Production Designer Ken Adam stood firm in his belief that if the film was to be about a car, it had to be about just that and not a mock up. Along with Rowland Emmett ,who had been assigned the task of creating a series of mad inventions to appear in the film, and the Ford racing team headed by Alan Mann, Adam set about creating CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG.
The final product weighed approximately 2 tons, was 17 feet long, and built on a custom made ladder frame chassis. NO detail was spared in her creation. Many traditional forms of car-building were re-employed, and modern technology stepped in to create a vehicle which was both accurate enough to fool veteran car experts when under the microscope of 70mm cinema cameras and hard-wearing enough to withstand everything from driving in sand to driving on cobbled streets and down stair-cases.
The wheels were moulded in alloy to replicate the timber wheels which would have been true to the period. The boat deck was of red and white cedar and built by boat-builders in Windsor, and the array of brass fittings were obtained from Edwardian cars. What couldn't be obtained was faithfully and accurately re-created. The alloy dashboard plate was from a British World War I fighter plane.
All of this was built around a modern Ford V6 engine with Automatic transmission.
Chitty rolled out of the workshop in June 1967 and was registered with the number plate GEN 11 given to her by Ian Fleming in his novel.
(In the novel, the number plate GEN11 had significance in that if you read the number ones as " i's ", it spelled out the latin word "genii" meaning magical person or being.)
The original was registered with this plate and used in the road-driving sequences and is owned to this day by Pierre Picton.
Pierre Picton first became involved with Chitty during filming in England in 1967/68. He was responsible for maintaining the car during production and for some "double" driving sequences. When filming was completed Pierre then transported and cared for Chitty as she toured the world promoting the film.
GEN11 has remained in Pierre's ownership. She has appeared in countless charity events for the "Stars Organisation for Cerebral Palsy" in which Pierre is deeply involved. Her appearances in parades and car rallies still raise cheers, and her public appearances still draw huge crowds of admirers, both young and old - and she has driven Santa to many more functions than Rudolph! The film, now one of the biggest selling and "most pirated" videos ever released continues to spark the imaginations of children world-wide (and those of us reliving the joy it brought us as children).