials as a getaway car, plus a number of spectacular off-road excursions, the bright yellow machine manages to shake off a pair of pursuing Peugeot 504s, which boast far more power and grip. Yet there’s more to this classic Citroen than meets the eye.
For instance, in order to make the chase scenes more exciting, stunt driving maestro Rémy Julienne ditched the standard car’s feeble 602cc two-cylinder engine in favour of a more powerful four-cylinder unit from the Citroen GS.
The 2CV was also one of the only Bond cars to spawn a roadgoing version. Launched to coincide with the film’s release, the special-edition model was finished in the same yellow paint scheme and featured 007 logos on the doors and bootlid, plus a smattering of stick-on bullet holes. It’s now highly prized among 2CV enthusiasts.
James Bond’s worst cars
Some of 007’s more questionable choices of transportation are better forgotten, but…
Aston Martin Vanquish, Die Another Day (2002)
You can thank Ford’s ownership of Aston Martin for the brand’s return to the James Bond franchise, ending the three-film run of BMWs. A multi-million-dollar product placement deal between Eon and the Blue Oval while it still owned Aston meant Bond could get behind the wheel of a Vanquish for 2002’s Die Another Day, with baddie Zao getting an XKR from also-Ford-owned Jaguar (more on that soon).
There’s no faulting the choice of Aston in particular. We’re even fine with the usual array of rockets and machine guns. But the whole invisibility thing was a plausibility stretch too far, even from the franchise that gave us Moonraker. At least the daft Aston Martin ‘Vanish’ idea was overshadowed by the rest of the film being a complete bin fire.
Ford Mondeo, Casino Royale (2006)
For his next outing, Bond was back in an Aston Martin, but fortunately, the more grounded take on the character involved no silly gadgets in his car, a lovely DBS, as mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, Daniel Craig also had to get behind the wheel of a Mondeo as part of the partnership with Ford.
Even in a franchise known for its overt product placement, it was a bit much. Mercifully, its screen time was short, much as it was for the next car on the list.
BMW Z3, Goldeneye
BMW was knocking out some incredible cars at the time of Goldeneye’s production. Pierce Brosnan’s Bond could have been seen driving an E36 M3, or maybe an 850i. But no. He got a Z3. A Z3 which apparently had stinger missiles among "all the usual refinements," said Q, except we don’t see any of those. Or much of the car at all, with the Z3 appearing for less than two minutes.
This had to do with the BMW deal coming along fairly late in the film’s production. But we can criticise all we want about its brief, awkward inclusion – the fact is it worked brilliantly from a marketing perspective. The tie-up is often described as one of the most successful product placements of all time.
James Bond baddies' cars
He's behind you: some of our favourite vehicles driven by the villains…
Land Rover Defenders, No Time to Die
The then-new Defender’s inclusion in No Time to Die was a bit of marketing genius. As if two Range Rover Sports giving chase wasn’t enough of a JLR plug, the film’s epic car chase soon sees the arrival of a pair of Defenders launching through the air. Land Rover was then able to boast about the Defender ‘doing its own stunts’.
Jaguar C-X75, Spectre (2015)
The Jaguar C-X75 is one of the greatest-looking cars never made, cancelled due to the ongoing bleak economic picture of the early 2010s. At least we got to see one charging around the streets of Rome in Spectre in a showdown with Bond in his Aston Martin DB10. Well, sort of.
The C-X75 shown being driven by Dave Bautista was a bespoke vehicle built around a space frame and merely made to look like the Jaguar. And while the C-X75 originally had diesel-fed turbines to charge a battery pack for powering several motors, the car used for filming had a V8.
Rolls-Royce Phantom III, Goldfinger (1964)
Auric Goldfinger had a thing for yellow – he wore the colour in every single scene of the film and had his Rolls-Royce Phantom III painted in the same hue.
Goldfinger chose the V12-powered Phantom because it had the strength and power to carry vast amounts of gold around Europe. However, he was spared driving duties, leaving that to his bowler-hatted henchman, Oddjob.
Jaguar XKR Cabrio, Die Another Day (2002)
Evil, metal-faced villain Zao didn’t fare too badly with his XKR painted in the same green as Jaguar’s then-F1 team. In spite of a gatling gun, rockets and missiles, the XKR couldn’t beat Bond’s ‘invisible’ Vanquish, which we were moaning about earlier.
Honda CRF250R, Skyfall (2012)
Skyfall includes an incredible chase scene on two Honda CRF250R motorbikes - and because both hero and villain (in this case, a henchman named Patrice) are using the same machine, it's one of our favourite action scenes from the film. It's almost like watching two top F1 drivers battle it out on the same team (perhaps a silver one with a three-pointed star on the nose).
Get the latest and best car news and reviews, first! Follow Auto Express on Google today
