Best cars & vans

5. Lotus Esprit S1 - James Bond: The Spy Who Loved Me

One of two Bond cars to make this list, the Lotus Esprit wasn’t the fastest car Bond had, or the most desirable.

by: Auto Express team

8 Feb 2017

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One of two Bond cars to make this list, the Lotus Esprit wasn’t the fastest car Bond had, or the most desirable. It only produced around 160bhp from its 2.0-litre four-cylinder engine and hit 62mph in 8.4 seconds, a time most hot hatches could eclipse today.

However, what the Esprit did have up its sleeve was a huge raft of gadgets. Not only did Bond have a cement sprayer hidden behind the number plate, but the car also had the scene-stealing ability to completely submerge in water and morph into a submarine. Once converted, the underwater Lotus was fully ready for combat, coming armed to the teeth with mines, torpedos and even surface-to-air missiles.

Elon Musk, founder and head of Tesla, bought the movie car for around £600,000. He aims to turn what is basically a movie prop into a proper submersible. He also added an ‘easter egg’ into the Tesla Model S’ operating system, a hidden feature revealed when you type in Bond’s 007 code number. After doing that, the submersible Esprit shows up on Tesla’s screen in the suspension settings and a “depth” drop-down menu appears.

The Lotus Esprit featured again in For Your Eyes Only, where Roger Moore drove a red Esprit Turbo with gold wheels. That model had 50bhp more than the S1, and launched to 62mph in a much faster 5.4 seconds.

Giorgetto Giugiaro originally designed the Esprit and the car carried on being built by Lotus right up to 2004. The last Esprit models were fitted with a thumping twin-turbo V8.