The first Bond movie car
In the first Bond film, Dr No (1962), Sean Connery rents a Sunbeam Alpine roadster and uses it in a car chase.
Sunbeam produced the Alpine in five forms between 1959 and 1967. All of them used relatively modest four-cylinder engines, but Sunbeam also built a version called the Tiger which was fitted with a much more powerful Ford V8.
Bond moves to Aston Martin
Aston Martin is probably the manufacturer most associated with James Bond. In the 1959 novel Goldeneye, he drives a DB Mark III, but for the film version released five years later this was updated to the then current DB5.
In both the book and the movie, the Aston is heavily modified. As driven by Connery, it has an ejector seat, machine guns, rotating number plates and a bulletproof shield, among other useful gadgets.
The Japanese Bond car
For You Only Live Twice (1967), set in Japan, Bond has the use of a Toyota 2000GT sports car, though it was mostly driven by his assistant (and, inevitably, girlfriend) Aki.
Toyota only ever sold the 2000GT as a coupe, but Connery was too tall to fit in it. Two convertible versions were hurriedly built to solve this problem.
In 2012, Daniel Craig revealed that the Toyota was his favourite of all the Bond cars.
The vintage Bentley
Connery retired as Bond after 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever but made a comeback in 1983 for Never Say Never Again, one of the very few Bond films not produced by Eon Productions.
His car this time was a 1937 Bentley 4 1/2 Litre, the same model Bond drove (and crashed badly) in the original novel, Casino Royale.
Ignoring the fact that he used the Aston Martin DB5 again in Thunderball a year after its appearance in Goldeneye, Connery had used six cars in six movies. WeBuyAnyCar values them at a total of £2,477,000, the highest figure for any Bond actor.
The amphibious Lotus
The most famous of Roger Moore’s cars during his time as Bond was the Lotus Esprit used in For Your Eyes Only (1981). One of the cars Lotus supplied was converted by Perry Oceanographic into an electric submarine for the famous underwater sequence.
In contrast to its exciting adventure, this Esprit was given the very unglamorous name of Wet Nellie. This was a reference to the autogyro used in You Only Live Twice, which was called Little Nellie after the music hall star Nellie Wallace, whose surname sounded very similar to that of autogyro pioneer Ken Wallis.
A Renault 11 (yes, really)
The cheapest of all Bond cars was a Renault 11 commandeered for a chase through Paris in A View To A Kill (1985). WeBuyAnyCar values the 11 at £1,000, though the one used in the film was so badly damaged that it would hardly have been worth anything by the time shooting stopped.
Roger Moore appeared in seven Bond films, but his cars are reckoned to have a garage value of just £193,000, well under a tenth of the ones used by Connery.
“Despite being one of the best loved Bonds, after our experts looked at his car collection, Roger Moore seemed to get the raw end of the deal with the motors he was handed,” says Richard Evans, WeBuyAnyCar’s Head of Technical Services.
“All credit to him for being one of the best Bonds in the business. It’s much harder to look cool when you’re cruising round in a Renault than it is in a Bentley, but he pulled it off to perfection.”
Bond's BMWs
Pierce Brosnan is the only Bond actor to have been supplied with BMWs, thanks to a three-movie product placement deal. He used a Z3 in Goldeneye (1995), a 750iL limousine and a stolen R1200C motorcycle in Tomorrow Never Dies two years later.
In 1999, he drove a rare aluminium-bodied Z8 sports car, estimated to be worth £200,000 now, in The World Is Not Enough. The Z8 went into production that year and was discontinued in 2003 after just under six thousand had been built.
Back to Astons
Brosnan’s Bond reverted to the famous Aston Martin DB5 for Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, but for 2002’s Die Another Day he was seen again in a modern Aston.
This was a V12 Vanquish fitted with at least as many optional extras as the DB5 had been, including the familiar machine guns and ejector seat but also a cloaking device which made the car invisible. Aston Martin has not so far made any of these available to its other customers.
WeBuyAnyCar values the Brosnan cars at £2,301,500. This is less than the Connery figure, but Brosnan appeared in only four films. His average per movie is £575,375 compared with Connery’s £412,833.
The Daniel Craig era
As portrayed by Daniel Craig, Bond has been seen driving nothing but Aston Martins. The celebrated DBV5 has appeared twice, while a DBS V12 was used for Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum Of Solace (2008).
Aston then designed a new car called the DB10 specifically for Bond to use in 2015’s Spectre. Mechanically similar to the V8 Vantage, it has a longer wheelbase and is almost as wide as the very rare One-77 supercar.
WeBuyAnyCar values this car and the DB5 at around £1 million each, giving the garage of Craig’s Bond a total value of £2,180,000 – only the third highest in the list, but a close second to Brosnan’s on a per-movie basis.
The next Bond car?
WeBuyAnyCar conducted a survey to see what the public would like Bond to drive next. Included in the top ten were the Bugatti Chiron, the Tesla Model S, the Jaguar F-Type SVR and the Bentley Continental Supersports.
However, it was another Aston that found the most support. According to the survey, Bond fans most want their hero to be seen in a DB11.
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