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Cosmotron Car - Designer Builds Sci-Fi Vehicle In His Backyard
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Mar 29, 2025
The Costomtron, affectionately known as Cosmo, is a unique car designed to look like a 1960s bubble car. The Jetsons-style space age design was created by Paul Bacon, who spent 18-months building the car from a shed in his back garden. Bacon sat down and drew his dream car then worked out what materials he could use to make his dream a reality. He used the chassis of an old BMW Z3 as the base for his car and sculpted its unusual curves using polystyrene, foam and fiber-glass matting.
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This purple vehicle may look like a spaceship from a sci-fi film, but it's actually a one
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of a kind custom car. The Cosmotron. The whole car is perfect. The more I drive it I realise that the car is perfect
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This kind of car has never been seen in this country before
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The space age car was designed by Paul Bacon, who spent 18 months building the car in a
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shed in his back garden. Once the project started I always like to keep it moving and never let it stand still
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If you do just a little bit every day it will always get done. In the 60s in America there
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was a few cars like this but not too many and when I was a kid I was always told that
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by the year 2000 this is what cars would look like and they don't so incredibly disappointing
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The 41 year old sat down and drew his dream car then worked out how to make his dream
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a reality. I went and bought a BMW Z3 with the 2.8 litre straight six around about 1998 and I took
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every single body panel off it so I was left with just the rolling chassis and floor pan I then braced that with extra steel just to make sure it was stiff enough so there be no flexing in the fiberglass body
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And onto that I bonded polystyrene and expanding foam. Then I sculpted the shape of the car
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I used a piece of 10mm steel rod and ran it from here down to here
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and that gave me the basic lines of the car. Once I'd got it to the shape I wanted it in polystyrene
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I covered that in fiberglass and then smoothed it all out to the car that you have now
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I also made the tooling for the dome. The dome ring's made of steel
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I made the tool for the dome and sent it to a place called Duplis Domes
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It used to be in Leicester. And they pumped up the dome. The dome sits on a steel ring that rises and falls on a hydraulic ram and hinge system
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The dome itself is made of the same sort of acrylic plastic used in glider canopies
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Paul stayed true to his design throughout, even if it meant using unconventional materials
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We've got the 2.8 straight six, but modified so it's running the six SU carbs, they're
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topped off with salt and pepper pots from John Lewis because they look like cool chrome bullets And the interior we got the crazy gear shift we got the one dashboard one steering wheel My wife actually stitched all the interior
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The rear grille here. During the 50s, people would modify cars with anything that was around
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and this kind of grille became popular using a draw pull off of old chest of drawers
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Those draw pulls are very hard to get now, so almost looking the same. These are actually lids off of a lot of tubes of moisturiser
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which I found in a charity shop for about £5 and then cleaned up and now on there
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These are plastic and they won't go rustic. Paul and his wife Kirsty took the Cosmotron to car shows around Europe
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but after two years they were ready to move on to a brand new project
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I sold it in order to build another car because for me the building of the car
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is better than the final owning of the car. Paul's always doing projects, crazy projects
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He's not happy unless he's making something. he's onto his next car project now and Cosmotron is actually his second car
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Luckily for Paul, car enthusiast Martin Smith had been coveting Cosmo for two years
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I decided to buy the car because for years I wanted a different sort of car. What I like
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about the car so much is the way it looks the space age look of it the craziness of it the actual bubble top the colour the whole way the car is built The 60 crazy look is what I really go for And Martin had fallen in love with the Bizarre Motor
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I've done about 800 miles in it and it's been brilliant. It's like being in a goldfish
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bowl looking out on the world. Luckily Martin's wife Cathy shares his enthusiasm
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We're a bit crazy in our family. We give them all names so he's Cosmo to us but I do love
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It's a lovely car. It drives so nice. People's reaction to the car, when you drive it down the road
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everyone stops, everyone stares, everyone wants to take a picture. I think just general amazement
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It's very, very, very eye-catching. Unique as well, I find. I pull up into a petrol garage, people come up to me
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what sort of car is this? Is it a kit car? Who makes it? Is it a production line car? They don't understand how it works
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If I took it down to the pub, my mates would love that. There would be photographs taken, it would be in the papers, it would be splashed everywhere
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And now Martin has the Cosmotron for himself. He has no intention of letting it go
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It's probably the first bubble-top car that's ever been made in England. I think it needs to stay in England
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So I'm going to try my best to keep it in England and never sell it
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