Ever wonder what today’s electric cars would have looked like if they had debuted 60 years earlier? Damien O’Carroll looks at some possibilities as imagined by the team at Chasing Cars.

BMW i8

If BMW had designed the sexy i8 at the same time it designed the even sexier 507 roadster (produced from 1956 to 1960), it might have looked something like this. And we like what we see!

The i8 is powered by a turbocharged 1.5-litre three-cylinder engine with a single electric motor, and an 11.6 kWh battery, so it could easily be packaged in the smaller, delicately pretty design the Chasing Cars team came up with, that adds some round headlights, thinner kidney grilles and a chrome front bumper.

Nissan Leaf

The Nissan Leaf might be one of the most successful production EVs of the modern era, but its styling leaves more than a few people scratching their heads, so the Chasing Cars team thought they would look in the opposite direction for inspiration – specifically the glorious Datsun 2000 (or Datsun Sport) roadster from 1967.

But instead of a roadster, they went with the current Leaf’s tallboy roofline and four-door body style, but critical design elements like the round headlights, low-set chrome front bumper, and chrome hubcaps were lifted directly from the 60s.

Porsche Taycan

The Porsche Taycan is simply one of the sexiest cars on the road today, essentially being a four-door, all-electric 911.

For inspiration for a 60s equivalent, Chasing Cars looked to Porsche’s first production car, the brilliant 356. Since the Taycan is technically a coupe-shaped sedan with four doors, they decided to make the retro-Taycan a longer wheelbase 356 with two more doors and a sloping roofline. The result is a vintage-inspired Taycan that purists are sure to enjoy.

Rivian R1T

The Rivian R1T is one of the most highly anticipated EVs due to land in the near future. With its striking frontal design and the fact that it is landing squarely in the single biggest selling segment in the United States and right here in New Zealand (it’s a ute. . .), people are just hanging out for it.

But imagine how it might have looked when given the slab body lines of a 1960s pickup truck.

Chasing Cars took the twin vertical round headlight design of the International A Series truck, the squarish cab design of the R1T, and sharp contours of the Chevy C/K series for inspiration.

Tesla Model X

SUVs had a lot sharper edges in the 1960s, so Tesla’s weird egg design for the Model X probably wouldn’t have flown back then. But weird doors? They were all about those back in the 60s.

Chasing Cars reimagined the Model X using the International Scout as a basis, threw in a few hints of wedgy sports cars from the same era (appropriate, given how much Tesla’s Cybertruck owes to them) and slaps a set of wild gull wing doors on the rear, along with some square headlights up front for good measure.