Editor’s Note: This article originally published on August 20, 2018.
Soon, you’ll be able to buy your very own silver 1964 Aston Martin DB5 just like the one Sean Connery, as James Bond, first drove in the 1964 movie “Goldfinger.” The rotating license plates and other gadgets will be included and it will come from the same Aston Martin factory that created the original DB5s.
As you might guess, Q’s handiwork is not cheap. Only 25 will be made available for direct sale to customers at a price of £2.75 million or about $3.5 million. These will be “continuation cars,” meaning they will be newly constructed cars made almost exactly as they were in 1964.
That’s a relative bargain compared to the $4.6 million someone paid in 2010 for an original James Bond DB5 used in the film. That car had guns that poked out through the taillights and a removable roof panel to allow for the exit of a passenger in the ejector seat.
The only other complete car used in the production was stolen in 1997 and is believed to have been destroyed.
The James Bond character actually drove a number of different cars in various films and, in the Ian Fleming novels, he usually drove Bentleys. Still, thanks to the “silver birch” colored Aston Martin DB5, the character has long been associated with Aston Martin. The car inspired a popular Corgi toy version of which 2.5 million were sold in 1965. The car appeared in six more Bond films after Goldfinger, most recently in “Spectre” in 2015.
The connection between the Bond brand and the Aston Martin brand is now so strong that the car company has dubbed its in-house customization arm “Q by Aston Martin.” Q was the person in Bond’s British intelligence agency who created all the gadgets that the spy used, including the DB5, to get out of various scrapes.
These new DB5s are being built in the Aston Martin Works facility in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, England. The former factory is now mostly dedicated to restoring classic Aston Martin cars. Aston Martin’s main manufacturing facility is now in Gaydon, Warwickshire, England.
The new James Bond DB5s are being created by Aston Martin in cooperation with EON productions, the company that makes James Bond films. The first customers will get their cars in 2020. In all, 28 of the cars will be made including ones to be kept by Aston Martin and EON and another to be auctioned for charity.
Aston Martin said the cars cannot be driven legally on public roads.
