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Aston Martin V8 Volante —The Living Daylights (1987)
When James Bond helps Kara Milovy and her invaluable cello escape the clutches of the Czech secret police, he uses his “winterized” Aston Martin V8 Volante. Q’s winterization initially appears to only have transformed the convertible seamlessly into a hardtop, but 007 soon engages a powerful laser built into a hubcap to detach a pursuing local police car’s chassis from its body and engine. Bond then fires a pair of rockets to blow a path through a truck’s trailer being used as roadblock. When the Czech military joins the chase, the Aston Martin dodges a tank shell, its bullet-proof glass unscared by machine gun blasts. Bond makes a detour into the forest on a road that dead-ends at frozen lake. On the ice, Bond and Kara are pursued by grenade fire from shore-bound soldiers in a Pandur APC and one brave Czech police car. Bond, having lost a tire and driving on a rim, sends sinking through his strategic driving. Outrigger skis, traction tire cleats, and a rocket motor allow Bond to use buttresses for a set of stairs at the frozen lake’s dam as a ramp to leap over troops sent to capture Bond and Kara. As the car enters the forest, trees rip the outrigger skis off, and the car ends in a snowbank. Upon exiting, Bond sets the self-destruct mechanism and continues their escape to Austria with Kara and her cello
The AMV8 gets plenty of action before its ultimate destruction. John Richardson (Special Visual Effects) tells of having eleven “cars” to play with. Three “real cars, which were acquired in the secondhand market at “reasonable prices.” First was the basic driving car which Timothy Dalton is seen driving in the Czech scenes (shot in Austria). The second was the stunt car, which did the jump by being fired off a compressed air cannon, designed to hit the ramp at 75mph and land in cardboard boxes. However, as Chris Corbould says, “Because of the extreme cold on the first attempt, rather than firing off like mad, the car just went ‘blump’ straight into the side of the hut. It was a total disaster.” After a night of repairs and testing, the second attempt proved successful. This car also drives down the mountain before hitting trees. The third car was the special effects car with most of the gadgets, including rockets firing from behind the fog lamps, the rocket booster in the rear, and the laser. There was a fourth vehicle which has no engine, but brakes and steering, designed to drive down between trees and have the outriggers knocked off.
With the decision to forgo the use of models, the remaining seven “cars” were in fact just molds, made at Pinewood under Aston Martin’s supervision. These shells were utilized for specific shots, including the engagement of the outrigger skis. It is this shell that the IFF owns with the operational outrigger skis, acquiring it in 2005.
There has been much debate about the proper nomenclature for the Aston Martin seen in The Living Daylights since two different models were used in the film. The term “Volante” only refers to convertible models of Aston Martins, in the film’s case an actual Aston Martin Volante owned by the chairman. The model used for the winter sequences is an Aston Martin V8 hardtop. The IFF has decided to refer to our effects car as a Volante because in the fictional world of the film, this car is, remarkably, a convertible.
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