Most Iconic Cars From History

Few cars have captured the movie-going public’s imagination like the Aston Martin DB5 in the James Bond film “Goldfinger.” It was equipped with machine guns, an ejector seat, revolving license plates, and a smokescreen generator. The Aston Martin made such an impression on the public that subsequent models were featured in half of the 24 Bond films. The original Aston Martin was sold at auction in 2010 for $4.6 million.

The car that make skipping school worth the effort in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Car enthusiasts breathed a sigh of relief when it was noted that the vehicle destroyed was a replica of the 1961 Ferrari 250 GT, which cost $300,000 at the time.

The king of cool, Steve McQueen, authored one of the most famous car chases in movie history while driving a Ford Mustang GT, whose posters adorned the walls of kids’ room all over America in the 1970s. The Mustang GT was so popular that Ford made a limited edition of this version twice. The vehicle from the movie was displayed at the fourth annual Cars at the Capital event in Washington, D.C. last year.

Introduced in the United States in 1949 the VW Beetle became famous in the movie “The Love Bug” as Herbie, a car with a mind of its own that turns a down-on-his luck race-car driver (Dean Jones) into a winner. Walt Disney Studios constructed 11 cars for the original film, and just three exist today.

The 1948 Tucker Sedan and its creator were the subjects of the movie “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” directed by Francis Ford Coppola about entrepreneur Preston Tucker, who took on the Big Three Detroit automobile makers with an innovative vehicle called the “Car of Tomorrow.” It had four-speed manual, electronic pre-select transmission, pop-out safety glass windshield, and padded dashboard and doors, among other features. The company was sunk by allegations of fraud, and only 51 cars were ever made. Coppola used 21 of them in the film.

In the movie “The Italian Job,” three Mini Coopers make off with a stash of gold and are pursued by the police through traffic in Turin, Italy, in an unlikely chase that takes them past some of the city’s most famous buildings and landmarks, through sidewalk cafes, and down subway tunnels. David Bowie and John Lennon owned this auto icon from the 1960s.

Henry Ford’s assembly line concept revolutionized industrial production the world. Ford produced 15 million Model T’s, or “Tin Lizzie.” The car was cheap and simple to make. It democratized driving for Americans and changed the course of automotive history. At one point in the early 1920s, about half of the world’s cars were Ford Model T’s.

James Dean’s flashy race car gained notoriety when it collided with another car in an accident that killed the brooding movie heartthrob in 1955. British actor Alec Guinness said in a BBC interview in 1977 that he warned Dean a week prior to the accident that if he drove the Spyder, he would be killed. For several years afterward, the wreck was shown around the nation as part of a display on driver safety. People still visit the crash site and leave various tributes.

This is the car that Depression-era outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow rode into a fatal ambush in 1934. The bullet-pocked car was emblematic of a bygone era of bank robbers and became a hot collectors item. It was passed from owner to owner for years before finally ending up in a casino. Bonnie and Clyde, folk heroes for the downtrodden, would later be portrayed in the 1967 motion picture “Bonnie and Clyde.”

The car, named after the son of company founder Henry Ford, was launched with the help of celebrities Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong. Despite the star power, the Edsel failed to excite the public because of its odd styling and became a punchline for comedians and situation-comedy television shows in the 1960s. Only 116,000 Edsels were built by 1960, not enough for Ford to recoup its investment.

The 1911 Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton carried doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie as they were assassinated while on a state visit to Serbia. The assassination triggered a chain of events that led to World War I. The car is permanently displayed in the Museum of Military History in Vienna, Austria.

The Chevrolet Corvair became iconic for the wrong reason. It was the subject of Ralph Nader’s groundbreaking consumer safety book “Unsafe at Any Speed.” The first chapter focused on the 1960-63 rear-engine Chevrolet Corvair compact. Nader maintained that the car had a defect in its suspension that caused the driver to lose control and possibly roll over. Fans of the Corvair disputed that allegation. General Motors, however, made changes to the suspension beginning with the 1965 model.

Gail and Tom Wise may have made history as the first to purchase a Ford Mustang — on April 15, 1964, two days before legendary Ford executive Lee Iacocca unveiled the vehicle at the New York World’s Fair. The Mustang would go on to become one of the most successful car launches in automobile history and be associated with the mobile youth culture of the 1960s.

Dictator Adolf Hitler ordered several of the massive, armored-plated vehicles (Hitler always feared assassination) to drive around the Third Reich. Amazingly, almost all of them survived to this day. Hitler’s vehicles are on display in museums in Canada and Germany, while others are in the hands of private owners.

The 1985 film “Back to the Future” is remembered for the DeLorean DMC-12, a stainless steel attention-grabber with gullwing doors designed by iconic car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro. It proved to be a disappointment commercially, however. Through certain modifications by zany scientist Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd), such as the flux capacitor, the car had enough juice to transport Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) back to 1955.

Mercedes-Benz W140 bears the weight of tragedy. Diana, Princess of Wales, one of the world’s most beloved people, and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, along with their driver, died when the car crashed in Paris in 1997 while they were pursued by paparazzi. The wreck disappeared almost immediately after the accident and was discreetly disposed of.

Another car that takes its place in infamy is the 1961 Ford Lincoln convertible that carried President John F. Kennedy and his wife the day he was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. After the assassination, the Lincoln was turned into a hard top from a convertible and underwent other changes that made it look different than it did in Dallas. The car would transport four other presidents before it was retired in 1977. It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

The custom-made 1928 Cadillac Town Sedan was built for America’s most notorious gangster Al Capone. The massive vehicle was bulletproof with 1-inch thick glass windows and steel-plate armor on side doors. It also had a police siren mounted under the hood and a police radio in the glove compartment. After going through a succession of owners, the Cadillac was sold at auction for $341,000 in 2012.

This 1972 Ford Lincoln Continental was at the scene of two attempted assassinations on U.S. presidents. The first came in 1975, when a would-be assassin fired several shots at President Gerald Ford. The second, more well-known incident occurred in 1981, when a newly-elected Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. Reagan and three others were hit by gunfire, but all survived.

Grace Kelly was one of the biggest movie stars of the 1950s before marrying into Monaco’s royal house of Grimaldi in 1956 and becoming Princess Grace. She died after suffering a stroke while driving her Porsche Rover P6 3500 along the curving roads of the principality on the Mediterranean coast in 1982. The vehicle was reportedly crushed and dropped into the Mediterranean Sea.

The film career of blonde bombshell actress Jayne Mansfield was cut short when the 1966 Buick Electra 225 she was involved in an accident in 1967, near Slidell, Louisiana. Mansfield, her driver, and her boyfriend were killed, but her three children sleeping in the back, including future actress Mariska Hargitay, survived. The wreck was displayed at a museum in St. Augustine, Florida, until the museum’s closing in 1998. The remains of the car were rumored to have been bought by a fan of Mansfield’s.

Jamaican reggae singer-songwriter and guitarist Bob Marley owned a BMW, not for prestige — material things did not matter much to Marley — but because the BMW initials coincided with Bob Marley and the Wailers.

The GT40 in 1966 became the first American-constructed car to win the 24-hours of Le Mans endurance car race in France.

Rapper Notorious B.I.G. was assassinated in a drive-by shooting in 1997 in Los Angeles while riding in a 1997 GMC Suburban. The crime remains unsolved. The vehicle was put up for auction in 2018 for $750,000 by Gary Zimet, who founded Moments In Time, which sells historic artifacts.

The 1996 BMW 750IL became associated with tragedy after rapper Tupac Shakur died in 1996 from gunshot wounds he sustained while riding in the vehicle in Las Vegas, Nevada. Historic artifacts seller Gary Zimet put up the car for auction for $1.5 million in 2018.

The 1969 Dodge Charger, also known as General Lee, with the Confederate flag painted on its roof, was one of television’s iconic cars of the 1970s, starring on the TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Because of the hazards involving chase scenes, many models of the Dodge Charger were wrecked during filming.