Sir Roger Moore’s best car moments

At age 89, Sir Roger Moore has passed away after decades of bringing charm and excitement to cinemas and screens.

Best known as the second major James Bond after Sean Connery, Moore’s Bond took on car chases far wackier than we remembered.

Today, we chose a couple of Moore’s best (and weirdest) moments behind the wheel on film.

It’s worth starting at the beginning, so we decided that Sir Roger’s stint as Simon Templar in The Saint is a good place to do that.

Though it wasn’t his first role, it’s the earliest well-known one, and we can’t let his time steering a gorgeous Volvo P1800 go unmentioned.

The car is luxury, performance, and reliability all at once, and made a perfect counterpart to the suave spy who probably launched a great actor into the spotlight.

At this point it’s also worth mentioning that Moore was seen in an Aston before he became Bond, in the very short lived series The Persuaders.

A year later in 1973, he became Bond in Live and Let Die, before going on to star in The Man with the Golden Gun.

The former featured a bus chase. Yes, you read that correctly. A double decker bus chase.

It was around this time that the Bond films started to get cheesy, after the (usually) fairly straight forward storylines and action embarked upon by Connery’s Bond.

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Which brings us to…

Though it was let down by the slide whistle soundtrack, the AMC Hornet corkscrew jump from that film cemented Moore’s place as Bond.

It wasn’t an Aston, a BMW, or even a particularly exotic car at all, but if Moore could make an AMC look that cool, he could do anything.

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Like drive a Lotus Esprit underwater. He did that, too.

Though the underwater scenes were mostly shot with a miniature replica, and the car was later destroyed, the submarine Esprit known as “Wet Nellie’ is iconic.

Since Bond is part of the reason a lot of us are so passionate about cars, it seems only fair we pay our respects to one of the greats.

Here’s to you, Sir Roger Moore.