For One Glorious Moment, All The World’s Most Important People Drove Fords

Try to imagine the scene. It’s a billionaire’s gleaming ice palace deep in subarctic Iceland. He’s found a new way to use diamonds to provide sunlight for darkened places to help them grow plants year-round (or so he says). He’s invited the most important people in the world. Business leaders, politicians, the media, and a few spies are on hand for a demonstration.

What do all of these elites drive? Ford products. Range Rovers. Jaguars. Volvos. Aston Martins. At least one Thunderbird. A whole crap ton of Lincolns.

Actually, you don’t have to try very hard to imagine it because you can just rent a copy of the James Bond film Die Another Day and you’ll see for yourself. All these products were a part of the short-lived Premiere Automotive Group, or PAG, an experiment by Ford’s then-CEO Jacques Nasser to unite a bunch of luxury brands under one Ford-owned company.

If viewed only through the lens of the parts-bin Jaguar X-Type, Ford’s brief experiment in creating a spinoff luxury automaker wasn’t particularly successful and its eventual dismantling was a good thing. Looking at the film, however, is a reminder of how many great cars were made during the era.

Die Another Day Is A Ridiculous Film With Equally Ridiculous Cars

Thinking about the universe portrayed in Die Another Day where the world’s superpowers only drives Ford Premier Automotive Group cars pic.twitter.com/cwHeXQ6leM

— Landau Calrissian (@DaftRyosuke) September 22, 2024

I must credit the excellently named Landau Calrissian on Twitter/X for pointing out the “universe portrayed in Die Another Day where the world’s superpowers only drives Ford Premier Automotive Group cars.”

It sounds like insane product placement, and to some degree, it is (more on that in a minute), but it’s not entirely unreasonable as a universe. Ford PAG came into existence almost exactly 25 years ago and eventually included Lincoln, Mercury, Aston Martin, Land Rover, Jaguar, and Volvo.

Range Rovers are popular vehicles for world leaders, as are Volvos, Lincolns, and Jaguars. Would a world leader show up in a Land Rover Freelander as depicted here? Maybe not, but it’s fun to think about. The Volvo 850 wagons and Volvo S60 are sensible choices by, presumably, sensible politicians from Nordic countries.

Here in the United States, leaders tend to choose Cadillacs, but Lincolns are also associated with state vehicles. How a dozen Lincoln Town Car limos ended up in Iceland is anyone’s guess, but if you’re making space lasers out of conflict diamonds I guess vehicle importation isn’t that much of a stretch.

The J. Mays T-Bird is definitely the outlier in the group, but that doesn’t belong to a world leader. It’s the vehicle of choice for Halle Berry’s Giacinta “Jinx” Johnson, an NSA agent who just happens to love Thunderbirds. She’s paired with Bond, who drives a Vanquish, in a fight against a North Korean Agent who drives a Jaguar XKR (these cars are covered in my James Bond story from earlier this month).

It’s not a great movie. As the Wall Street Journal‘s film critic explained at the time: “James Bond gets bad news in “Die Another Day”: They’ve rescinded his license to kill. The news is worse for us. They’ve given him license to bore.” That’s rough, and only partially accurate, as both Rosamond Pike and Halle Berry are fun to watch.

It wasn’t truly a failure as the film netted $430 million, making it the highest-grossing Bond film at the time. Surely the movie was helped by almost $100 million in co-promotion from companies like the Ford Motor Company.

They Spent How Much?

One of the ways large movies make more money is by using product placement to cover some of their promotional costs. Sometimes this can be a company paying to be in a film, but just as often the company agrees to spend a certain amount of money on co-branded marketing to get people into theaters.

In the case of Die Another Day, various brands spent $100 million in product placement-related marketing. The biggest chunk of that came from Ford and PAG, at a reported $37 million. Why would Ford do this?

According to long-time PR man Simon Sproule, who was VP of Comms at Jaguar Land Rover at the time, the impetus was CEO Jacques Nasser, who wasn’t happy to see Bond driving BMWs in the prior three films. With a new Vanquish coming, Nasser saw the opportunity and personally negotiated with Barbara Brocolli, the producer whose family runs Eon productions and guards the Bond legacy, to pass an Aston to Bond.

Of course, $37 million is a lot of money for Aston Martin.

“Much to the chagrin of those at Ford Motor Company, it was their marketing budget that carried the single biggest load for that ad spend and they weren’t happy about it,” said Sproule. “Aston Martin didn’t have any money, so they got a free ride.”

Did Aston Martin sell a lot more cars because of the movie? I don’t know. I do know that Aston Martin went from a company selling hundreds of cars a year to one selling thousands, which isn’t a bad sign. Plus, without this move, it’s possible we’d have been deprived of Daniel Craig in an Aston Martin (and a Ford Mondeo) in the excellent Casino Royale.

Hot Take: PAG Was Good

PAG was disassembled in chunks, with Lincoln and Mercury being removed in 2002, and Ford eventually selling Aston Martin, Jaguar Land Rover, and Volvo between 2006 and 2008 as CEO Alan Mulally tried to horde cash ahead of an impending financial crisis.

That was probably the smart move given that Ford avoided bankruptcy and those brands have, to varying degrees, gone on to be successful on their own. In the imagination of Very Online Car People, it seems like parts-sharing projects like the ill-fated Jaguar X-Type are what people remember of PAG. This isn’t entirely unfair as PAG was a “parts-sharing bonanza,” as Road & Track called it.

I think that’s a little oversimplified, however. There were many truly great and/or important cars built during that period.

“In defense of PAG, it was what Volkswagen did,” said Sproule. “The grouping of luxury brands was arguably started by VW and Jacques saw that and put together a pretty complimentary set. I’ve probably drunk too much Kool-Aid at this point, but if you look at the cars you had something for everybody.”

A quick look back and there are, indeed, many great cars running the spectrum of what you might like. Just looking at the Die Another Day parking lot there’s the L322 Range Rover, which was engineered in large part by BMW during the company’s brief ownership of Land Rover. Ford would go on to stuff some Jaguar V8s underhood, making these fast and fun 4x4s.

Volvos of this era are also great. Thomas mentioned recently the success of the V8-powered Volvo S80 and I’m partial to the early Volvo C30, which was jointly developed with Mazda and Ford and built on a platform shared with the contemporary Mazda3 and Ford Focus. These are gorgeous and quick little hatchbacks. They’re also one of the best examples of parts bin key-swapping working out for all partners involved.

Our own Stephen Walter Gossin is a huge fan and collector of PAG-vintage Jaguar XK8s and for good reason. These are still gorgeous cars in pre- or post-facelift guise. Ian Callum knew what he was doing.

“PAG cars are now starting to fit squarely into the criteria that draw me to cars: cheap, broken, and a little bit out of the mainstream,” Gossin told me.

He even likes the X-Type.

“I’m now on my second sub-$1K X-Type (since those cars have been broken and dotting every Craigslist across the land for years now), and have really started to appreciate a car that had faced criticism nearly its entire existence. V6, leather, moonroof, AWD and Ford parts make them a truly outstanding cheap buy in my book. Yes, there are a few strange engineering decisions here and there, but for the most part, it’s one of the best “Junior Executive” cars you can buy for the money.”

According to SWG, XKs are “shockingly robust, reliable vehicles.”

Even better in my mind are the DEW98-platform trio of the Jaguar S-Type, Ford Thunderbird, and the Lincoln LS. I think history will be kinder to the T-Bird, but we’re already smitten with the LS. As Thomas wrote:

Overall, the Lincoln LS is a better car than you might expect. It was an intriguing experiment with promising early results, only made possible thanks to the mergers and acquisitions mess that was Ford’s Premier Automotive Group. Without Jaguar bones, it’s possible we could’ve ended up with a Lincoln-badged Contour, or yet another Lincoln-badged Taurus. More importantly, the Lincoln LS showed gumption, for an attempt at an America 5 Series while the legendary E39 was still in production wasn’t for the faint of heart.

You can fault the world leaders in Die Another Day for almost accidentally falling victim to a secret plan by a crazy billionaire with space-themed dreams to help our enemies, but you can’t fault them for their car choices.

The post For One Glorious Moment, All The World’s Most Important People Drove Fords appeared first on The Autopian.