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........

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