Elon Musk wants to make Bond submarine car

There are any number of memorable movie vehicles on the road today, but the Lotus Esprit, which James Bond so casually drove into the ocean in The Spy Who Loved Me would be hard to find.

According to online motoring journal Jalopnik, Tesla CEO Elon Musk who recently paid $866,000 on the James Bond submarine-car, would turn it into a working undersea vehicle.

The high-tech vehicle - affectionately known on the 1977 movie set as "Margie Nixon" and "Wet Willie" went under the block, early September in England.

An unnamed "collector" picked it up for less than the expected $990,000, and according to Jalopnik, the buyer was Musk, who also headed SpaceX.

The car starred in one of the most memorable scenes in movie history, in which Bond drives it off a pier and into the water then turns it into a submarine at the press of a button.

According to Musk he remembered the car fondly from his youth in South Africa and was ''disappointed to learn it can't actually transform.''

The film featured six versions of the vehicle, each one with a different role, while this one nicknamed "Wet Nellie" -- was a functioning submarine, it was not engineered to drive.

The car itself was something of a mystery, disappearing after production ended on the 1977 film.

It was however, discovered in a storage locker on New York's Long Island in 1989, the contents of which had been purchased in a blind auction when the rent was not paid.

The car had been cosmetically restored since, but was not operational, and that was something Musk wanted to change.

He told Jalopnik that what he would try to do was upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real.

Interestingly the Tesla Roadster was built on a Lotus Elise chassis modified to accept the automaker's electric powertrain.

Musk has been portrayed in popular culture as both a real-life Iron Man and Bond-style super villain and the latest move could well perpetuate that perception.