The $100 storage unit that unearthed a $1million piece of ‘James Bond’ history
Anyone who has ever watched Storage Wars has occasionally thought, “I wonder what kind of treasures I could unearth from an old storage unit?”
Few of us actually bite the bullet and shell out the cash for any of these abandoned wonders, because we’re afraid all we’ll find is a heap of unsellable junk, covered in cobwebs, that the owner couldn’t be bothered to claim. Fortune favours the brave, though, and it can’t be denied that truly incredible things have been discovered in these dusty old units, such as when an unsuspecting couple found a piece of James Bond history worth nearly $1million.
This crazy tale goes back to 1989, when a building contractor and his wife in Long Island, New York, took a chance on a unit whose ten-year lease had long expired. When no one arrived to claim it, Sotheby’s auctioned off the mysterious unit, with the couple, who chose to remain anonymous, paying the princely sum of 100 bucks for it. When they entered the unit, which no one at the auction company had opened, they found something curious hidden under a pile of blankets.
To the couple, it seemed like they were looking at a car, but it wasn’t like any car they’d ever seen before. Even though it was badly dented and was up on blocks because the wheels had been removed, it boasted an angular design, blacked-out windows, and, most bizarrely, four white fins over the front and back wheel axles. Strangest of all were the bank of propellers at the back of the vehicle. What kind of crazy contraption was this?
It was only when the couple organised to have the vehicle moved from the unit to their home that they realised what they truly had in their possession. As they drove from Holbrook to Long Island, they heard the truckers they’d hired to transport the vehicle talking about the “James Bond submarine car”.
Preposterously, neither of them had ever watched a Bond movie, so when they got home, they asked the truckers to give them the skinny. It turned out they had unsuspectingly bought ‘Wet Nellie’, the iconic Lotus Esprit that transforms into a submarine in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me—a vehicle that had cost the production $100,000 to craft.
Suddenly, the couple realised they had a potential goldmine on their hands, and they poured money into restoring the vehicle to its former glory, including fixing the dents and damage to the roof. After that, they displayed it in several exhibits over the years, including at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Then, in 2013, they decided they were finally ready to cash in on ‘Wet Nellie’, so they returned to Sotheby’s to organise an auction.
To their amazement, the vehicle they’d accidentally purchased for $100 in 1989 wound up selling at auction for a staggering $997,000. Who was the die-hard Bond fan with the passion and funds to drop just shy of $1million on a stunt vehicle from a movie released 36 years earlier, though? None other than Elon Musk.
“It was amazing as a little kid in South Africa to watch James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me drive his Lotus Esprit off a pier, press a button and have it transform into a submarine underwater,” the undeniably odd and problematic Tesla founder waxed lyrical in an official statement.
However, Musk, being a tech guy, revealed that he also had a motive beyond simple Bond fandom for buying ‘Wet Nellie’. He had been bitterly disappointed as a child when he found out the Esprit didn’t actually transform into a working submarine, and that Hollywood smoke and mirrors were used to fool his little eyes. Instead, the movie was shot with eight different versions of the car, and only this one was used for underwater sequences. A US Navy Seal piloted it in scuba gear and with a full tank of oxygen, as the vehicle’s interior was filled with water the entire time.
Musk revealed that he planned to upgrade the vehicle with “a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real”, but only four years later, he’d given up on that pipe dream. “Will keep the original Bond Lotus sub as-is,” he tweeted in May 2017. “That design can’t actually convert from car to sub”. Presumably, the couple weren’t keen on giving him a refund.
