Book Review — Cosmic Motors by Daniel Simon

What if you’re a designer at Bugatti and you get bored? You stare out the window and start thinking about spaceships, cars, and pilots from another galaxy. You have the software to visualize them — but, more importantly, the imagination to shape that future into a vision.

That’s exactly what Daniel Simon did (although he probably wasn’t bored at Bugatti!). Cosmic Motors doesn’t just show sketches of a parallel, futuristic universe — these designs are modeled in CAD and rendered with incredible detail and precision.

The connection to Syd Mead’s work is clear. The foreword is written by the master himself, and the level of imagination here is right up there. This book marks the beginning of Simon’s transition from professional car design to the world of entertainment. In the following years, he went on to design vehicles for Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, and Top Gun: Maverick.

You can see the seeds of all that work in this early book — the shaping of a universe where humans can fly, explore, and still rely on mechanical beauty to do so. Even though Cosmic Motors is now over 20 years old, it remains an inspiring source of creativity and visual storytelling.

https://designstudiopress.com/products/cosmic-motors?variant=40796767289540