15 Of The Most Iconic Cars Of The 70s

Maserati Merak

The Maserati Bora was one of the cooler cars of the 1970s, and Maserati’s attempt to capitalize on that resulted in one of those cars that just didn’t add up to the sum of its parts. The wild, open-flying buttresses in the back are no doubt cool, but underneath the skin, the four-seat Merak was comprised of equal parts Bora and repurposed components, including the modified V6 engine.

Ferrari/Dino 308 GT4

The luxurious Ferrari, the grand touring Ferrari is probably the one that looks the least like a Ferrari. And in fact, it wasn’t technically a Ferrari at first, produced under the Dino name that Ferrari assigned to his smaller-engined cars, named after his dead son. Regardless, it’s a car that’s really practical for what it is, and at the same time, a bit of a stylistic enigma. That’s kinda the 1970s in a nutshell when you really think about it.

BMW 2002 Turbo

As the ultimate incarnation of BMW’s “New Class” vehicles, the 2002 Turbo was the first European turbocharged passenger car. It beat the Porsche 911 Turbo to the market by a year, and though it wasn’t the first turbocharged car in the world (the Oldsmobile Jetfire and Corvair Monza briefly ran them in the early ’60s), it kicked open the door to the turbo world, and helped transform the word into a euphemism for performance.