From Aston Martins fitted with ejector seats and water cannons to a Lotus Esprit reborn as a submarine to a Venetian gondola improbably reimagined as a hovercraft, the vehicles of the James Bond cinematic franchise are as iconic as the spy himself.
Enter James Bond Cars, Assouline’s third fully-authorized title devoted to 007 (following James Bond Destinations and James Bond Style) and the most comprehensive chronicle ever published of not just the twenty-five films’ legendary automobiles, but also all the other must-know machines of land, sea, and air—whether motorcycles, helicopters, speedboats, blimps, snowmobiles, jet-packs, or even the bizarre one-offs developed specifically for Bond’s world (the “Little Nellie” autogyro from 1967’s You Only Live Twice comes to mind).Curated and introduced by Academy Award–winning special-effects supervisor Chris Corbould, OBE, who has worked on fifteen Bond films, James Bond Cars is both a full-throttle visual catalog and an insider’s account of how filmmakers engineered some of cinema’s most unforgettable stunts.
The book features more than three hundred images, from rare behind-the-scenes stills to design drawings to production ephemera, and Corbould’s commentary lifts the curtain on the secrets of those masterful sequences (think engineering hacks, one-take-stunts, near-disasters) and the rides that powered them. James Bond Cars is a film-by-film journey, starting with the Sunbeam Alpine in Dr. No(1962) and ending with the bullet-scarred Aston Martin DB5 in No Time To Die(2021).The book stars 007’s own vehicles but also those used by his allies, love interests, and adversaries over the past six decades—from Bentleys, BMWs, and Land Rovers to Sunseekers, Glastrons, and Boeing 747s.
The Bond series’ most enduring marque, the Aston Martin, appears in nearly half the films and is featured within this volume in a dozen-plus models, including the DB5, DBS, V8, Vanquish, and beyond. Through hundreds of vehicles on the ground, over the waves, and in the sky (or even space), James Bond Cars highlights the Bond franchise as cinema’s ultimate test driver.
