EV classic Broncos? Inside the Bay Area factory reinventing classic car 'restomods'

"In a long-vacant industrial building on Mare Island, once a vital cog in the U.S. Navy's shipbuilding machine, a very different kind of manufacturing hum has taken hold. Where trains once rolled inside carrying steel and supplies for submarines and ships, technicians now strip, rebuild and re-engineer classic vehicles, many of them reborn as electric cars designed to meet modern expectations of performance, safety and reliability."

"Kindred Motorsports is a restorer and modifier, or "restomod," founded by technology and supply chain veteran Rob Howard. Its mission is to do something traditional restoration shops have struggled to achieve at scale: deliver fully rebuilt, turnkey classic vehicles using standardized processes, proprietary technology and factory-like quality control. And all that while preserving the emotional pull that made the originals iconic."

"For Howard, the Vallejo company is the culmination of decades spent restoring cars one painstaking evening at a time. "When my family went to bed, instead of watching a rerun of 'Shawshank Redemption' or something like that, I would go out in the garage and work on restoring cars," he said. Each project took thousands of hours. "I saw how hard it was to do that. It took me years to do each one of my restorations, and when I was done, they weren't quite right," he said."

A repurposed industrial building on Mare Island now houses a restomod shop where technicians strip, rebuild, and re-engineer classic vehicles, often converting them to electric. Kindred Motorsports, founded by Rob Howard, aims to deliver fully rebuilt, turnkey classics at scale by applying standardized processes, proprietary technology, and factory-like quality control. The company emphasizes repeatability, engineering discipline, and modern manufacturing principles to improve performance, safety, reliability, and turnaround time. Long, handcrafted restorations that took thousands of hours are being reimagined into scalable workflows without sacrificing the emotional appeal of the original vehicles.

Read at The Mercury News