Feature: Largest ever James Bond car exhibition takes place in London

No James Bond movie would be complete without at least one fast car packed with gadgets.

Bond cars in Spectre, the new film in the franchise, have joined about 40 other cars and vehicles from previous Bond films at the "Bond in Motion" exhibition in London's Covent Garden district.

"The collection is the largest official collection of James Bond vehicles and the majority of them come from the Eon Archive (the Bond franchise production company). The collection is over 50 years old," said Jonathan Sands, founder and chief executive of the London Film Museum.

"We cover all 24 Bond films, and for the first time we have been able to work with the production of a film as it was being filmed," he added.

Every film in the Bond series is represented, whether it is with a prop, model, art work, storyboard or full-size vehicle, now brought fully up to date with five vehicles from the latest film.

The vehicles from Spectre joined the permanent exhibition of vehicles from the other Bond movies this week, and the most striking is a specially built half-car of Bond's Aston Martin DB10 sports car, complete with an ejector seat.

"This is the stunt rig where Bond ejects out of the car," said Sands.

The stunt rig contains only those elements necessary for filming, so the front of the car is missing. But the interior is perfectly detailed including the ejector button, sliding roof and ejector seat.

For external shots, Aston Martin completed a limited production run of DB10s. One is on show in the exhibition.

"They made 10 vehicles only for use in the film," said Sands.

Multiple vehicles were necessary for filming to go ahead on widely separate locations. For instance, the car on display in the exhibition was used in a car chase sequence filmed in Rome.

Other vehicles on show from the film include a vintage Rolls-Royce, a Jaguar sports car which is wrecked in the film, and a Land Rover, which features in a fall down a mountain on screen.

"This vehicle really is the stunt vehicle. It turns over as it comes down the mountain, and its lights get knocked off," said Sands.

The connection between Bond and vehicles has been part of the film franchise since the first film Dr. No in 1962, which featured a car chase involving a hearse.

Sands said the use of vehicles owed a lot to the artistic vision of two cinema professionals involved in the first of the Bond films.

Ken Adam and Syd Cain, the original Bond film production designer and art director, were highly influential and have had on the films over the past 50 years.

"They had visions of cars that flew or cars that went under water and because of those visions that a lot of the contemporary Bond adventures are happening today," he said. Endit