Vintage Cars

Lotus's Wild Wedge of a Car Could Be Your Next Best Investment

Resale prices are trending up.

The white 1976 Lotus Esprit car from the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me

Photographer: Oli Scarff/Getty Images Europe

Quick: What do Sharon Stone, Richard Gere, and Roger Moore have in common? Answer: They each drove a Lotus Esprit in a blockbuster Hollywood movie.

The sexy British wedge won generations of admirers in Basic Instinct, Pretty Woman, and, especially, in Moore’s The Spy Who Loved Me, when James Bond drove a white Lotus Esprit Series 1 in an epic chase along the Sardinian coast and then transformed it into a torpedo-firing submarine when he took it underwater.