“Old cars are beautiful, but they’re not functional,” Rob Howard told me one day this spring. “People don’t really elect to admit it, that they’re a pain in the ass. And you tend to find reasons not to drive them.” Howard isn’t immune to their charms, to be sure: He has a small collection of cars he tinkers with, including a 1957 Chevy Bel Air wagon and an ’88 Toyota Land Cruiser. But to commute to and from work, he admitted, he drives a Rivian R1T electric truck. It’s just easier.
We were speaking in his office, not far from San Francisco, surrounded by beautiful old cars in the process of being made functional. Howard is the founder and CEO of a small but growing company called Kindred Motorworks, which is in the business of something called restomodding: upgrading classic cars to be more reliable, more street-friendly, with new engines and modern safety features—and, in Kindred’s case, adding the option of rechargeable, battery-powered electric motors. The trend is not new, exactly, but it got juiced over the past couple years as electrification technology became available to hobbyists and body shops. It’s now possible to turn an old gas-guzzler into an electric car, provided you don’t shock yourself to death. The appeal is obvious: All kinds of people, but especially people with a surplus of both cash and taste, want to drive a rare, classic automobile around town. At the same time, a lot of the same people are increasingly open to going electric. And so a small group of companies has emerged to turn everything from an old Porsche 911 to a vintage VW bus into something you can plug in overnight.
Restomodding isn’t quite as heady as the purist’s version of car restoration—what you see at car shows known as concours d’elegance, where the aim is to present classic automobiles as if they’ve just rolled off the factory floor, in flawless condition with original parts. But giving an old car modern power steering and air-conditioning, and a Bluetooth stereo system, never mind an electric power train, isn’t exactly affordable. Florida’s FJ Company had me lusting this year over one of their own refurbished Land Cruisers (sticker price: $266,800). In the United Kingdom, Everrati will electrify an old Porsche, starting at around £240,000 (that’s more than $300,000). Zelectric in San Diego, which has a two-year waiting list, will retrofit your father’s 1969 Karmann Ghia with disc brakes, LED lights, and Tesla batteries (plus reaching 120 horsepower). Kindred, meanwhile, has focused on the humble Ford Bronco.
So far, customers for electrified restomods are about who you’d think: Robert Downey Jr. made a whole TV show, Downey’s Dream Cars, about his efforts to green-ify his vintage car collection. Julia Roberts, a Kindred rep told me, has pre-ordered one of its electrified VW microbuses. And, yes, one of Kindred’s electrified Broncos starts at more than 200 grand. “This is a luxury good,” Howard said. “We don’t apologize for that because there’s a huge amount of craftsmanship involved in this thing. A very unique vehicle.”
When I visited, the company was producing four Broncos a month, though they were on track, Howard said, to soon make 10 a month. In any case, it was already sold out of everything it would be able to produce through 2025. But Howard really got my attention when he said he planned to cap electric Bronco production at 100 vehicles a year—not for scarcity, he explained, but because Broncos weren’t the only car of interest.
