The man with the cool cars

There has been a James Bond car as long as there’s been a James Bond. While it took three movies for 007 to get handed the keys to his tricked out Aston Martin DB5 with the machine guns and ejector seat, Ian Fleming had a scene in the very first Bond book, Casino Royale, that reads like a stirring treatment for a pulse-pounding movie car chase.

The most heartbreaking moment in the recent movie version of Casino Royale wasn’t the death of Bond’s true love, Vesper Lynd, but a scene where Bond’s Aston Martin DBS V12, the latest successor to the DB5, goes ass over teakettle on a deserted road, flipping seven times before coming to a rest in a crumpled heap. I can’t help but remember that scene now as I stare at a brand-new DBS sitting in the showroom at Grand Touring Automobiles, the first one I’ve seen in real life.

Dean Jordan has been selling Aston Martins for years, and recalls doing the auto show circuit the year after James Bond was reunited with Aston-Martin when Pierce Brosnan got behind the wheel of a Volante and a Vanquish in Die Another Day.

“All the kids know who you are — it’s a very good way of advertising you as a company. As a product placement it’s brilliant. James Bond has always been synonymous with Aston, so it’s only appropriate that he drives one. It’s been very good for us over the years.”

Like the other 6,500 Aston Martins produced a year, the DBS is completely handmade, a luxury auto built around a race car’s guts, and it has the compact closeness of a real sports car, enveloping you in the driver’s seat without making you feel cramped. The DBS I’m sitting in — just one of five Dean sells a year — will cost you $300,000 plus taxes, but it won’t take car seats, so I tell him that’s the deal breaker.

Like the Aston Martin, the Bentley, which Bond Bond pursued Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, is a handmade car, loaded with luxury options, and probably a bit overpowered for most of its buyers.

“A lot of the clients who drive them want to drive it because it’s a Bentley,” says John Koutoulakis, a Bentley salesman at Grand Touring. “They don’t care how fast the car will go, even though the cars will go 200 miles per hour or more. They don’t care that it’s an all-wheel drive vehicle. They care about the presence and the name.”

If Bond were in the market for a runabout, he tells me, he’d be buying a GT Speed, the souped-up version of their marquee two-door model. Inside, it feels like a five-star hotel room, all custom leather, wood and metal, but the 600-horsepower engine can do over 200 mph. The starting price for a 2008 model is $220,000, but with options it will end up costing around $300,000, though Koutoulakis says they have flexible leasing options. Car seat anchors, he says, are standard.

We walk out onto the lot and he opens the door to a silvery white GT, telling me he’ll take the wheel for a few blocks, then let me drive it back. I’m probably blushing when I tell him that I don’t have a licence — I don’t even know how to drive — and he tactfully conceals what I can only call a look of dismay.

My quest to become Bond, hobbled as it was, ends in a final, resounding humiliation, but not before I let Koutoulakis open up the engine and lunge gracefully into traffic with me in the passenger seat.