Rolls-Royce Returns to the Furka Pass with One-Off Goldfinger Phantom
Photography Rolls-Royce
60 Years since Goldfinger hit cinemas Rolls-Royce has gone back to the scene of one of the film’s most famous sequences – The Furka Pass in Switzerland.
What’s more, the 2024 Phantom that took to the Swiss pass is a tribute to the wasp-coloured 1937 Phantom Sedanca de Ville driven by henchman Oddjob in the 1964 film.
The Furka Pass serves not just as an appropriate photo location, but the inspiration for several of the bespoke car’s special features. A map of the road, which in the film leads to villain Auric Goldfinger’s secret gold smelting plant, has been inlaid into the dashboard. It was painstakingly created in three dimensions using stainless steel and a method named physical vapour deposition. Contour lines and elevation figures are engraved into the dark substrate, exposing the bright metal beneath. The route is cut out from the stainless-steel layer, revealing a gilded surface underneath. Rolls-Royce took a year and ten different prototypes just to perfect this art piece.
Goldfinger’s filming on the Furka Pass ended on 11 July 1964 and it’s the night sky on that very day which has been recreated in the Phantom’s ‘Starlight’ headliner using 719 fixed gold-glowing LED stars and eight more shooting stars that appear in the simulated sky.
There are plenty of other film references throughout the car from treadplates that look like gold bars, to a picnic table featuring a map to Fort Knox. This phenomenal Phantom was created for a British collector and 007 fan, who, we hope, will be taking regular detours to Switzerland in his unique Goldfinger limousine.
60 years since Goldfinger hit cinemas Rolls-Royce has gone back to the scene of one of the film’s most famous sequences – the Furka Pass in Switzerland.