James Bond always has the coolest cars, and the coolest by far would have to be the iconic Aston Martin Silver Birch DB5.

The car made its movie debut in 1964, alongside Sean Connery in Goldfinger. Since then, anyone who’s seen the film has dreamed of owning one – so much so, in fact, that in its first year of production 2,5 million of the Corgi die-cast models were sold.

Now, 25 very lucky (and very wealthy) people will get the chance to own an exact copy of the DB5, complete with some of the gadgets installed by Q in the original.

These include revolving number plates, ensuring that the car will not be street legal anywhere in the world.

IOL has more on how you can get your hands on one of these beauties:

Once all the DB4 GT continuation cars are delivered, Aston Martin Works at Newport Pagnell (which is where the original DB5s were made) in collaboration with Chris Corbould, the Oscar-winning special effects supervisor of the James Bond films, will build a series of 28 authentic reproductions of the DB5 seen on screen, first in Goldfinger and later in Thunderball (1965), again with Connery, GoldenEye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) with Pierce Brosnan, and three appearances alongside Daniel Craig in Casino Royale (2006), Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015).

Twenty-five examples will available to purchase at £2.75 million (R51 million) plus taxes, with first deliveries to customers planned for 2020, plus one each for Aston Martin and Eon Films, and a final example to be auctioned for charity.

The Aston Martin DB5, first shown at the Earls Court motor show in October 1963, was developed from the DB4, with disc brakes all round, its straight six bored out from 3.7 to four litres and three SU carburettors in place of the DB4’s two, giving it an extra 31kW, and a new five-speed ZF gearbox.

With 210kW at 5500 revs and 380Nm at 4500rpm on tap, it would launch to 100km/h in little more than seven seconds and top out at 230km/h. Just 898 were made between 1963 and 1965 and the survivors are among the world’s most sought-after collectors’ cars – especially in silver birch with sage grey leather trim.

Bit of a bummer that they cost in excess of R50 million, but it was fun while it lasted.

Here’s Q with some of the finer details of what to expect in a fully kitted out spy-car:

Seems like the kind of car that would suit Idris Elba, right?

[source: iol]