The BMW Z3 was a nice little roadster but it never looked as cool as this custom-made sports car from the UK. It’s called the Cosmotron and it was created by Paul Bacon who spent some 18 months constructing the Jetsons-style bubble-car from a shed in his garden.

“In the 60s in America, there were a few cars like this, but not too many. When I was a kid, I was always told that by the year 2000, this is what cars would look like and they don’t, so I was incredibly disappointed,” he told Barcroft.

The 41-year old man from West Leicester then took it upon himself to build a futuristic vehicle inspired from the (overly optimistic) space age designs of the 1960s.

“I went and bought a BMW Z3 with the 2.8-liter straight six, around about 1998, and I took every single body panel off it so I was left with the just the rolling chassis and floor pan,” he said. “I then braced that with extra steel, just to make sure it was stiff enough so there would be no flexing in the fiberglass body and onto that I bonded polystyrene and expanding foam. Then I sculpted the shape of the car.”

The Cosmotron is not only fully drivable, but it’s also road legal, taxed and MOT’d, according to Bacon. After keeping the car for a few years, Bacon went on to sell it to private car enthusiast Martin Smith who now enjoys it on the road.