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It’s hardly surprising that, in an electric world where Jell-O-mold cars are designed for creating the least drag, so many motorheads are yearning for the auto aesthetics of yesteryear. After all, classic cars from the 1970s and earlier undeniably had style—trouble is, auto companies don’t make them anymore.
That’s a sales boon for restoration workshops, but, barn finds notwithstanding, the supply of period vehicles is inevitably limited. But this scarcity has resulted in an opportunity for an Indonesian firm, which, in a legal gray area, handcrafts drop-dead gorgeous copies of the 1950s Mercedes 300SL Gullwing and other legendary sports cars.
And it not just Indonesia. Chinese factories are stamping out 3D-scanned body shells for icons such as Ford Broncos of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent Land Rover Defenders from the 1980s and 1990s.
Equipped with the latest technology, today’s cars are safer and easier to drive than vintage ones, and thanks to AI-infused software stacks and smartphone hook-ups, more personalized, too. Still, they can be dull to drive, and, as if designed in a wind tunnel by committee, often lack individuality. Squint and the Nissan Rogue looks like the Kia Sorento; ditto for the Porsche Cayenne and its Volkswagen Group stablemate, the Audi Q5.
Voluptuous vintage cars may creak, but those that have achieved classic status ooze personality. (To collectors, “vintage” and “classic” refer to cars from specific eras, but in this article the terms are used in their general sense.) Hagerty estimates that there are 45 million such vehicles in the US, worth $1 trillion.
Selling to affluent collectors (almost all of whom are men), there are automotive ateliers in the US and Europe which make “replicars” aping classic outlines from the past. Some equip these new-old cars with non-period flourishes such as polished side exhaust pipes, rear-view cameras, and features now either common or mandatory on modern cars, such as power windows and reinforced frames.
Bodyshell Boom
One of the most copied period cars—usually made under license—is the Shelby Cobra, a sports car developed by American automotive designer and race car driver Carroll Shelby, and manufactured in the early 1960s by British company AC Cars. Originally hand-built with a curvaceous aluminum body, many of the replica Cobra shells now made in the US are popped out of fiberglass molds.
If historicity is preferred, there are also workshops that restore and modify genuine vintage cars, upgrading these “restomods” with beefier brakes, performance engines, and full-blast aircon units. Land Rover in the UK sells “remastered” pre-2016 Defenders for $305,000, while Helderburg of Arkansas takes 25-year-old Defender bodies and rebuilds them with in-house machining, hand-shaped components, and customized cockpits, adding Focal audio systems, Apple CarPlay, and a Tesla-style multi-camera cloud-based security system.
While the Helderburg Lazare, available for $376,000, has a reworked turbo diesel engine, some restomod shops have clients who wish to switch to electric. British specialist Electrogenic transformed Jason Momoa’s 1929 Rolls-Royce Phantom II into a restomod EV. Kindred Motorworks, which works out of a former naval shipyard on Mare Island, San Francisco, bolts proprietary electric motors and batteries into antique Ford Broncos, which, once finished, retail for more than $200,000.
