Bond's car, sawn in half off Baku in the film; first seen near Trafalgar Square; lost at Sunnyvale BMW to the one buyer the story couldn't top
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
The silver BMW Z8 was James Bond's car in The World Is Not Enough — bisected by a helicopter-borne bandsaw in the Caspian oil fields off Baku, which mattered at the London dinner table because John Leggate had run BP's actual Baku operation until the year before. Jonathan Hare saw his first one in the metal near Trafalgar Square, walking London with his friend Russ Deleon, then Evolve Software's VP of International Business Development. Around a thousand were made the first year; list was about $135,000, and none sold at list.
At Sunnyvale BMW, Hare bid $250,000. The dealership told him they were selling the car to Steve Jobs unless he raised to $330,000. He suspected a bluff to run up the price — and heard later that Jobs really did buy that exact car, and sold it three years on for the $330,000 Hare wouldn't pay, which is the rare car story where everyone's number turns out to be right. Jim Woodhill's alternative — a European-spec car direct from the factory at list, flown to the States — closes the story in the source record, where the dictation tangles mid-parenthesis over the bill of lading and is preserved exactly as it tangled.
The ending, completed by the author's ruling of 29 August 2026 (S-134) and the contemporaneous account in S-136: he owned the Z8 from 2000 — a quarter century — with the Bustamante Bond party of October 2018 among its appearances. On Thanksgiving night 2025 it was rear-ended at 90 miles per hour and totaled; the other driver was found 100% at fault, and after a couple of months' adjustment — during which he did not know whether the settlement would even cover the $100,000 loan on the car — State Farm paid $152,000 in mid-January 2026. The $100,000 cleared the loan; the remaining $52,000, tax-free, funded the Einstein-mode months in which the nine filings and 2,091 claims were completed. The record notes what the author noticed himself: with no car, he went nowhere, and it became the most productive period of his life. The Bond car died funding the patents — an ending the franchise itself would envy.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
The car's stories keep accumulating, as this record predicted they would. In October 2019 it attended a James Bond theme party at Carlos Bustamante's house as the only guest who required no costume: Bond drove the first Z8 ever made, in 1999, and this is that car's sibling. Iris Steine was Hare's invitee; the host chairs Stanford's Department of Computational Biology, which means the Quantum Genome attended too, in a manner of speaking.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Group CIO without an IT background: North Sea driller, president of the Baku operation, hilarious, and the best guide to BP a vendor ever had
Open →the factory-direct workaround fromOne of Hare's oldest friends and the second patron in this record — whose Capitol Hill house held a future Senator and a future Speaker
Open →the same relationship to vehicles asA quarter share, bought as a hedge against not getting into Stanford
Open →the Trafalgar Square walk withOne of Hare's best friends: Evolve's VP of International Business Development in London, then an investor twice over — once completed, once pulled back for a rainforest
Open →Bond party host, October 2018Stanford's computational-biology chair — and host of the Bond party the Z8 was born for
Open →the buyerHP as a teenager, Terman's Valley, an Oregon commune, India, Zen — the parallels the record can actually show; and the borrowed Ferrari, the Z8, and the woman who connects them
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-113The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-134The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-142The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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