This is one of the full scale prop cars used while filming The Spy Who Loved Me, and I became one of the most enduringly famous Bond cars thanks to its transformative ability to turn into a submarine.
A number of 1:1 scale body shells were used during filming, the fact that the car had a fiberglass shell actually made it ideal for the prop department’s modifications. The Esprit became a global sensation after the film debuted, and it did no harm to its sales figures.
Above Video: This is a clip from “The Spy Who Loved Me” covering much of the use of the Esprit during the film. The car was a major character in the movie, and it became one of the best-known Bond cars as a result.
History Speedrun: The Lotus Esprit Submarine
The most widely told version of the story on how the Lotus Esprit ended up in The Spy Who Loved Me starts with Don McLauchlan, Lotus’s head of public relations, pulling off a piece of guerrilla marketing that would go down in the history books.
In early 1976, McLauchlan learned that pre-production was underway on a new Bond film at Pinewood Studios In England. Recognizing the huge publicity that an association with 007 could bring, he drove a pre-production Esprit to the studio, parked it directly outside the main administration building with all badges and branding covered, and then simply walked away.
The striking wedge-shaped car drew a crowd, including producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, and when McLauchlan casually returned to the car and drove off, Broccoli was reportedly determined to find out who made it.
As a result, Lotus was contacted about the car, and perhaps unsurprisingly they proved to be happy to supply two fully road-legal Esprit S1 production cars. Interestingly, each of these cars were fitted with protective metal undertrays beneath the radiator to handle the rough roads of Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda, where the chase sequences were filmed.
One of these cars served primarily as a camera chase-car – no alternative vehicle available at the time was said to be able to keep pace with the Esprit through the twisting mountain roads. When a third road car was needed during filming, the production borrowed Lotus chairman Colin Chapman’s own personal Esprit.
In addition to the road cars, Lotus provided seven full scale body shells for the underwater and transformation sequences. Three of the shells were used to show different stages of the car-to-submarine transformation.
The Lotus Esprit made its debut in 1976, and its appearance in the 1977 James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me” made it a global sensation. Image courtesy of United Artists.
One was launched from the end of a pier using a compressed-air cannon. Another unpowered shell, fitted with wheels, was towed by a rope buried beneath the sand of a beach – with a brush fitted to its underside to cover the rope as it moved – to film the Esprit emerging from the sea. A miniature model was also used for the initial underwater shot of the car entering the water.
Arguably the most important shell was sealed and shipped to Perry Oceanographic in Riviera Beach, Florida, a specialist marine engineering firm, where it was converted into a functioning wet submarine at a cost of over $100,000 USD. This was a true wet sub in every sense of the term, there was no dry cabin, and its pilot wore full scuba gear.
It was powered by battery-driven electric motors turning four propellers, with ballast tanks controlling depth. The Esprit’s wedge-shaped body naturally generated downforce, which would have caused the submarine to dive nose-first; this was compensated for by fins positioned where the road car’s wheels would normally sit. The sub was piloted during filming by Don Griffin (a former U.S. Navy SEAL) and the underwater sequences were shot in Nassau, the Bahamas.
Most of the Esprit body shell models have been lost to history, or were destroyed during filming, with only a small number known to have survived. One of the cars ended up in a storage unit which was bought by a couple at a blind auction for $100, it was later bought from them by Elon Musk for $1 million USD.
The Lotus Esprit Prop Car Shown Here
The Lotus Esprit prop car you see here is believed to have been used during filming of the 1977 James Bond hit The Spy Who Loved Me. It’s one of the submarine “Wet Nellie” cars build using a 1:1 scale Esprit body shell, and it’s spent almost 20 years on display at PowerPark in Finland, the country’s largest amusement park.
The Lotus Esprit prop car you see here is believed to have been used during filming of the 1977 James Bond hit “The Spy Who Loved Me.”
This version of the Wet Nellie prop car has dive planes, stabilizing fins, a periscope, four impellers, reinforced windows, and a torpedo launcher. In the summer of last year the car was restored by Makela Auto Tuning of Kannus, which included a partial repaint in the original white.
The car is now due to roll across the auction block with RM Sotheby’s on its easy-to-move stand as part of their Monaco sale on the 25th of April. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of RM Sotheby’s + United Artists
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
