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Cosmotron, the Weird Bubble Car Built From Scratch With Household Items

Paul Bacon's Cosmotron bubble car, with new owner Martin Smith 10 photos
Photo: John Roberston / Barcroft Cars
Paul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never gotPaul Bacon's Cosmotron bubble car, with new owner Martin SmithPaul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never gotPaul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never gotPaul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never gotPaul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never gotPaul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never gotPaul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never gotPaul Bacon's Cosmotron bubble car, with new owner Martin Smith
If you’re looking for out-of-this-world, absolutely bonkers but visually impressive custom builds in the UK, Paul Bacon is the guy to check out. His first project of this magnitude, a bubble car called Cosmotron, is proof of how deep and wild his imagination runs, on par with his building skills.

Paul Bacon has already been featured on our site during Custom Builds Month, with the fake rat rod van he created from a London cab in just seven days, and the visually stunning Steampunk Automatron. Cosmotron, or Cosmo for short, was his second project ever and, though old, it remains to this day a brilliant example of perfect style, even if it’s at the expense of function.

Cosmo is a 1998 BMW Z3 with a 2.8-liter inline-six engine, but you’d be hard-pressed to see any resemblance between it and the purple bubble car that wouldn’t look amiss in The Jetsons universe. It was partly inspired by the work of Ed Roth and the futuristic cars of the 1960s. In the video below, a 2015 interview with Bacon, he recalls being told as a kid that all cars would look like this in the year 2000.

Paul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never got
Photo: YouTube / Barcroft Cars
Disappointed that this wasn’t his everyday reality, he set out to set things right. As one does.

He bought the 1998 BMW and stripped it bare: the rolling chassis and floorplan would become the basis of the Cosmo, which he’d already drawn in advance. Progress was slow, over the course of 18 months, but mostly because Bacon believes you should do your work a little bit every day to make sure you register progress, instead of whenever you can.

He crafted the body from polystyrene and expanding foam, to which he added fiber glass and steel beams for more rigidity. The strange, Perspex dome that serves both as roof and windshield, sits on a steel ring and is actuated with hydraulic hinges by remote control. In a separate interview, Bacon said the dome turned the process of making the car road legal incredibly difficult because authorities deemed it unsafe.

Paul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never got
Photo: YouTube / Barcroft Cars
Despite its futuristic, alien design, much of the stuff on the Cromo is basic household items. The engine peaking out of the hood is adorned with salt and pepper shakers from John Lewis, the rear grille is decked in moisturizing caps, the chrome trim on the steering wheel is the top of a shower waste pipe, the center of the steering wheel is the top of a firework rocket, while the moon tank in the front is a boiler expansion tank. Bacon even made the radio by hand, to go with the custom dash.

The white leather interior is just as beautiful as the exterior, and matching. Bacon’s wife hand-stitched the two seats, and there’s an almost insane degree of attention to detail to everything. Cosmo may be a garden shed project (which it is, in the most literal sense), but Bacon cut no corners in building it. Every millimeter has been brushed with the finest toothed comb, so the result is pure perfection.

At least visually.

Cosmo is a stunner, but it’s not exactly the most practical vehicle. It is completely road legal and, at least in theory, it can do 140 mph (225.3 kph), but in reality, it’s a very fickle mistress. One review in MotorPunk noted that the saucer-shaped tires made it handle “like you’re driving on ice,” but added that style over function was definitely a focus with Bacon in this build, calling it “the ultimate automotive expression of form over function, done for the hell of it, simply because it looks bloody brilliant.”

Paul Bacon's Cosmotron, the bubble car of the future we never got
Photo: YouTube / Barcroft Cars
And that it does.

Bacon owned Cosmo for two years after he completed it but, as he puts it himself, for him it’s the journey toward building the car and not the actual ownership of the car that does it. He sold it to car enthusiast Martin Smith, who pledged to keep it in the UK, where it belongs.

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About the author: Elena Gorgan
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Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends.
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