James Bond has always had impeccable taste in cars. In Ian Fleming’s novels, he drove a Bentley. The films made Aston Martin iconic. The 1970s flirted with Lotus, and the 1990s handed him the keys to BMW. What remained consistent wasn’t the badge; it was the idea that Bond always drove something aspirational, cutting-edge, and slightly ahead of its time. What it has never been, until now, is Chinese. BYD is changing that with the Denza Z9 GT, a high-performance luxury EV launching in Europe in April, and the company is betting that Daniel Craig’s face will do the heavy lifting in making Europeans take it seriously.
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Bond Cars Are Always Exceptional
When BMW put Pierce Brosnan’s Bond in a Z3 and later a Z8, it was seen as a commercial pivot rather than a purist choice. In hindsight, it was an early example of the franchise aligning itself with whoever best represented the future of the car industry at that moment. Daniel Craig played Bond across five films, from Casino Royale in 2006 right through to No Time to Die in 2021. During that run, he was closely associated with Aston Martin, driving the timeless DB5, the DBS, the Vantage, and the DB10, a car built almost exclusively for the film. That relationship between Bond and Aston Martin ran so deep that it became shorthand for a certain kind of aspirational British luxury. By recruiting Craig for its newest and most advanced electric vehicle, BYD is sending a very deliberate signal.
The Denza Z9 GT itself is legitimately impressive on paper. Three electric motors producing a combined 960 horsepower, a 0-62 mph time of under 3 seconds, and a claimed range of 497 miles from a 122 kWh Blade Battery 2.0. BYD’s new Flash Charging technology can take the battery from 10 per cent to 70 per cent in five minutes flat, and on to a full charge in a total of nine minutes. On paper, the Denza Z9 GT has the kind of numbers and the trick crab walk feature that would have once been reserved for Q Branch fiction.
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The Irony Worth Sitting With
Craig’s Bond was always less about fantasy gadgets and more about realism and brute effectiveness. That makes him an unusually fitting ambassador for an EV that is selling itself not on romance, but on sheer technical dominance. Not long ago, a “Bond car from a Chinese EV maker” would have sounded like a punchline. But Bond has always been about power, innovation, and whoever defines the cutting edge at a given moment. Right now, BYD is making a case that it deserves that role.
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