The 1964 Aston Martin DB5 Is Worth Every Penny of Its $13,000 Price
If you had $13,000 to spend on a new car for model year 1964 (that's about $133,650 in 2025 money), why would you have bought a new Aston Martin DB5?
Not because James Bond drove one, because "Goldfinger" didn't show up in theaters until the '65s were hitting showrooms and Bond wheeled an Aston Martin DB Mark III in the original 1959 novel.
No, you bought one because a rich fella such as yourself respects the work of the hand-picked craftsmen who shape the DB5's aluminum-magnesium panels by hand and then apply and wet-sand 22 coats of paint.
You'll find plenty more of such details— including shout-outs for some of the workers at Newport Pagnell—in this magazine advertisement from early 1964.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Car and Driver
28-05-2025
- Car and Driver
Aston Martin DB12 Palm Beach Is a One-Off to Celebrate the Florida Sun
Aston Martin revealed a new one-of-one edition of the DB12 Volante called the Palm Beach Edition, meant to celebrate the eponymous area. The special edition is finished in an exclusive Frosted Glass Blue exterior paint that Aston Martin says requires hand-spraying to get the proper effect. The inside of the Palm Beach Edition makes repeated use of a palm-leaf motif, and the seatbacks and trim are finished in Linear Light Olive Ash wood. Toeing the line between tastefully displaying your wealth and looking like Jay Gatsby can be quite the challenging task, particularly when you're in South Florida and every other car on the block originates from Italy or Germany. There's a simple solution to avoiding any nouveau riche accusations—buy an Aston Martin. If it's classy enough for Bond, it's probably classy enough for you. To that end, Aston Martin just revealed the Palm Beach Edition DB12 Volante, a new one-of-one model designed to walk the tightrope between elegance and kitsch. The exterior is finished in an exclusive Frosted Glass Blue paint that mixes glass flakes in the topcoat to create a shimmer effect, which the brand says encapsulates the South Florida sun. The brand also says the effect is only possible by hand-spraying the paint onto the car. Aston Martin The cabin is made up of Aurora Blue and Ivory leather with Spicy Red contrasting stitching, but the showstopper is the Linear Light Olive Ash book-matched wood trim found on the dash, center console, doors, and seatbacks. Palm Beach's latitude and longitude coordinates are embossed onto the leather dashboard, and there's a palm-leaf motif scattered from the seats to the door sills. South Florida Celebration If the theme hasn't made itself clear yet, the one-of-one model was designed in collaboration between Aston Martin's Q division and Aston Martin Palm Beach, drawing on inspiration from the Palm Beach area. Aston Martin Aston Martin didn't mention anything about mechanical changes for the one-off car. That means the Palm Beach Edition likely comes with typical DB12 hardware. But even for South Florida, the DB12 is anything but typical, with a twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V-8 spitting out 671 horsepower and offering an estimated zero-to-60-mph time of 3.4 seconds for the Volante. As for pricing, the standard DB12 Volante starts at $271,825, but we expect the requisite cash for the Palm Beach Edition to be closer to $400K. Jack Fitzgerald Associate News Editor Jack Fitzgerald's love for cars stems from his as yet unshakable addiction to Formula 1. After a brief stint as a detailer for a local dealership group in college, he knew he needed a more permanent way to drive all the new cars he couldn't afford and decided to pursue a career in auto writing. By hounding his college professors at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he was able to travel Wisconsin seeking out stories in the auto world before landing his dream job at Car and Driver. His new goal is to delay the inevitable demise of his 2010 Volkswagen Golf. Read full bio
Los Angeles Times
16-05-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Revving engines, thrills and drama drive ‘Duster' and ‘Motorheads'
After humans, and arguably before dogs and horses, there is no character more vital to the screen, and more vital onscreen, than the automobile. Driven or driverless, the car is the most animated of inanimate objects, sometimes literally a cartoon, with a voice, a personality, a name. Even when not speaking, they purr, they roar. They are stars in their own right — the Batmobile, the Munster Koach, James Bond's Aston Martin DB5, K.I.T.T. (the modified 1982 Pontiac Trans Am from 'Knight Rider'), the Ford Grand Torino (nicknamed the Striped Tomato) driven by Starsky and Hutch. They might represent freedom, power, delinquency or even the devil. Whole movies have been built about them and the amazing things they can do, but even when they aren't jumping and flipping and crashing, they play an essential role in helping flesh-and-blood characters take care of business. Perhaps in some sort of reaction to our enlightened view of the effects of our gas-guzzling ways, two new series fetishizing the internal combustion engine arrive, Max's 'Duster,' now streaming, and Prime Video's 'Motorheads,' premiering Tuesday. Created by J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan and named for the supernaturally shiny cherry-red Plymouth the hero drives, 'Duster' is stupid fun, a comic melodrama steeped in 1970s exploitation flicks, with a lot of loving homage to period clothes, knickknacks and interior design. The driver is Jim Ellis, played by Josh Holloway, in what reads like a turn on Sawyer, his charming, criminal character from Abrams' 'Lost,' topped with a shot of Matthew McConaughey. Jim, a man who has never bothered to make a three-point turn, works out of Phoenix for Southwest crime boss Ezra Saxton (Keith David, monumental as always), picking up this, delivering that. The first delivery we see turns out to be a human heart, picked up from a fast-food drive-through window, destined for Saxton's ailing son, Royce (Benjamin Charles Watson). Along for the ride is little Luna (Adriana Aluna Martinez), who calls Jim 'uncle,' though you are free to speculate; her mother, Izzy (Camille Guaty), is a big-rig trucker — trucking being another fun feature of '70s pop culture — who will find cause to become a labor leader. The Ellises and the Saxtons, also including daughter Genesis (Sydney Elisabeth), have history — Jim's father, Wade (Corbin Bernson), served with Ezra in World War II, and his late lamented brother had worked for him as well. Saxton is the sort of bad guy with whom you somehow sympathize in spite of the violence he employs; there's genuine affection among the families, though one is never sure when or where a line will be drawn, only that one probably will be. Into Jim's low-rent but relatively settled, even happy world comes FBI agent Nina Hayes (Rachel Hilson, sparky), fresh out of Quantico and ambitious to make a mark. As a Black woman, she's told, 'No one's clamoring for an agent like you,' but she's been assigned to Phoenix 'because we have no other options.' She's partnered there with cheerful Navajo agent Awan (Asivak Koostachin), as if to corral the minorities into a manageable corner, and assigned the Saxton case, regarded as 'cursed' and so intractable as to be not worth touching. Which is to say, agents deemed not worth taking seriously — along with underestimated 'girl Friday' Jessica (Sofia Vassilieva) — have been thrown a case deemed not worth taking seriously. This is a classic premise for a procedural and strikes some notes about racism and sexism in the bargain, not out of tune with the times in which it's set, or the times in which we're watching. Nina, who has managed to gather evidence of Jim crossing state lines to deliver the heart, which was stolen, and that Saxton may have been responsible for his brother's death, bullies and tempts him into becoming a confidential informant. Thus begins an uneasy partnership, though their storylines run largely on separate tracks in separate scenes. 'Lost' was not a show that bothered much with sense in order to achieve its effects, and 'Duster,' though it involves a far-reaching conspiracy whose payoff plays like the end of a shaggy-dog story, is a show of effects, of set pieces and sequences, of car chases and fistfights, of left-field notions and characters. These include Patrick Warburton as an Elvis-obsessed mobster named Sunglasses; Donal Logue as a corrupt, perverse, evangelical policeman; Gail O'Grady as Jim's stepmother, a former showgirl who doesn't much like him; LSD experiments; absurd puzzles (also see: 'Lost'); an airheaded version of Adrienne Barbeau (Mikaela Hoover), with the actual Barbeau, a queen of genre films, making an appearance; Richard Nixon (in a few creepy seconds of AI); an oddly jolly Howard Hughes (Tom Nelis) in his Kleenex-box slippers; and a 'Roadrunner' pastiche. Though not devoid of genuine feeling, it's best experienced as a collection of attitudes and energies, noises and colors. Don't take it any more seriously than it takes itself. The opening titles are super cool. 'Motorheads' is a familiar sort of modern teenage soap opera but with cars. For reasons known only to series creator John A. Norris, the whole town is obsessed with them, and along with its human storylines, the series is a tour of automotive entertainments — drag racing, street racing, ATV racing, go-kart racing, classic car collecting. I have no idea whether this will resonate with the target demographic, but there is much I cannot tell you about kids these days. As is common to the form, our young protagonists — Michael Cimino as Zac and Melissa Collazo as Caitlyn — are new to town, having been brought back from New York City by their mother, Samantha (Nathalie Kelly), to the oxymoronically named Rust Belt hamlet of Ironwood, where she was raised, and which is the last place anyone saw their father, Christian (Deacon Phillippe in flashbacks), 17 years earlier. He's an infamous local legend, admired for his skill behind the wheel; aerial footage of Christian threading his way through a cordon of police cars as the getaway driver in a robbery keeps making its way into the show, though if you live in Los Angeles, you see this sort of thing on the news all the time. Marquee name Ryan Phillippe plays the kids' Uncle Logan, who runs a garage that apparently does no business, but he has love and wisdom to spare. Though at the center of the series, Zac's storyline is a little shopworn, not just his wish to become, almost out of nowhere, Ironwood's top speed racer, but his textbook interest in rich girl Alicia (Mia Healey), the girlfriend of rich boy Harris (Josh Macqueen), a Porsche-driving bully who is also hurting inside — so feel free to get a crush on him, if that's your type. More interesting is sister Caitlyn, who prefers building cars to racing them and is perhaps the series' most emotionally balanced character. She becomes friends with shop classmate Curtis (Uriah Shelton), tall and good-looking, whose criminally inclined older brother, Ray (Drake Rodger), will become a sort of dark mentor to Zac. With the addition of Marcel (Nicolas Cantu), the archetypal 'geek who becomes the hero's best friend,' who works at the diner his father (grieving, drunk) used to own and dreams of designing cars, the four constitute the show's outsider band of good guys. They'll have their not-always-happy business with each other — being teenagers, you know, things happen — and with their elders, as their elders will with one another. The past is not past in Ironwood; old feelings will resurface and old plots unravel. (And no one knows what happened to Christian.) Except for the cars sprinkled on top, it's old stuff, not very deep, but produced with an engaging naturalism that rounds off the narrative extremes, enhances what's commonplace and makes 'Motorheads' easy to watch. (Colin Hoult is the sensitive director of photography, it's worth mentioning.) Drive on.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Yahoo
Ultra-Rare 2021 Aston Martin Vantage 007 Edition – 1 of 100 Worldwide
⚡️ Read the full article on Motorious A true collector's gem is now on offer: a 2021 Aston Martin Vantage 007 Edition, one of only 100 examples produced globally, celebrating the enduring legacy between Aston Martin and James Bond. Finished in Cumberland Gray with a black Q-Spec interior, this meticulously maintained coupe combines British performance with cinematic heritage. Recently serviced at Aston Martin Orlando and showing a clean CARFAX, this limited-edition Vantage features an 8-speed automatic transmission, two keys, and exclusive design elements that set it apart even within the brand's prestigious lineup. Built as a tribute to the Bond film The Living Daylights, the 007 Edition Vantage includes an array of bespoke details: Carbon fiber seatbacks etched with cello 'f-hole' cutouts, referencing the film's iconic cello chase scene. Embroidered sun visors with the radio frequency '96.60 FM,' used in Bond's Aston Martin during the movie. A laser-etched gadget plaque in the center console, inspired by Q Branch's imaginative vehicle upgrades. Yellow livery accents along the side skirts and rear diffuser for a subtle, stealthy contrast to the Cumberland Gray finish. A black mesh grille up front, adding aggression to the Vantage's already potent styling. Beyond the unique visual treatments, the car retains all the driving dynamics that make the Vantage a standout—razor-sharp handling, twin-turbo V8 performance, and Aston Martin's unmistakable road presence. This Vantage 007 Edition isn't just a luxury sports car—it's a cinematic tribute, a collector's showpiece, and a thrilling drive all in one package.
