It's been thirty years since George Miller's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome opened in theaters, but a new installment in the Mad Max franchise - once again co-written and directed by Miller - is finally about to open in theaters. The project in question is titled Mad Max: Fury Road, with Tom Hardy taking over from Mel Gibson in the role of Max Rockatansky: an ex-family man-turned loner making his way in a post-apocalyptic setting... one where the only thing more dangerous than the surviving humans are the cars and trucks they use for traveling.

Charlize Theron co-headlines Fury Road as Imperator Furiosa, a warrior who rescues several of the women enslaved by Immortan Joe - a warlord played by Mad Max (1979) star Hugh Keays-Byrne - and eventually teams up with Max, on a mad dash to escape Joe's henchmen and take shelter in Furiosa's old childhood home.

Rounding out the cast are such actors as Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: Days of Future Past) playing one of Joe's thugs, while the women under the care of Furiosa and (in time) Max are played by the likes of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (Transformers: Dark of the Moon), Riley Kenough (Jack & Diane), and Zoë Kravitz (The Divergent Series).

The majority of the Fury Road trailer footage released to date has been excerpts from scenes of Joe's cronies and their vehicles - such as the Nux Car that is driven by, appropriately enough, the deranged Nux (Hoult) - crashing through mounds of sand, flipping over, colliding, exploding, and/or getting sucked up into gigantic dust storms. It's fitting, then, that the actual cars and trucks being driven are just as violent in their design and appearance as the world they exist in, over the course of Fury Road's "one big chase" storyline.

We've included images of the various Fury Road vehicle below (courtesy of Car and Driver), along with truncated breakdowns of their model design, accessories, and/or their relevance in the history of the Mad Max franchise. If you would like to read more extensive descriptions of each vehicle, you can head on over to the original C&D article.

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Riding on 66-inch-tall Goodyear tires and featuring four feet of suspension travel, this beast, according to the official materials, is powered by a supercharged V-8 turning a Turbo 400 automatic transmission.

 For the moviemakers, however, a Corvette built on a big, rugged truck frame offers several advantages. So Buggy #9 was created as sort of a last-days-of-disco-era Vette running through misery while chewing on a fistful of meth.

In Fury Road, however, FDK is this blown, V-8–powered contraption to which the filleted body of a Volkswagen Beetle is tack-welded. In the story it acts as part of a convoy guard that throws off flames with fuel from barrels integrated into its structure.

Take one 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille body and split it open down the middle. Then insert another Coupe DeVille body into the first one and weld like mad.

Mad Max would only be Slightly Peeved Max if he didn’t drive the classic 1974 Ford XB Falcon. And the Falcon is back—as it has been for every film in the series.

In The Road Warrior, it’s an R-series tractor-tanker that is at the center of much of the action. In Fury Road there’s “Mack,” an R-series wrecker tasked with trailing the action and scavenging the battlefield for precious scrap and equipment.

The greatest ’32 Ford five-window Deuce coupe in cinematic history is, of course, John Milner’s yellow rod from American Graffiti. The Nux Car from Fury Road can’t even come close to that car. First, it’s apparently a ’34 model, so it can’t be a Deuce. And second because it’s a Chevrolet. In compensation it does feature a turbocharged V-8 that, at least according to the press materials, also huffs in a steady diet of nitrous oxide.

So in Fury Road there are at least two Valiant Chargers featured. This one, called Peacemaker, isn’t so much a Chrysler of any sort as it is some classic sheetmetal stretched out over a U.S.-made Ripsaw light-tank chassis.

Built around the desiccated remains of what appears to be a 1937 Plymouth sedan, this metallic hyena’s mission is to scrounge the wasteland looking for carrion to consume and repurpose. The spikes were not part of Plymouth’s original design.

There’s big, there's bigger, and then there's holy-crap gargantuan. A six-wheel-drive Tatra semi powered by two supercharged V-8s seems big enough to qualify for that last category.

What's your favorite of the Mad Max: Fury Road vehicles? Feel free and let us know in the comments section.

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Mad Max: Fury Road opens in U.S. theaters on May 15th, 2015.

Source: Car and Driver