Live and Let Buy Premium 007 Bond Cars in Auction

Of course, we can’t all be Bond, but there are those who’ll try to get a bit closer by bidding when Bond memorabilia comes up at auction, especially when it’s one of the cars. Here are a few that were snapped up in the last ten years.

In 2012, a pre-production replica of the BMW Z8 used in The World is Not Enough sold for £80,000 – not bad for a kit car! In fact, no real BMW Z8s were used in the film as the car wouldn’t be released for some time afterwards. Instead, BMW provided the designs for the prop team to create replicas for filming, often using a BMW shell on a Corvette engine.

In the same year, an Aston Martin V12 DBS that Daniel Craig drove in Quantum of Solace sold for over £240,000. It’s an undeniably stylish car, as you might expect from Aston Martin who has provided more cars for Bond than any other manufacturer so far, featuring in approximately half of the films.

Fun fact: Someone splashed out more than £44,000 for the swimming trunks 007 wore in this film!

Speaking of swimming, the submersible Lotus Esprit that featured in The Spy Who Loved Me sold for a staggering £600,000 plus, in 2013. That makes for quite a tidy profit, considering the seller found it in an abandoned storage bin he’d bought in 1989 for a mere $100 – that’s about £60 quid! You can’t drive it, as the vehicle auctioned was the submarine version of the car and lacked wheels, but the new owner didn’t much mind. He intends to create a fully-functional car-to-submarine vehicle just like it, and as the new owner is Elon Musk, it doesn’t seem all that impossible.

An Aston Martin DB10 that was used in Spectre sold for over £2.4 million at a charity auction in 2016, more than twice its reserve selling price. Only ten of the vehicles were ever made, all of them exclusively for the film, with one of them donated by Aston Martin specially for the charity event. The donated vehicle was a show car used to promote the film rather than one of the stunt versions, and was signed by 007 himself. (Well, Daniel Craig.)

Spectre also saw use of a Land Rover Defender (ten of them, actually, three of which were destroyed while filming). There were two types for the film, one for the road scenes and the other for the snow, which were adapted to include massive 37-inch tyres and a roll-cage, with additional changes made to the suspension. The one auctioned in 2019 was a badly damaged one from one of the snowy Austrian mountain scenes and was sold in that preserved condition for £100,000. A year previously, Gordon Ramsey paid more than three times that for one of the Defenders, but to be fair his was at least roadworthy.

For 2019 we’re back with another Aston Martin, this time the DB5 that had promoted Thunderball. Sean Connery drove the DB5 in two Bond films – Thunderball and Goldfinger – before going on to buy one himself, claiming they were “amazing” cars. This one set an auction record, going for over £5.2 million to make it the most expensive DB5 in the world. The vehicle was not used in the film itself, but it had still been heavily modified to include machine guns in the bumpers, tyre slashers in the wheels, and a bulletproof shield that could be raised to protect the rear windscreen.

Another Spectre car, the Jaguar C-X75 was to be auctioned as part of an event taking place for the Formula 1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2019, with an expected sale price of between £570,000 and £850,000, but after bidding no sale was agreed. One of only five such vehicles made especially for the film, the C-X75 was part of a supercar project that Jaguar abandoned in 2012 only for director Sam Mendes to request its use for one of the Bond bad guys. This particular vehicle was used for the close-up hero shots rather than any of the more strenuous stunt work.

The 1969 Mercury Cougar XR7 convertible that featured in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was auctioned at the end of 2020. Red, with leather interior to match, this one belonged to a Bond girl, and although it’s not the actual one Diana Rigg drove across ice in one memorable car chase scene, it was used in the film. The new owner restored it over a period of 30 years before offering it for sale. It sold for over £350,000, twice as much as estimated, and set the record for auctioned Mercury Cougars.

Stolen, not Sold

In 1986, one of the DB5s used for effects work in Goldfinger was purchased for $250,000 and stored in an airport hangar in Florida, only to be stolen in 1997. To this day its whereabouts are still unknown, though investigators believe it ended up in the Middle East. One theory even proposes it was an inside job because the owner received a massive insurance pay out of more than $4 million. The charcoal silver 1963 vehicle had been installed with a variety of gadgets, as you would expect for a Bond car, and if you’re keeping an eye out for it, the number plate was BMT 216A.

Bond’s number plates

Okay, so the Department for Transport won’t let you have number plates that flip over into fake ones, or drop to reveal machine guns, but you can get personalised registration marks resembling those used by Bond. They make great no-maintenance investments, too, proving to be consistently valuable in the open market.

Registration marks close to the one on Bond’s DB5, for example, BMT 216A (or BMT 214A in Goldeneye) tend to be very valuable. A recent DVLA auction saw BMT 216C fetch nearly £6,000, and before that BMT 216B went for £14,000. In Guernsey, where plates with just numbers are permitted, 007 sold for £240,000!

Although you can’t use only numbers here in the UK, 007 remains a popular plate-filler, making any registration all the more visually striking and memorable. We talked about Bond plates in a previous article, where you’ll also find a list of some of our available Bond registrations.

Here are some more we presently have for sale (not previously mentioned) but you’d better be quick if any take your fancy!