With rare exceptions like the Nissan Cube, the automobiles of today are designed to be curvy, organic, and sinuous, like a Porsche 911. But that wasn't the case for the cars of the 1970s, which were gas-guzzling land sharks every bit as square as the boomers who drove them.
Dutch 3-D artist Michiel van der Berg has always had a fascination with vehicles from before he was born, and in a series of playful isometric renders, he has brought them back to life in all their clunky beauty.
Some of these cars are classics today for their roles in pop culture. For example, there's the 1968 Plymouth Satellite, looking as if it was just driven across Martha's Vineyard by Roy Schneider in Jaws. Walter White's meth-cooking RV from Breaking Bad is of this era, too.
Some of these cars were never actually made. The Alfa Romeo Navajo, for example, was a concept car unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1976, and looks like something Buck Rogers might have tooled around space in. The Tank Studio, on the other hand, appears to be a conceptual space rover of van der Berg's own devising that would look pretty at home crawling across Martian dunes with its 360-degree windowed view.
Even the most anonymous of these vehicles, like the cartoonish Dodge Aspen, take on a strangely captivating new vitality through van der Berg's loving eye. They look almost like cars that have just popped out of a charming video game. Far from being obsolete geezermobiles, these renders are almost enough to make you believe that some of these designs should come back to life.
More of Michiel van den Berg's work can be found here.