Yahoo Autos Aston Martin's Goldfinger DB5 Has Officially Killed Nostaligia
Guess what? Great news. Nostalgia is dead. Ford played a part with its tributes to not-at-all-notable film Bullitt in the form of a series of green Mustang GTs, and now Aston Martin has dug the hole 20 feet deeper, thrown in the coffin, and laid cement over the whole damn thing.
Yesterday, it was announced that the British sports car maker will produce 25 brand-new "continuation" DB5s as a tribute to the Aston featured in the 1964 Bond film Goldfinger. The 25 cars will be faithful reproductions of the car in the film, so they'll all be silver, and Aston has said its working with Chris Corbould, the special effects supervisor for the James Bond films, to give the cars working gadgets.
The cars will be built at Aston Martin Works in Newport Pagnell, which is where the original DB5 was built, and will cost £2.75 million each. And none of them will be road legal.
You read that right.
So, you're going to be paying nearly $3.6 million dollars for a 1:1 scale model of a DB5 that you can putter around your driveway in. The only working gadget that it's confirmed to have is a rotating number plate, which you can use to, I guess, trick your family as the DB5 sits in your garage mahal? You know that it won't have machine guns for obvious reasons. It's unlikely that it'll be able to create a smoke screen or shoot an oil slick. And if it can, who would want to make a mess like that around their garage?
Will it have a working ejector seat? Probably not. Maybe a roof panel that gets out of the way, but the seat won't fly out. That'd be dangerous.
Aston Martin is doing so much good stuff right now. The new Vantage is brilliant. Same with the DB11 AMR and DBS Superleggera. The upcoming mid-engine sports car sounds like a winner and the Valkyrie, co-developed with Red Bull Racing and Adrian Newey, looks like it might be another McLaren F1-moment. None of these cars rely solely on nostalgia to sell. But even the one that does, the DB4 GT continuation, is faithful to the original and isn't a gimmick. This Goldfinger DB5 feels wrong.
It's not even tied to an anniversary. Goldfinger was released in 1964 and Aston will begin deliveries of this car in 2020. That's 56 years since the film's release. No better way to celebrate a 56th anniversary than with a car nobody will actually drive.
While the car will be lauded for being cool and a tribute to Bond, it's a Bullitt Mustang on a much more expensive scale. It grasps at nostalgia for a film that came out when, like Bullitt, Lyndon B. Johnson was president. Unlike Bullitt, Goldfinger is a masterclass of a film, but both are more than 50 years old.
And I'm willing to bet that Sean Connery, the coolest person to ever play Bond, wouldn't be caught in a car that's a tribute to a movie he starred in. Please don't tell that to the 25 people who plop down $3.5 million to play pretend.
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