Yahoo Finance Now you can own the James Bond Aston Martin DB5 — for about $6 million
What’s fast and smooth running, with a perfectly styled 1960s look that’ll have you cruising down a highway?
A beautifully restored 1965 Aston Martin vehicle — the James Bond Aston Martin DB5. Featured in the James Bond motion pictures, “Thunderball” and “Goldfinger.” The car is fully road legal with 13 functioning Bond gadgets, ranging from a Browning 0.30 caliber machine gun in each fender, wheel-hub mounted tire-slashers, smoke screen dispensers, to revolving license plates. Next month, the car will be auctioned by RM Sotheby’s and It is expected to fetch up to $6 million.
“There were four cars built for the movie, three survived today. This is one of what’s called the promo car. So it was used to go around different events like movie theaters, world fair events, county fairs, and really get the James Bond name out there before a time of social media and wide media distribution,” said Barney Ruprecht, RM Sotheby’s senior car specialist, who sat down with Yahoo Finance’s Adam Shapiro and Julie Hyman to discuss the upcoming auction and the history of the car.
Ahead of its public auction debut, the car is on display in the lobby of Sotheby’s York Avenue global headquarters in New York City this month. The car had previously mostly been housed in a private museum in a small town in Tennessee, according to Ruprecht.
“The car transcends a wide group of different people. It’s not so much a car collector as it is a cultural icon,” he said. ‘The buyer profile is anyone you can imagine: a car collector to a James Bond enthusiast to a guy down the street who wants to drive a James Bond car.”
On August 15, RM Sotheby’s will conduct its dedicated Aston Martin auction called “An Evening with Aston Martin” with the Bond car headlining the event. RM Sotheby’s will have almost $30 million dollars worth of Aston Martin’s on sale, according to Ruprecht. Besides the Aston Martin auction event, the company will have about 150 to 200 cars, with a total estimated value of about $200 million, for sale at the big Monterey, Calif. auction event.
“We have good interest so far,” Ruprecht said, referring to the James Bond Aston Martin DB5. “It’s a little early for the sale. We got a month left, estimate is $4 million to $6 million. And it’s my hope we get close to $6 million if not over.”
Ralston Ramsay is a producer for Yahoo Finance’s On the Move.
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