50 years of James Bond cars (Part 1)
007’s true love
Fifty years have passed since the first James Bond movie reached the cinema screen. We take a look back at the cars driven by 007, starting with the famed Aston Martin DB5, the Swiss Army Knife on four wheels. (Sebastian Viehmann, Jessica Fischer , 17.01.2012)
Saving the world in style
Whenever an Aston Martin rolls up anywhere in the world there are certain expectations… a gentleman in perfect tailoring will climb out with supreme elegance with a Martini (shaken, not stirred) in one hand and a beautiful woman in his wake. The man has only one thing… well, maybe two… in mind. His agenda is to save the world. And why not undertake this noble mission with the maximum or refinement possible? Secret agent James Bond has driven many autos in the course of his fifty year career, but none has such a firm place in the collective memory as the silver-grey Aston Martin DB5.
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- When 007, then played by Sean Connery, was shown the car in the film ‘Goldfinger’ the secret agent was far from enthusiastic. “My Bentley has never let me down”, he told Major Boothroyd… alias ‘Q’… the innovative armourer of Her Majesty’s secret service.
All a secret agent needs
The relationship between James Bond and the elite British automobile marque did not get off to the best start. When 007, then played by Sean Connery, was shown the car in the film ‘Goldfinger’ the secret agent was far from enthusiastic. “My Bentley has never let me down”, he told Major Boothroyd… alias ‘Q’… the innovative armourer of Britain’s secret service. But ‘Q’ brooks no opposition. “Orders from ‘M’, 007… you are to drive this modified Aston Martin.” The term ‘modified’ can be taken as British understatement, and ‘Q’ had spared no effort the help Bond to switch from his beloved Bentley to the Aston. The DB5 had all that a secret agent could wish for… two 7.6 mm machine guns were implanted behind the car’s headlights, a bullet-proof barrier could be raised from inside the boot and there was an ejection seat…operated by a secret switch in the gear lever… to deal with unwelcome passengers. There were also spinning blades extensible laterally to cut another car's tyres to shreds. At the press of a button the license plate could be switched to change the auto’s purported identity. A fascinating fact is the way the DB5 predicted the navigation systems we know so well today… this was 1964, but the Aston displayed an arrow on a map displayed on a small screen, enabling Bond to stay on the trail of the evil doers.
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- The press were shown several gadgets which were never actually seen on the silver screen… a telephone mounted in the door on the driver’s side, battering rams which could be extended from the nose of the car, a system for throwing out a hail of sharp nail
Bond mania
The legend of the Bond DB5 owes a lot to the tricks which helped the secret agent to escape villainous pursuers. In ‘Goldfinger’ a mere press of a button sprayed oil on the road behind him, to the astonishment of Auric Goldfinger in his Mercedes ‘Ponton’ who found himself skidding helplessly. In ‘Thunderball’ the car was again the star... it was water shooting out from the back that held the followers in check by sweeping them off their feet. It was above all the Aston Martin DB5 model which fuelled the Bond mania which developed after ‘Goldfinger’, the third movie in the series. “I was the lucky one, my job was to drive this car when we toured the world”, recalls Mike Ashley in an interview. At the time he was European sales manager for Aston Martin Lagonda. Ashley also demonstrated for the press several gadgets which were never actually seen on the silver screen… a telephone mounted in the door on the driver’s side, battering rams which could be extended from the nose of the car, a system for throwing out a hail of sharp nails, a weapons cache under the seats.
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- Battering rams could be extended from the nose of the car.
Bond’s little extras
In all there were four DB5s built with all the Bond extra equipment. The elegant sports car toured the whole world, displayed at the salon in Paris in 1964 and for the American première of ‘Goldfinger’ in New York. It was in the French capital that Mike Ashley pulled a trick on the gendarmes . It is said that he sped past the police at such an alarming tempo that they alerted other patrols, advising that they should be on the lookout for an Aston with British license plates. But when Ashley cruised past the next road-block he had used the number plate changer… the Aston now appeared to be registered in Switzerland.
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- It was above all the Aston Martin DB5 model which fuelled the Bond mania which developed after ‘Goldfinger’, the third movie in the series.
Zeitgeist
The DB5 came to have a permanent place in popular culture. Soon the car began to appear in television spots advertising… for trousers or for car polish! In 1966 Her Majesty made a personal visit to the Aston Martin factory where she was inevitably invited to admire the Bond car. As a gift for Prince Andrew the Queen was given a toy car with Aston Martin styling, complete with all the extras like the number plate changer and smoke generator. One can imagine the boy happily zooming along the endless corridors of Buck House. For less blue-blooded kids such an auto would remain just a dream but it can be presumed that any young lad who had a collection of model cars would have had among them a grey Aston Martin.
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- Because the grey Aston is so closely associated with James Bond it featured in other 007 epics long after ‘Goldfinger’ and ‘Thunderball’ although some appearances were only very brief. In the 1995 film ‘Golden Eye’ the Bond played by the newly recruited Piers Brosnan was involved in a mischievous chase with his opponent Xenia Onatopp driving a Ferrari 355 GTO.
Spanning generations
Because the grey Aston is so closely associated with James Bond it featured in other 007 epics long after ‘Goldfinger’ and ‘Thunderball’ although some appearances were only very brief. In the 1995 film ‘Golden Eye’ the Bond played by the newly recruited Piers Brosnan was involved in a mischievous chase with his opponent Xenia Onatopp driving a Ferrari 355 GTO. The fact that the old DB5 outclassed the speedster built in Maranello was, of course, due to the magic of the movies. But, after all, who could possibly imagine the most gentlemanly operative On Her Majesty’s Secret Service at the wheel of an Italian car?
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