Do you wish your car could drive underwater? You probably don’t, but if that’s something you’ve dreamed about you can make it a reality for a price. The submarine car from the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me is going up for auction in September. It’s the only one of it’s kind, and yes — you can really drive it underwater.
The car is being offered by RM Auctions at their sale in London that runs from September 8th to the 9th. It’s a heavily modified Lotus Esprit Series 1, and of the six such models used in the film, it’s the only one that’s actually a working submarine.
What’s crazy is that this car somehow sat in a storage unit for a decade before becoming part of a Storage-Wars-style blind auction, presumably for Davey Jones’ Locker, on which Mr. Jones owed several months of back rent. Rough, sure, but them’s the breaks. The car was unearthed for what RM calls “a modest winning bid,” which probably didn’t even cover the cost to make it in the first place. That’s because when the car was built for the 1977 film it cost a cool $100,000 to make. That translates into roughly half a million dollars today, making the hydrophilic Lotus one of hell of an expensive prop.
If you’re interested in buying the car… well, of course you’re interested in buying it, it is James Bond’s submarine car — you can learn more about it at RM’s website. Just be prepared to bust open that piggy bank if you’re planning on making a bid. RM Auctions sold Sean Connery’s Aston Martin DB5 — used in Goldfinger and Thunderball — for about $4.3 million dollars in 2010, and that thing isn’t a submarine, so I’m willing to bet the submarine car goes for a pretty steep price.
(via RM Auctions, image via RM Auctions)
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