While far from my favorite installment in the franchise, there’s no doubt that the most iconic James Bond film is 1964’s “Goldfinger.” The third film in the series saw Sean Connery’s Bond going after villain Auric Goldfinger, a gold magnate that wants to infiltrate Fort Knox. It’s well known for introducing Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, but even cooler is Goldfinger’s 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville, which inspired a new one-off Phantom VIII that was commissioned by a customer in celebration of the movie’s 60th anniversary.
Rolls-Royce says this special new Phantom took three years of continuous development to complete, and it has “some of the most extensively engineered Bespoke features” ever put into a Rolls-Royce. It all starts with the “long-side” two-tone paint job that’s a new layout for Rolls. The company precisely matched the yellow of the original movie car, which uninterruptedly wraps around the black body with a subtle pinstripe surrounding it. Awesome polished 21-inch disc wheels have black centers that make them appear to float, a similar look to the old car’s hubcaps and white wall tires.
The Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament has been offered in lots of different finishes for years now, from solid gold or rose gold to illuminated crystal and carbon fiber, but this Goldfinger Phantom has a finish that’s never been done before. Inspired by how Goldfinger used his car to smuggle gold in the film, the new car’s Spirit of Ecstasy is made from solid silver with hand-plated 18-carat gold sections that are revealed depending on the light and how you view the ornament. It looks truly spectacular.
Nearly every bit of the interior is covered in Navy leather, which is nicely offset by Royal Walnut veneers. The leather has gold stitching, gold double-R headrest monograms and gold-colored metal “bullets” that cap the ends of the seat piping. All of the air vents, organ stops and speaker grilles have a “lustrous” gold finish, with the speakers engraved with the movie title in the correct font. The gold-plated three-dimensional treadplates are meant to look like gold bars and are also embossed with the film title, and the VIN plaque is gold-plated. Rolls made sure the car’s VIN ends with 007, of course.
A hidden vault in the center console houses a solid 18-carat gold bar that has been shaped into a speedform of the Phantom, designer speak for a small scale model that’s a stylized version of the car’s shape used to determine how different paint colors and light conditions look on the design. The vault is illuminated to show off the speedform, and the insides of the center consoles and glovebox are lined with a gold finish. The glovebox is debossed with a quote from early on in the movie, when Goldfinger tells Bond, “This is Gold, Mr. Bond. All my life, I l have been in love with its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness.”
One of the coolest features of the Phantom VIII is the Gallery that runs the width of the upper dashboard, in which customers can commission all sorts of different works of art. In this Goldfinger tribute, it has a hand-drawn three-dimensional isoline map of the Furka Pass in the Swiss Alps, where Bond tails Goldfinger to his gold smelting plant. This artwork is made from stainless steel that was darkened by physical vapour deposition, and the terrain and elevation lines are engraved into the dark substrate to reveal the brighter metal beneath. The Furka Pass road is cut out from the steel, exposing a gilded gold surface. To create the piece, Rolls-Royce developed ten prototypes over years of “painstaking” development. The clock surround in the Gallery is designed after the gun barrel intro that has been used in every single Bond movie.
Each Royal Walnut picnic table in the rear has a 22-carat gold inlay that’s a tenth of a millimeter thick, showing a fictional map of Fort Knox from the film. These took six months and required three prototypes to develop, and they highlight different locations from the movie’s plot. The starlight headliner depicts the night sky as it looked above the Furka Pass on the last day of filming on July 11, 1964, made of 719 stars that glow a subtle gold and are accompanied by eight shooting stars.
The Phantom has some special accessories, too. The classic Rolls-Royce umbrellas that slot into the doors are the same colors as Goldfinger’s umbrella in the movie — blue, green, red and yellow. Bond places a tracking device on Goldfinger’s Phantom in the film, so Rolls’ Bespoke division created a device that projects the 007 logo onto the carpet whenever the trunk is opened. Also mounted in the trunk is a gold-platted putter golf club, a recreation of the one used by Goldfinger and guarded by his henchman Oddjob, which has an “AG” engraving like the one on Goldfinger’s signet ring. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like Rolls made a killer hat like the one worn by Oddjob.
For one last special touch, Rolls-Royce acquired the AU 1 license plate — a nod to the chemical symbol for gold — that was used by the Phantom III in the movie. The new Phantom is now registered with that plate, having been delivered to a “significant” client and collector in England. As for the price? Well, if you have to ask… I hope the buyer paid for this thing in gold bars, at least.
