The greatest cars ever to grace the big screen

Roger Moore and Barbara Bach with the Lotus Esprite car used in the James Bond film 'The Spy Who Loved Me' Alamy Stock Photo

Cinematic cars

Cinema strips a car back to its most essential quality, and decades on, these cars still do it.

THERE ARE CARS you drive, and then there are cars that drive themselves into the cultural imagination and never leave.

Cinema has given us some of the most iconic automobiles in history, and the strange thing is that a lot of them were never really meant to be stars. They were props. Means of transport for fictional characters. And yet here we are, decades later, still talking about them.

The Aston Martin DB5 is probably the most famous movie car in the world, and it earned that title in Goldfinger in 1964.

Sean Connery behind the wheel, Silver Birch paint, and a set of gadgets that made children everywhere want to grow up to be spies. The car came fitted with a rear smokescreen system, revolving number plates front and rear, simulated twin front machine guns, tyre slashers, and a bullet-resistant rear shield.

Sean Connery with his Aston Martin DB5 Alamy Stock Photo

Alamy Stock Photo

The whole lot was dreamed up by special effects man John Stears, who reportedly went back to Aston Martin with his wish list and was told it was impossible. He built the gadgets anyway. The closest I got was the Corgi model and anyone old enough to remember will also recall how quickly the missiles got lost in our 1980s thick carpet.

Alamy Stock Photo

Alamy Stock Photo

The car appeared again in Thunderball, after which it was stripped of all its spy equipment and sold. It changed hands several times, was sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 1986 for $250,000 (€217,000), and then in June 1997, it was stolen from a secure airport hangar in Boca Raton, Florida, and disappeared for 25 years.

Art Recovery International eventually traced it to somewhere in the Middle East, and as of writing it remains there, unrecovered, and estimated to be worth over $25 million (€21.67 million). The most famous car in the world, and nobody’s quite sure whose wall it’s hanging on.

The Lotus Esprit that Roger Moore drove into the sea in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) is a different kind of story. And it’s my personal favourite.

Roger Moore and Barbara Back with the Lotus Esprit Alamy Stock Photo

Alamy Stock Photo

Production nicknamed the submarine version “Wet Nellie” as a nod to the autogyro from You Only Live Twice, and it was built by an underwater engineering firm in Florida. It was powered by four electric motors, could move forward but not reverse, and the operator inside had to use scuba gear because it wasn’t watertight.

It cost around $100,000 (€86,000) to build, which sounds like a lot until you consider what happened to one of the surviving versions in 1989. It went at auction as a blind lot, meaning the buyer had no idea what was inside the storage unit they’d just purchased. A couple bought it for $100. It was later sold to Elon Musk for $1 million (€867,000). Not a bad return on a storage unit.

Then there’s the DeLorean. Built in Dunmurry just outside Belfast from 1981, the DMC-12 featured gull-wing doors and a brushed stainless steel body. It was not, by most accounts, a particularly good car.

The V6 was underpowered, the build quality was inconsistent, and the company went into liquidation within a year of production starting. Then Back to the Future came out in 1985, and none of that mattered any more.

A DMC DeLorean parked with passenger door open. License plate reads 88MPH, from Back To The Future. Alamy Stock Photo

Alamy Stock Photo

Director Robert Zemeckis changed the script’s time machine from a laser-equipped refrigerator to a DeLorean after deciding he needed something mobile for more dynamic storytelling, and the stainless steel, sci-fi angles of the car made it the most plausible-looking time machine imaginable.

Six DeLorean chassis were used during production. One was destroyed at the end of Back to the Future Part III, two were left to rot, and the primary hero car eventually ended up fully restored and on permanent display at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the actual factory in Dunmurry still stands, and the workers who built those cars are very much part of local memory. There’s a particular Irish pride in the fact that the most recognisable time machine in cinema history was built on the outskirts of Belfast.

The Cannonball Run (1981) gave us the Lamborghini Countach at the height of its powers. If you grew up in Ireland in the 1980s, that film was basically a religion, and the opening scene  was almost three minutes of uninterrupted Countach, the V12 soundtrack filling the cinema while the car carved through the Nevada desert.

raystevensmusic / YouTube

The car in the film was a black 1979 LP 400 S with a mustard yellow interior, loaned to director Hal Needham by a Florida-based car collector who happened to be a friend of his. It was one…