He certainly seemed to forget the surface-to-air missile that Bond later uses to take down a helicopter, though the titanium armour didn’t do much to stop a second chopper using a dangly rotary chainsaw to cut the Z8 in half. In Secret Service Q spec, it apparently had titanium armour, a head-up display and “six beverage holders”, though Q’s assistant – played in this case by John Cleese – didn’t mention much else. It was a gorgeous retro-styled thing, and certainly had the go to match the show, powered as it was by the E39 M5’s V8 and good for 400bhp, 370lb ft of torque and a sprint time to 62mph of well under five seconds – enough to out-drag baddie Renard’s henchpersons.
In case you’ve forgotten, the Z8 was a svelte two-seat RWD roadster that BMW produced in the late Nineties until 2003 by a team led by Chris Bangle, with the exterior design by a certain Henrik Fisker (he of the Karma, DB9 and V8 Vantage).
One of those moments where you wince slightly at the galumphing product placement, but when the Z8 appeared in 1999’s The World Is Not Enough, at least the car was fit for Bond.
