James Bond drove a Jensen CV8 – NOT an Aston Martin DB5

When Sean Connery decided to treat himself to a new car after finishing You Only Live Twice, he chose a Jensen CV8, not an Aston Martin DB5. And now it’s up for sale.

When you think of James Bond and cars, you usually think of of the Aston Martin DB5, shortly followed by a mental picture of Sean Connery standing by it. 

So you might have expected, when Sean Connery made a few bob, that he’d pull a few strings and get AML to do him a deal on a DB5 of his own. But he didn’t.

Fresh from filming You Only Live Twice – his fifth outing as James Bond – Connery happened upon a green Jensen CV8 in the showrooms of Jensen dealers Charles Follett in Mayfair and fell in love.

Connery, a canny Scotsman, chose to grab the secondhand CV8 rather than a nice shiny new one, and plonked down around £2k to take ownership (around half its new cost), a similar amount to the cost (then) of an equivalent DB5.

Connery didn’t keep the car that long, although in the time he had it it did feature heavily in the only film he ever directed – The Bowler And The Bunnet – and after he sold it the CV8 went through a variety of owners until it ended up with the Jensen Museum in 2014.

Now, after a chunk of sympathetic restoration, the Sean Connery Jensen CV8 is up for sale, and the Jensen Museum are looking for £135,000 for their ‘James Bond’ car.

By comparison, if this had been a DB5 once owned by Connery, you could at least add a nought (and more) to the end of that price – regardless of condition – and a DB5 Continuation will cost you £3.3 million.

Seems like a bargain.