Make Your First Electric Car an Old Ford Bronco

In a former naval shipyard outside San Francisco, one start-up is cooking up cars for the next century-just not the kind you think.

- ROSECRANS BALDWIN

"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 RIT 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.