Ford is making the most of its product-placement opportunities with James Bond movies by featuring the five-door version of the new European Mondeo in Eon Productions’ ‘Casino Royale’, which opens on 17 November.
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Cinema goers will be the first to see the model in action at the hands of the new James Bond, British actor Daniel Craig.
Although Aston Martin – previously placed in Bond movies along with other Ford models such as the Thunderbird – remains Bond’s brand of choice, the new Mondeo is the first car to appear in the film as the star uses it – rented from Hertz, we wonder – to drive to a hotel after arriving in the Bahamas on the trail of a terrorist cell.
Noted Stephen Odell, Ford of Europe’s vice president for marketing sales and service: “As part of [our] significant relationship with Bond, the producers wanted a very special vehicle for this short, early sequence in [the movie], and we decided this was a great opportunity to showcase the exciting new Mondeo shortly after the global reveal of a preview [wagon] model at the 2006 Paris motor show.”
The film car is a specially-built five-door example with sports bodykit and finished in a production colour called Tonic blue. The car was built by hand at Ford Europe’s design studio in Cologne, Germany, in January 2006 and shipped secretly to the Bahamas, where the short driving sequence was filmed.
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By GlobalData“The new Mondeo was essentially still on the drawing board when we were asked to supply the vehicle for filming in February 2006,” said Martin Smith, Ford of Europe’s executive director for design. “As volume production for the car doesn’t start until the second quarter of 2007, we had to create a one-off, driveable model based around a design studio property.”
The Cologne team worked night and day for several weeks to complete the car and make it driveable.
“This team normally builds the clay and fibreglass models of all of our future products, so they are used to demanding timeframes and making full-scale models look like real vehicles,” Smith added.
In addition to its cameo role in the new film, James Bond’s Mondeo will also feature in a specially made pan-European Ford television commercial inviting viewers to ‘discover the secret world of 007’ and showing footage of the car in action in the Bahamas.
This is not the first time that a new Ford Europe model has been previewed in a Bond film before the car itself has gone on sale.
In 1976, as Ford was about to launch its then-new Taunus-Cortina model, the company provided a pre-production vehicle for a brief appearance in “The Spy Who Loved Me”. In the sequence filmed on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda, Bond is chased by the Taunus-Cortina which eventually careers off the mountain road and through the roof of a cottage.
Casino Royale, the 21st James Bond film, began filming on 30 January in the Czech Republic. It is based on Ian Fleming’s first novel to feature the secret agent, which was published in 1953.
