Gaydon, Warwickshire - It is arguably, after the Volkswagen Beetle, the most recognisable car on the planet, and has twice been voted the world’s coolest car.
Since it made its movie debut alongside Sean Connery in the 1964 spy thriller Goldfinger, children of all ages have dreamed of owning a Aston Martin DB5 just like James Bond's - so much so that the Corgi die-cast model of the car driven by the world’s most unsecret secret agent sold an astonishing 2.5 million in its first year of production.
And now 25 very lucky (and very wealthy) people will get the chance to own an exact replica of the iconic silver birch DB5, complete with some of the Q branch gadgets fitted to the original - including the revolving number plates, which is one of the reasons these ‘continuation’ cars will not be street legal anywhere in the world.
Once all the
are delivered, Aston Martin Works at Newport Pagnell (which is where the original DB5s were made) in collaboration with Chris Corbould, the Oscar-winning special effects supervisor of the James Bond films, will build a series of 28 authentic reproductions of the DB5 seen on screen, first in Goldfinger and later in Thunderball (1965), again with Connery, GoldenEye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) with Pierce Brosnan, and three appearances alongside Daniel Craig in Casino Royale (2006), Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015).
Twenty-five examples will available to purchase at £2.75 million (R51 million) plus taxes, with first deliveries to customers planned for 2020, plus one each for Aston Martin and Eon Films, and a final example to be auctioned for charity.
The Aston Martin DB5, first shown at the Earls Court motor show in October 1963, was developed from the DB4, with disc brakes all round, its straight six bored out from 3.7 to four litres and three SU carburettors in place of the DB4’s two, giving it an extra 31kW, and a new five-speed ZF gearbox.
With 210kW at 5500 revs and 380Nm at 4500rpm on tap, it would launch to 100km/h in little more than seven seconds and top out at 230km/h. Just 898 were made between 1963 and 1965 and the survivors are among the world’s most sought-after collectors’ cars - especially in silver birch with sage grey leather trim!