The Bond Car Is Back!

[In my sentient lifetime, James Coburn’s knife-throwing cowboy in 1960’s The Magnificent Seven may have been the first enduring symbol of Cool, but before Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” in A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, or Henry Winkler’s Fonzie on Happy Days starting in 1974, or George Clooney’s appearance as the studly surgeon on E/R in 1984, there was James Bond as embodied by Sean Connery starting in 1962 with Dr. No. 

[Many of us, especially if we started watching the Bond movies with that portrayal, still think of Connery as the definitive master spy of the Ian Fleming novels—and the epitome of Cool.  His clothes were cool, his Walther PPK pistol was cool, his signature drink—the shaken-not-stirred vodka martini—was cool, his voice—including the slight Scottish burr—was cool, his women were cool.  Maybe most of all, his car was cool. 

[That souped-up. tricked-out silver Aston Martin DB5 was the height of Cool.  Any teenaged boy worth the label—I was 17 when the Bond Car made its first film appearance in 1964’s Goldfinger—would have killed to have one.  Later, I fell madly in love with the Jaguar XKE; after three years of driving a cute, yellow GM Opel Kadett (the “Mini-Brute”) that my dad brought back from Germany for me, I graduated to a candy-apple red 1970 Ford Torino fastback with a black interior and airplane seats.  It wasn’t a Jag, but I loved it.

[Still, 007’s Aston Martin was the dream.  I was driving the Torino in Germany when I was a Military Intelligence agent (not Bond, but as close as I’d ever get) and it turned heads . . . but it was no Bond Car!

[Now Aston Martin is producing recreations of the Goldfinger DB5—with an astronomical price tag, to be sure—with most of Q’s bells and whistles in place (granted, many are non-functional).  I’m afraid they’re all sold out, but a guy can still dream . . . .]

“BOND’S ‘GOLDFINGER’ ASTON MARTIN, SPY GADGETS INCLUDED”

by Jerry Garrett

[I collected several articles relating to James Bond’s Aston Martin, starting with the announcement of the recreation of the 1964 DB5.  I’m presenting them on Rick On Theater in reverse chronological order.  Below is the New York Times coverage from the “Business” section of 25 May 2020, an article taken from the paper’s Wheels blog, reporting the marketing of the recreations.]

James Bond is lonely. It’s just 007 and his gadget-laden 1965 Aston Martin DB5 these days. He hasn’t had any company since his last passenger was ejected. His car phone can’t call anyone; for one thing, its inventor didn’t remember to include a dial. His radar-mapping system is frozen on some place in rural Sussex, and just emits beeps like a sonar signal from a submarine movie.

Even the fender-mounted machine guns seem to be out of bullets.

What’s an international man of mystery supposed to do these days for a bit of excitement?

Fortunately, Aston Martin has an answer: The 107-year-old British luxury carmaker is re-creating the Bond DB5 from the 1964 movie “Goldfinger,” starring Sean Connery, in painstaking detail. It is but one example — a really expensive one — of how auto manufacturers, including Land Rover, Jaguar and Porsche, have started reaching into their pasts to update some of their classic models and equipment.

A special run of 25 “Goldfinger Continuation” DB5s is being hand-built at the same facility in Newport Pagnell that produced all 898 originals between 1963 and 1965. The cars are finished in the same Silver Birch paint scheme, the interior leather is identical in color and texture, and the dashboard and gauges are as true to the original appearance as possible. Aston Martin even called upon the special-effects wizard from the Bond films, Chris Corbould, to supervise their re-creation.

“Aston Martin is fastidious about authenticity,” said Paul Spires, head of Aston Martin Works. “And we have gone to very considerable lengths to ensure the equipment in the Continuation cars is as faithful to that seen in the film as possible.”

He added: “Aston Martin has sourced the cockpit instrumentation from the modern successor to the same supplier who made the original instruments in the 1960s. They appear, essentially, identical.”

The movie car was equipped with a lethal array of nonstandard gadgets, to aid Bond in his crime fighting. These included oil-slick sprayers, smoke-screen foggers, a retractable bullet-resistant shield, a passenger ejection seat, a nail spreader, hidden machine guns in the fenders and telescoping battering rams.

“The main challenge has been to recreate the gadgets from the film world and transfer them into a consumer product,” Mr. Corbould said. “We have license in the film world to ‘cheat’ different aspects under controlled conditions. For instance, we might have four different cars to accommodate four different gadgets. We obviously don’t have that luxury on these DB5s, as all the gadgets have to work in the same car all the time.”

  

Sean Connery with a DB5 during the filming of “Goldfinger” in 1964.        Credit...Aston Martin, via Reuters

There are also concessions to the real world. There will be no ejection seat, as no “non-mischievous” use could be identified for it. Same with the nail dumper. The oil and smoke sprayers will emit simulated substances. And the machine guns won’t fire ammunition.

“That would not be compliant with a very great number of laws and/or safety regulations!” Mr. Spires said. “However, the guns do appear to ‘work’ and have light bursts to indicate them ‘firing’ along with authentic gunshot sound effects amplified through speakers — for a very impressive effect.”

Most other gadgets will be updated behind their dials and exteriors, to function in the modern world.

“The ‘radar’ screen uses modern-day satellite navigation mapping to show, as a blinking point of light in the center of the screen, the position of the car at any given time,” Mr. Spires said. “It mimics the functionality of the car’s screen in the film,” which had a static map of seven counties in southern England affixed to it.

“Work is still ongoing on the phone functionality, and we will provide more detail to owners in due course,” he added. Although the corded handset in the movie car appeared groundbreaking, the car phone had been invented in 1946. Unlike the DB5’s phone, actual car phones at the time could make actual calls.

The most noticeable difference between the Continuation cars and the originals is the price. A 1965 DB5’s base price was $12,850 [ca. $105,000 today], although the Bond car’s options would have added considerably to that. The Continuation cars are all priced at $3.5 million.

Despite some tough sledding in the luxury car market of late, Aston Martin reports that all 25 are sold. All are being built, and are expected to be delivered to their owners in the coming months.

It was once said an Aston Martin “costs as much as a house.” If one is talking about central London, perhaps that is still true. In any case, the Continuations are a veritable bargain compared with the actual Bond DB5, which sold for $6,385,000 at auction in Monterey, Calif., in August [up to $6.4 million in 2020].

Aston Martin’s Continuation cars may be the most ambitious of such auto projects to date. But Land Rover got the ball rolling four years ago with a project to refurbish a handful of its original Series I sport utility vehicles, which first appeared in 1948. Jaguar built “continuation XKSS” models, hand-building — like Aston Martin — replicas from original blueprints.

On a more practical note, Porsche is using the down time during the pandemic to address some needs of cars it has already built, with a new Porsche Classic Communication Management system. It’s a way to retrofit classic Porsches with modern infotainment features.

Porsche’s Classic Shop online offers two systems — one that replaces the skinny dashboard radio in classic Porsches with a unit that’s the same size and offers Bluetooth, Apple Car Play, Android Auto and other abilities that are compatible with a 3.5-inch screen the system adds to the dash display. For newer models, a seven-inch version adds touch-screen ability and some slots for peripherals like USB and SD cards. The retro look is retained with period-correct rubber knobs and plastic push buttons.

This system can retrofit Porsches from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Pricing is expected to be under $1,500 for even the top-line units. That’s cheaper than, say, replacing a burned-out original unit.

[The version of the article above incorporates a correction of 26 May 2020.  The earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a type of “continuation” model built by Jaguar.  The automaker built a car called XKSS, not XJSS.

[On 25 October 2013, the Times announced a new blog, which it labeled “A New Parking Spot for Wheels Coverage”;  Wheels was intended to report on “the latest features, trends and technologies in the automobile industry.”  On the feature, a team of Times contributors “blogs about news, trends and all things automotive,” including insight, photos, reviews of cars, and more.]

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“ASTON MARTIN DB5: JAMES BOND CAR TO FETCH UP TO $6 MILLION AT MONTEREY AUCTION”

by Jack Guy, CNN

[As the New York Times report above mentions, before the release of the Goldfinger Continuations, one of the original prop DB5’s used in the filming was sold at auction last year.  The following article was reported by the CNN.com Wire Service and then  published on 13 June 2019 in the San Jose Mercury News.]

A fully restored version of the Aston Martin DB5, made famous by suave spy James Bond in the 1964 film “Goldfinger,” is going up for auction.

On Aug. 15, a DB5 with full Bond modifications, including a Browning .30 caliber machine gun in each fender and wheel-hub mounted tire-slashers, will go under the hammer in Monterey, California, according to a press release from auction house RM Sotheby’s.

Auctioneers estimate the car, one of only three surviving examples of the Bond-modified DB5, could fetch between $4 million and $6 million. (A 1964 DB5 used in the filming of “Goldfinger” and the next Bond film, “Thunderball,” sold for $4.6 million in 2010 [$5.4 million today].)

This particular vehicle is one of two built in 1965 for a US tour to promote “Thunderball,” and has had just three owners in over 50 years.

“No other car in history has played a more important leading role on film and in pop culture than the Aston Martin DB5,” Barney Ruprecht, a car specialist at RM Sotheby’s, said in a press release.

“This is an unbelievably rare chance to play secret agent in a car that offers incredible performance and style in its own right and we’re honored to offer the Bond DB5 alongside our partners at Aston Martin.”

All of the Bond modifications are fully functioning following a full restoration, so the winning bidder will be able to make use of smoke screen dispensers, revolving license plates, and a passenger-seat ejection system.

The car will be displayed in North America this summer, with dates and locations to be announced.

In 2018 Aston Martin announced a limited run of 25 replica DB5s, kitted out with some of the same features as the Bond-modified model.

With a list price of £2.75 million ($3.5 million), the replicas are aimed at wannabe secret agents with cash to burn.

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“JAMES BOND’S 1964 ASTON MARTIN DB5 TO BE AUCTIONED”

by Nick Kurczewski

[Prior to the auction sale of the James Bond Aston Martin DB5 last August, the car was purchased at a previous auction in 2010.  The New York Times’ Wheels blog of 15 September 2010 covered the sale.]

How could anyone resist pressing an “ejector seat” button, especially when the bright red temptation was in a car once owned by the world’s most famous British secret agent?

Luckily for me — the one doing the pressing — this gadget is one of the few nonfunctional items installed in the silver 1964 Aston Martin DB5 seen in the early 007 films “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball.” Set to be auctioned in London on Oct. 27, the car is expected to bring more than $5 million [$5.8 million now], according to RM Auctions, the company handling the sale in cooperation with Sotheby’s.

That price would be far beyond the $12,000 paid by the current owner [ca. $84,000 in 2010], Jerry Lee, when he bought the car from Aston Martin in 1969. Mr. Lee, a radio station owner in Philadelphia, has kept the car in a special “James Bond room” of his house, where he often demonstrated its crime-fighting gadgetry to guests.

The car has only 30,000 miles on the odometer, and Mr. Lee said that nearly all the mileage — with the exception of “two blocks” he drove in London — was racked up before he took ownership. “I decided the car is a work of art,” he said, standing alongside the DB5 in the lobby of Sotheby’s New York auction house on the Upper East Side, where it will be on public display until Friday.

The atmosphere is in sharp contrast to the DB5’s condition when Mr. Lee bought it. “The car was literally buried” at Aston Martin’s headquarters in Newport Pagnell, England, he said. “The spare tire was on the back seat and the car was just covered with dirt.”

After being gently refurbished (and at some point repainted, according to RM Auctions) the car was put on static display for decades, with only two public appearances over the past 30 years. Mr. Lee said he intended to use proceeds of the sale to finance his charitable organization, the Jerry Lee Foundation, which focuses on social issues, like poverty and, in particular, crime prevention.

A surprising variety of cars can claim some degree of James Bond provenance, like a submersible Lotus Esprit and a flying AMC Matador. But this is the first authentic James Bond Aston Martin DB5 to go on sale in years. Only four were built: two for promotional purposes and two for driving scenes in the movies.

So what happened to the other original 007 DB5? Its whereabouts remain a mystery. In 1997, it was reported stolen from an airport hangar in Boca Raton, Fla. As for Mr. Lee’s Aston Martin, it was the “road car” in 1964’s “Goldfinger,” where it was used for driving and chase scenes.

In “Thunderball,” the car was given more screen time, which meant it had to be fitted by the Aston Martin factory with the full armada of bad guy-fighting gadgets. Most are functional, to some degree. For obvious reasons, an ejector seat was never installed in the car — though it has an electrically released removable roof panel.

RM Auctions has restored the DB5 to driving condition, with special attention paid to the brakes, clutch assembly and exhaust system. The hydraulic and electrical controls for the car’s special features were also refurbished. The front-mounted machine guns actually do poke out from behind driving lights. However, the firing was a special effect. “They’re only metal pipes,” said Don Rose, a car specialist for RM Auctions.

The “wheel splitters” are also a bit of movie trickery. Fixing them into place — which Mr. Rose did in the lobby of Sotheby’s — requires removing the wheel center cap with a rubber mallet and manually screwing the tire-shredding devices into position. In the film, they deploy with the push of a button.

Revolving license plates, a driver’s door-mounted telephone, a dash-mounted tracking device and bulletproof rear shield are among the other technology that come standard with the car. The rear smoke screen and oil spreader are also fully operational. “We’ve tried the smoke screen,” says Mr. Rose, with a grin. “It works.”

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“JAMES BOND ASTON MARTIN DB5 SELLS FOR $4.6 MILLION”

by Dave Kinney

[In an earlier Wheels post, the Times reported the same auction results on 28 October 2010.]

LONDON — The Ohio collector Harry Yeaggy brought home the top prize from Thursday’s RM Auctions Automobiles of London sale, a 1964 Aston Martin DB5 James Bond film car from “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball.”

The car sold for £2,600,000. With the addition of auction fees, the final figure is expected to be over $4,600,000.

The car is said to have been one of two used for driving scenes in the movies with the actor Sean Connery behind the wheel as Bond.

Four were built in total and two were used for promotional purposes. The other car used in the films was reported stolen from a Boca Raton airport hangar in 1997. It has not been seen since.

The car sold on Thursday was reportedly bought by its seller, Jerry Lee, a Philadelphia radio station owner, for $12,000 in 1969.

There were rumors at the auction of a proposed £5,000,000 to £6,000,000 sale to undisclosed, mysterious bidders, but Mr. Yeaggy ended up with the car. The bidding opened at £2,500,000. The car received two bids, and Mr. Yeaggy’s was the winner.

Another Bond film car offered at the sale far exceeded expectations. A 1998 Jaguar XKR special effects car from the film “Die Another Day” [a 2002 James Bond film starring Pierce Brosnan as Agent 007] brought about £50,000 and 10 percent commission, or about $86,600 [over $136,000 today], against an estimate of £35,000, or $55,100 [about $87.000 in 2020].