What Car Would You Display In Your Living Room?

One of the best-known automotive gadgets in the James Bond 007 cinematic universe is the submersible Lotus Esprit. The original Aston Martin DB5, which featured guns, tire-shredding knock-off hubs, bullet-proofing, and an ejector seat, was such a difficult thing to follow up that Roger Moore’s Bond really needed a memorable hero car for The Spy Who Loved Me.

And the freshly unveiled Lotus Esprit S1 was just the ticket. All wedge shape with a flat windshield and ground-hugging design, it was a real head-turner even in stock form in the late 1970s. For the iconic scene where it jumps off the end of a pier, hides its wheels inside its bodywork, and transforms into a torpedo-shooting submarine, Lotus provided seven bodyshells on top of the two driving cars that featured in the preceding helicopter chase. One of these was built into a functional submarine car, which reportedly was piloted by two stuntmen in scuba gear. That car was auctioned by RM Sotheby’s in 2013 and was said to have been bought by Elon Musk for $866,000.

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The history of the rest of the bodyshells is spotty at best. One is said to have been destroyed during filming, but the shells used to show off the hidden wheels and the periscope are lost in time. Despite the scenes being set in Italy, the filming of these underwater stunts took place in the Bahamas; a scrap metal company supplied the cranes to lift the equipment and props in and out of the water. For his trouble, the scrap metal company boss was gifted two Esprit shells, one of which is the car being auctioned in Monaco this month.

Having sat outside at the scrapyard for over a decade, the Esprit was bought by an Italian collector in 1988. With help from Lotus, including photographs and technical information, the shell was rebuilt into the specification in which it stands today, complete with the steering fins and propellers that it likely originally lacked. Coys auctioned it in Monaco in 2007, and it was bought by a Finnish entrepreneur, Jorma Lillbacka, who also owns the PowerPark fairground in Southern Ostrobothnia.

Mäkelä Auto Tuning, a well-known rally car restoration business that sourced the car from Monaco, also restored the car at that point and built a movable display stand for it. The Lotus went on display at Lillbacka’s shopping mall near PowerPark, where it remained for years. I managed to take a photo of it in 2015, and because this was 2015, I slapped all of the world’s Instagram filters on it.

Now, the Esprit is again back in Monaco, and again up for auction. MAT has done more recent work on it to bring it to showroom condition; inside, it’s the bare Esprit bodyshell that shows its movie prop history, with no interior or engine. Weighing around 800lbs, it’s lighter than a complete Lotus but likely still takes a careful push to wheel around any garage, shopping mall or living room.

That brings us to the question: what car would you display in your living room, as a static object?

I’ve often said the DeLorean is the sort of car that might be best on display instead of being daily driven, thanks to its various build quality challenges and meager power output, but the tangentially related Lotus Esprit is certainly a good alternative. This particular Esprit is expected to bring 200,000 to 300,000 Euros, or up to $345k; there are cheaper plastic-bodied cars you can bolt on a stand and admire from your couch.

Top graphic images: DepositPhotos.com; RM Sotheby’s