Bitten by the Bond Bug? Design icon from the orange decade on sale at Bilweb Auctions

”One of the strangest cars ever built in England”, wrote The Telegraph about the Bond Bug.
And that is, of course, the reason to want it. Now there is an opportunity to get one of the few existing in Sweden - at Bilweb Auctions.
 
First of all: the Bond Bug has absolutely nothing to do with James Bond. The first Bond Minicars was produced already back in 1949, a three-wheeler with a single cylinder two-stroke engine. Bond also made a traditional sports car, the Equipe in the Sixties, but never gave up its three-wheeler focus.
 
In 1970 the Bond Bug arrived, a car that became a fashion accessory in the early Seventies in England. Fiercely orange with black stripes, a wedged body in glass fibre, square frog eyed headlamps, a lift-up canopy with side screens and windscreen in one piece, twin seats… and wonderfully crazy.
 
Nobody had seen anything like it - and that was the whole point: it should turn everybody’s heads when it drove by.
 
”It looks like a space capsule, works like a car, but is classified as a bike” wrote a bewildered Swedish car magazine, Teknikens Varld, when they drove the Bug in 1972.
 
And it was definitely not a toy: top speed was 122 km/h, faster than a Mini, even if it took quite some courage to find out if the figure was correct. The engine, place between the legs of the two passengers, was a  700 cc (later 750 cc) 4-cylinder from Austin working together with a 4speed manual gearbox.
 
Back to the Seventies: in the summer of 1974 an elderly couple in Halmstad, Sweden, walked into one of the city’s  bike shops and bought a Bond Bug. They were definitely not a part of the target group for this cool, youthful vehicle, but they traded in another three-wheeler, a Henkel Trojan, so we can assume they just had been caught by these odd vehicles.
 
By this time, in June 1974, the production of the Bug recently had ceased after 2 270 cars made, but that didn’t bother our Swedish couple. In addition they got a Bond Bug 750 ES with the bigger 750 cc engine, producing 32 horsepower and produced in 142 examples only.
 
And everybody in Halmstad turned their heads.
 
It is this car now sold on Bilweb Auctions. It was restored back in 2011 with a focus on engine and chassis. Today it is in a patinated working condition and ready for the road and todays traffic.
 
A special detail is that this Bond Bug is registered with a towing bar. It is not mounted, but comes with the car.
 
The Bug auction closes on 27 October and it has an estimated value of 75 000 to 85 000 SEK.
 
 To the auction