James Bond’s Most Tricked Out Vehicles Go on Display at D.C.’s Spy Museum

The International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. explores the legacy of global espionage, making its history legible and compelling to a contemporary audience. So, it’s fitting that its latest exhibit displays a dozen-and-a-half vehicles associated with the person who may be, oxymorons aside, the world’s best-known fictitious super-spy. 

This show, “Bond In Motion,” opens March 1 and features iconic cars from 007’s six decades. These include the self-cloaking Aston Martin Vanquish from Die Another Day, the remote-controlled BMW 750iL from Tomorrow Never Dies, the surface-to-air missile-firing BMW Z8 from The World is Not Enough, and, perhaps the world’s most famous car, the machine gun–concealing, oil slick–emitting, license plate–rotating, seat-ejecting Aston Martin DB5 used in Goldfinger.

But it also includes lesser-known Bond vehicles, like a snowmobile from Die Another Day, a three-wheeled, motorcycle-based Tuk-Tuk from Octopussy, a hang-glider from Moonraker, and a submarine from Diamonds are Forever, fabricated by Batmobile-designer George Barris.

“Most modes of transportation come with certain risks that we generally understand and accept when we get onboard,” says John Cork, one of three founders of The Ian Fleming Foundation, a not-for-profit dedicated to Bond’s creator, author of the 14 original 007 books. “The Bond films often turn those risks on their head.” Risk becomes the reward as the Bond vehicles “externalize death.” 

The foundation loaned out the great majority of the vehicles featured in the exhibition. Others came from EON Productions—the company responsible for making the Bond films—as well as from the permanent collections of automakers’, private individuals, and the museum itself.  

One of the most interesting aspects of the exhibit is the ways in which it ties the gadgets and practices in the Bond films to those used in the actual furtive world of international intelligence. To facilitate these connections, the museum relies on experts who worked “in the field.”

“Our Q was the Office of Technical Services, at the CIA. It was about a thousand people, and it included all the different technologies involved,” says founding Spy Museum Advisory Board member Jonna Mendez, a three-decade veteran ofAmerica’s Central Intelligence Agency, who worked on all manner of gewgaws and false documents, in addition to acting as the agency’s director of disguise. 

“We did some outrageous things,” Mendez says. She discusses running audio operations, globally, via hidden recording devices; securing clandestine visuals with cameras housed incoat buttons, pen caps, and fake pregnancy bellies; and even working with illusionists and magicians, experts in arts of misdirection. “We were very interested in the philosophy of disappearing things, or making people refuse to believe what they saw,” she says. 

Vehicles played a key role in all this. Mendez describes working on Bond-esque in-car devices like quick-change license plates, concealment spaces, push-button exterior color changes, and even an automotive Murphy Bed, “a van or a truck that you could open the back of it, put down a ramp, and drive a car into it—just disappear a car.”

One core difference from Bond, according to Mendez—who kept secrets for a living for 27 years—was the claim that the CIA rarely worked with weapons. “We didn’t have guns mounted on the roof of our vehicles,” Mendez says. “We used to say when the guns come out, the intelligence is no longer there.”

Given the retirement of the most recent Bond, Daniel Craig, it’s unclear what will come next for 007. But one thing can be certain. Vehicles will continue to co-star in the films, and to presage and adapt to the latest transportation technologies. 

“Electric vehicles are not a threat to 007,” Cork says. “On the other hand, autonomous vehicles offer a more interesting challenge.” Will Bond no longer power his own way through his famed car chases? “How those changes will become part of Bond’s world is anyone’s guess.”