Aston Martin or Lotus — What’s Bond Going to Drive Next?
I know, it’s not really a metals topic — my editor will no doubt berate me for wandering off the reservation — but it has to be said the current speculation about which car Bond will drive in the next movie has got to be of the topic of the month, hasn’t it?
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According to the Financial Times, there is a battle royal developing between Aston Martin – long considered the only authentic wheels for our hero — and upstart Lotus, provider of Bond’s principal transport on two occasions (“The Spy Who Loved Me” in 1976 and in the 1981 film “For Your Eyes Only”).
We are not suggesting Lotus does not make fine cars, although arguably their road cars never quite lived up to the promise of their track record. From their racing debut in the late 1950s, a series of iconic drivers and Colin Chapman’s magic combined to create a dream team that competed at the highest level in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
Drivers like Graham Hill, Jochen Rindt, Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti, not to forget possibly the greatest of them all Jim Clark (winner of two F1 titles for Lotus), firmly established the mark as an innovative and exciting brand that, from its humble origins in Norfolk, took on the might of Ferrari, Renault, Honda and other famous British teams, like Brabham and BRM.
There is no question Lotus has a fine racing pedigree. As a road car, however, they have never attained the same suave mix of power, prestige and understated competence that is and always has been Aston Martin.
Bond, though, is quintessentially British, and following a brief ownership by Ford, Aston Martin Lagonda has been privately held for over 10 years by a consortium including British and Kuwaiti investors. Soon to go public via an IPO, you too could buy a slice of history when it goes public later this year.
Not so for Lotus which, along with Swedish Volvo and British-based London cab company London Electric Vehicle Company is owned by Chinese Geely. To be fair, much like Volvo, Geely is a good steward of Lotus, allowing the firm to create its own direction and innovation while providing ample funding when needed. Still, diehards would argue it dilutes the Britishness of the brand.
Featuring in a Bond movie, though, would certainly help revitalize lackluster sales at Lotus and may create other one-off opportunities.
For example, Aston recently produced a series of 25 DB5 models — the same as used in “Goldfinger” — made at the car’s original home in Newport Pagnell, the company will sell the specials for £2.75 million apiece. Styling and design for the movies can, like technology developed for racing, feed back into road cars, according to the Financial Times. Much of the engineering for the DB10 car, a model created exclusively for the most recent Bond film “Spectre,” went into the company’s latest models (the DB11 and the Vantage).
Some argue that Bond should go back to Bentley, the brand used in his first film and in Ian Fleming’s books. A brand that in the heyday of the Bond series became a “poor man’s” Rolls Royce – if the buyer of a Bentley could ever be termed a “poor man.”
But in this decade, Bentley has emerged as a fine builder of high-powered executive saloons — maybe not quite what they were in Bentley’s own racing days, but that was well before F1.
No, for 50 years Bond and Aston Martin have been indivisible. Every attempt at substitution – Lotus, BMW, Ford, once a Lincoln convertible for goodness sake – has fallen flat.
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There really is no substitute — please, EON Productions, just don’t be tempted to make it electric.
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