In 1989, at a storage facility in Holbrook, Long Island, a New Yorker paid less than $100 at a public lien auction and unknowingly stepped into one of the strangest pop-culture windfalls of the modern era. This was not a curated auction with catalogs and estimates. It was a blind storage-unit sale, the kind designed to clear abandoned units and recover unpaid rent, where bidders buy everything as-is with little to no idea of what sits inside. The unit in question had reportedly been prepaid for nearly ten years before the payments stopped, and it quietly slipped into delinquency.
When the buyer opened the unit later, the scene was underwhelming. Beneath blankets sat a white sports car-shaped object with no wheels, visible dents, and damage to the roof, as reported by ABCNews. It was not drivable. It did not look valuable. Early descriptions made it sound closer to scrap than treasure. The buyer, often described as a Long Island contractor or a working-class couple, did not recognize what they had bought and initially had no sense of its significance.
That object traced its origins back to the late 1970s, when a Lotus Esprit S1 became one of cinema’s most outrageous gadgets. For the 1977 Bond film, one version of the Esprit was converted into a fully functioning underwater vehicle built specifically for submerged filming. It was never meant to be a road car. It was a submarine shaped like a car, designed to sell a fantasy rather than practicality. After filming, the vehicle went on a promotional tour at auto shows before ending up in storage on Long Island, where it would be forgotten for years.
By 1989, the storage unit was auctioned blind. The buyer did not know what was inside. The car was hidden under blankets, missing wheels, and visibly damaged. Only later did clues emerge. Passing truckers reportedly recognized the shape. The buyer rented the Bond movie on VHS. Eventually, the car’s identity was confirmed and authenticated, cementing it as the real underwater “Wet Nelly” used for filming.
The long arc reached its public climax in September 2013, when the submarine car crossed the block at a London auction by RM Sotheby’s. The hammer price was £550,000, rising to roughly £616,000 once fees were added. At the time, the buyer’s name was not disclosed, preserving the mystique for just a little longer.
The reveal came the following month. The buyer was Elon Musk, who had paid close to $1 million for the Bond submarine. His reaction reframed the entire story. Musk spoke openly about watching the film as a child, about being disappointed to learn the transformation was only movie magic, and about wanting to make it real. He discussed upgrading the vehicle with an electric powertrain and attempting to transform a cinematic illusion into a functioning machine. It was a rare case where a collector purchase was presented not as nostalgia, but as an engineering challenge.
The purchase also fit neatly into a larger pattern. Tesla’s earliest halo product, the original Roadster, was rooted in Lotus engineering. Musk buying the most famous Lotus ever to appear on screen felt less like a coincidence and more like an obsession, completing a loop.
That obsession quietly leaked into Tesla itself. A couple of years later, owners discovered a hidden “007” Easter egg in the Model S. Activate it, and the on-screen car graphic transforms into the Bond submarine, complete with a depth gag in the suspension menu. It does nothing mechanically, but it does have a cultural impact. It turns a forgotten storage-unit oddity into a living piece of Tesla lore.
A blind $100 purchase became a million-dollar Bond artifact, then a billionaire’s personal engineering thought experiment, and finally a playful software joke embedded in thousands of electric cars. Few stories capture chance, obsession, and pop culture quite as cleanly. One mystery crate held more than a car. It held a feedback loop between fantasy and reality that is still echoing today.
