Following the announcement of 007’s new Aston Martin DB10, Sniff Petrol correspondent BUZZFACT CLICKBAYTE looks at the five greatest Bond film cars to date.
1. Ford Cortina
Hello, My Name Is James Bond (1968)
While on the trail of the deadly Dr Foxcock, Bond realises that he is near Reading and pops in to see his uncle Terry who, as it turns out, has recently purchased a brand new mk2 Cortina. ‘Cortina?’ Bond quips. ‘I knew a girls there once!’ Then they have a cup of tea. After an hour or so Bond remembers that he is supposed to be tracking down a baddy, makes his excuses and leaves. The scene was removed from the final cut of the film on the grounds that it was extremely boring and had absolutely no relevance to the plot.
2. Austin Princess
The Spy Who Did Things (1976)
Bond has stopped for a wee at RAF Clithole when he hears that underwhelming villain Kendo Lizard has stolen a box of nuclear things from a nearby bunker by posing as a mime artist. Quick as a flash Bond runs outside and wrestles the keys to the infamous brown Princess from its hapless owner and jumps behind the wheel only to find he can’t get it into reverse. ‘I’m having a bit of trouble!’ he quips before finally forcing the immobile Austin into the right gear and zooming backwards at high speed, straight through a wall and into an inexplicably massive hole in the ground whilst shouting ‘Oooh Betty!’ This entire sequence was later scrapped after producers realised they had been accidentally working from a script for an entirely different film.
3. Vauxhall Chevette 1.3L
Some Twat Wants To Blow Up The Moon (1980)
In the movie, 007 has been pursuing Cristofer Teste, henchman of evil despot Professor Cress, for seven weeks before finally cornering him in an Ipswich backstreet and slamming his head into the Chevette’s bonnet over and over again whilst shouting ‘Stop being naughty, you shit!’. This harrowing scene was mostly cut from the final movie because Roger Moore had only been half listening in a pre-production meeting and mistakenly believed that the sequence required him to adopt a bad Spanish accent and a prominent limp for no logical reason whatsoever. Also, during filming he kept accidentally looking straight into the camera and saying ‘Hello there’. As a result, the footage was almost completely unusable.
4. Chevrolet Cavalier
Wasptits (1984)
Bond celebrates another successful mission and escapes the trauma of having to kill lots of people in a casual manner by flying to Miami with his mate Gaz and going on a massive coke bender. He ends up having actual sex with a lady in the white Cavalier he rented at the airport then accidentally smashing it into a wall on Ocean Drive and running off to hide in a brothel for a couple of days. Sadly, movie goers didn’t get to see any of this as the film had finished by then.
5. Citroen Saxo 1.1 Fantastique
Today Is Just Tomorrow’s Yesterday (2000)
Perhaps the most legendary Bond car of the modern era, the keys to this rental Citroen are awaiting 007 when he arrives in St Greavsie to rendezvous with American agent Rover Sterling so that the pair may investigate international ‘businessman’ Ford Scorpio and his mysterious floating nightclub, ‘Aquafart’. Bond hasn’t even got behind the wheel before he is involved in a furious argument with hire car staff which leads to him shouting, ‘This should be a category C car. Speak to my… no, I don’t understand what you’re saying. Speak. To. My. Office’. He then throws the keys back and gets a shuttle bus to the hotel instead. This infamous sequence only appeared on the DVD version of the movie in Norway after producers decided that devoting a scene to Bond filling out all the forms necessary to rent a car took up so much time there was no room left for any plot or action or the very expensive stunt they’d already filmed in which Bond goes mad and smashes a travel kettle.
