This Aston Martin for children might cost more than your real car
By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN Business
For kids interested in practicing their spycraft, Aston Martin is offering the perfect tool. It’s a battery-powered Aston Martin DB5, small enough for children to drive, and complete with various James Bond-style gadgets one could use to evade capture. It even goes pretty fast.
Produced by The Little Car Company, which also made a tiny Bugatti Type 35, the No Time to Die special edition Aston Martin DB5 Junior is two-thirds the size of the car used in the movies. Also, unlike the car in the movie, this small DB5 has no roof, allowing larger children or even adults to sit int.
Only 125 of these pint-sized cars will be made. The price? About $123,000 each. The Little Car Company was already producing a diminutive Aston Martin DB5, but this Bond version includes a number of added features. Among other things, toy machine guns come out of the front of the car as the headlights retract. Instead of the rotating license plate seen on the original Bond car, which could display plates from different countries, this edition has a digital license plate that does that. It also has a “smokescreen” device that pumps dark smoke through “exhaust pipes.”
The mini Bond car also has a lot more power than Little Car’s original DB5. The company’s standard DB5 model produces just 6.5 horsepower. The Bond version’s electric motor can produce up to 21.5 horsepower, and has a top speed that is estimated to be between 45 and 50 miles per hour. The car also has various drive modes, some of which have lower top speeds for younger drivers. The miniature car is not legal to drive on public roads, but owners will be invited to participate in special driving events at race tracks, according to Aston Martin.
Since the car has no roof and can fit an adult, it’s expected that adults will often drive it, or ride along when children are at the wheel.
“We’d encourage parents to ensure their kids wear a helmet and that kids are supervised while driving,” said Aston Martin spokesman Nathan Hoyt.
The Little Car Company went to great lengths to reproduce the DB5 in small scale, as accurately as possible. An original DB5 was 3-D-scanned for reference. Some of the dashboard gauges were changed for the new role in an electric car. The fuel gauge was changed to a battery meter, for example, and the oil temperature gauge shows the temperature of the electric motor.
The “real”James Bond Aston Martin DB5 first appeared in the 1964 movie Goldfinger. A later version, made to promote a subsequent Bond film, Thunderball, sold at auction for $6.4 million in 2019. This junior version is being released to promote the next film in the long-running series, No Time To Die.
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