Episode 244: Kindred CEO Rob Howard

The automobile is one of the most important inventions that revolutionize the modern world.

In America, the rich history of car culture runs deep.

This technology continues to shape the future of the industry.

Jason Stein is here to share the stories of people passionate about cars,

from industry leaders and innovators to car-obsessed celebrities.

Buckle up as Jason takes you inside the boardroom, onto the track,

and around the bend on Cars and Culture on SiriusXM Business Radio.

Welcome into episode 244 of Cars and Culture. I'm your host Jason Stein.

Great to have you back listening again on SiriusXM Business Channel 132.

This week we're coming to you from the NADA show, the National Dealers Association show,

in Las Vegas, where we sat down with Rob Howard, founder of Kindred Motorworks.

Kindred is a company born not in a boardroom, but as Rob put it, from 20 years in the garage.

It's a story of passion, culture, persistence, and the belief that the future of mobility

doesn't have to abandon the emotional connection we've always had with great cars.

Rob's journey to building Kindred Motorworks started long before the company had a name.

For those two decades, he was in the garage restoring, modifying,

and reimagining classic vehicles, not just his hobbies,

but as a way to blend timeless design with modern performance and reliability.

That hands-on tinkering eventually sparked a bigger idea.

What if you could take the icons people love, vintage Broncos, classic Volkswagen buses,

beloved analog era vehicles, and thoughtfully re-engineer them for a new generation,

with electrification, modern drivability, and craftsmanship at the core.

Out of that vision came Kindred Motorworks, a company focused on preserving automotive heritage

while adapting it for today's expectations around sustainability, usability, and technology.

In our conversation with Rob, he walks us through the leap from enthusiast to entrepreneur,

the moment when years of personal experimentation evolved into a scalable business,

and the challenges of building a company that sits at the intersection

of restoration, manufacturing, and electrification.

We'll discuss how Kindred approaches design and engineering,

why there's a growing market for reimagining classics in an EV era,

and how he balances reverence for original vehicles with the demands of modern performance and safety.

It's a conversation about craftsmanship, innovation, and emotional bond

that most drivers will relate to, because it's the machines that defined an era.

All of that and more from Las Vegas on Cars and Culture.

Hi, this is Rob Howard from Kindred Motorworks.

This is Cars and Culture with Jason Stein.

And this is Cars and Culture from the backseat of the Kindred Bronco in Las Vegas.

And the first time we've done this, Rob, thanks for being on the program.

Thanks for having us here inside the vehicle.

It's actually kind of a testament that we can actually have an interview

in the back of a Bronco.

Right, exactly.

We designed it well enough that we can do that.

Yeah, there's plenty of room for sure.

We have a lot to discuss around Cars and Culture.

This vehicle personifies Cars and Culture.

But I want to start off first by saying we're in Las Vegas,

a city that reinvents itself over and over again.

It has a propensity to take what's old and make it new.

How appropriate that we're in a...

What year is this Bronco?

This is the 66.

A 66 Bronco that is completely modern and available in gas and electric.

And I'll start off with a general question before we get into the vehicle of

why?

What is Kindred?

Why are we doing this?

Why the Bronco?

I think the why is this model, this car, is immortal, right?

But after 50 years, the joy dwindles away from the car to the point where it's not

that fun to own it because you can't drive it.

And it's not...

You can't enjoy the drive.

Sorry, I see.

It's a rough ride for sure.

Yeah, it's a rough ride.

So Kindred really is focused on recreating these vehicles so you can actually enjoy them,

to enjoy the ownership of these cars,

but also enjoy the driving experience of the car.

So that has us reinventing the basics of the car, the steering, the braking systems.

We redo all the electronics, make sure it has a killer sound system,

you know, four-wheel disc brakes, rear view camera.

So it's modernizing the car so you inject the joy back into the car.

And if you had to really dwindle Kindred down to its most basic,

it's that like how do we design these cars so you can enjoy every moment of owning them and driving them?

A lot more to come on this vehicle, but we're a revolutionary point

in terms of the industry, looking at what's old and making it new.

There's a lot of, you know, whether you call them resto mods or, you know,

complete redos of vehicles that keep the spirit of what they were,

inject what's new and what's capable.

Why this model and how did you get involved with Kindred?

Well, this model in particular Bronco is just a kind of car.

We knew that we could create one standardized, it's even better than what was out there.

And we knew that we could do an electric one as well.

And they're both quite different when you actually drive them.

So we knew they made, they made a lot of these cars from 1966 to 77,

made half a million of these cars.

So they're out there.

We knew that the parts infrastructure was all out there too.

So in this car, about 80% of the parts are aftermarket parts or original.

And 10 to 20% generally, Kindred makes those parts because they're not available out there.

But a large number of the parts are available out there,

which is really appealing for us when we rebuild these cars

to not have to go hunt and peck for individual parts.

But we also knew that there is a community of people

that are Kindred spirits out there that love this car, you know.

So we knew this would be a great place for us to start,

to do the gas one first, use the learnings on that to do the electric one,

and then move to another model.

This last 10 years, people have shifted more towards,

if I'm going to own a car like this, I want to be able to drive it.

And, you know, if you go back to the roots of Kindred, that's where I came from.

Right.

You know, restoring my own cars and realizing that it's really hard to do.

And when I was done, I was kind of disappointed.

I wish I could do it over again.

That was the genesis of this for you?

It was, yeah.

I mean, I grew up in Philadelphia and working-class household,

and when something broke in the Howard House, we had to fix it.

You know, so I learned just enough about cars for my dad,

about replacing the starter motor and fixing the rust on the station wagon

and things like that, that the mystery around cars was gone for me.

I was not afraid to work on cars.

And as my career progressed, I really wanted to go back to that.

So about 25 years ago, instead of, you know, watching Shawshank Redemption again,

I would go out to the garage and, you know, work on restoring a car.

And I just craved that working with my hands.

But as I progressed through that, I saw how hard it was to get these cars pulled together.

Like my last car took me four years, right?

And I had to use six different vendors, the carpet guy, the engine guy, the paint guy.

And I was disappointed with the end result, you know.

So I knew that kindred, if we put all that under one roof, the paint, the body,

you post, you're all of it, and control the quality, control the timeline,

that we, and then we standardized the rebuild process.

So every car came out the same.

The quality gets better and better and better.

We know that this car we're sitting in has 1,253 parts in it.

We know the torque on every bolt.

We know what to do, what not to do.

And the car has become, this is the highest quality Bronco available in the world because of that.

Because we standardized that.

So anyway, that's kind of the basics of the company and a little bit of the history of it.

It really revolves around making sure that you're unfettered in your desire to get in the car and drive it.

You're a car guy, anyway.

I mean, as evidenced by working on your own stuff.

But you also have an engineering mind, don't you?

And logistics and supply chain.

And you understand all of those components.

How difficult is it these days to make sure that all of those cars are in order

if you're going to take on a project like this?

Well, that's been the root of the challenge of the restoration world.

It kind of emanates from DIY people who don't have much experience.

And by the time they're done their restoration, they've got some experience, but it's not in the car.

And then the other one is on local shops.

We just don't have some of the supply chain experience or technology

to unlock higher quality and higher volume built.

So I am so lucky to be in a scenario where my career got me right to this spot.

So you're immersed in culture, but you've already had the target culture actually in front of you already.

How do you apply what you learned at Target to the car world?

Yeah, I mean, Target's a very customer-centric kind of place.

So taking that customer-centric view is really important.

And so kindred, that's really responsiveness to any service needs.

This is a big part of a classic car.

It's responsiveness to the purchasing process.

And making sure we're paying attention to their desires on the colors and things like that.

So that's new for me.

I was a little bit more of a kind of B2B kind of person as a founder.

That's been a fun learning for me as I kind of came through Target into Kindred

re-centering what I need to focus on towards the consumer really wouldn't have happened as

effectively unless Target kind of taught me the way.

Yeah, interesting.

And the point you made earlier about logistics and supply chain,

I think resonates probably in this world more than any other.

What have you learned on the Kindred journey as it relates to that?

What's funny, I mean, having restored these cars myself, I experienced the worst of it

without knowing it, honestly.

So I would take a part off the car and I would put it in a plastic bag and I would write what

the part was.

And then I would come back nine months later and couldn't read my handwriting.

Didn't know what the part was for.

So it's weird to say, but that's part of the supply chain.

And then I would order parts.

I would do a bulk order, put them away, finally open it up and I actually need them and I'm

the wrong parts.

Or I ordered two of the wrong one or whatever it was.

And it just spoke to and then you're tripping over yourself constantly.

That is the experience of the local shop also because they don't have technology driving

their supply chain.

It introduces a lot of extra hours and quality problems and compromises into the car that

you can eliminate if you spend time up front mailing the bill of materials.

And the bill of materials is quite complex.

As I mentioned, there's a lot of parts and you have to know where to buy them,

how much they cost so you can print in a properly priced car.

So I would say, and then what that does is unlock scale.

So what happens is local shops are great, but they can't build many in a year.

So the result is the price goes up and up and up.

So you see that, that these high end rest of my builds are very expensive because they have

to be because a shop can only build one a month.

So by unlocking the supply chain, putting in process, making sure it's all digitized

out of the brain and into our technology platform, which we call Blueprint,

that unlocks ability to build this car over and over the same way, but also at higher volumes.

How many units did you do in 25?

We did, we did about 50 and 25 and we'll be more than double that this year.

And obviously plans to continue to grow aggressively.

Yeah, well, we'll never be a mass market, right?

This is Kindred is really kind of a series of niche markets.

So we have the Bronco.

I suspect we'll never build more than 100 Broncos in a year.

It's probably when we're headed, but we can still grow by adding additional models to the lineup.

And that's a very unique business proposition that you can kind of have some scarcity in your brand

as well as the ability to grow still with scarcity.

And I think because we have the new models introduced every year,

that's a really valuable part of what we're doing.

So let's talk a little bit about that, what product expansion are you looking at?

Well, we'll have, if you dig to the core of the business model for Kindred,

you talked about enjoyment as kind of an ethos of Kindred.

The core of the business model is vehicle development.

We have a group of 17 engineers, mechanical, electrical, industrial engineers.

And what we do is focus on one model at a time.

So we bring in one model, we tear it down, build it up, tear it down,

put it up until it's freaking perfect.

Then we take that bill of materials and create our supply chain network,

which was all our vendors.

And then we do the work instructions in our blueprint system

so that we have this scalable way to build.

So that produces a new model once or twice a year.

We add models to our lineup.

So for us, the lineup is, we started with the Gas Bronco.

We introduced the EV Bronco.

They're both in full production now.

And our next one is the VW bus.

Yeah.

It's an electric bus.

Yeah, of course.

It's a wonderful car.

You know, they made this, that 1960, really 1954, actually, all the way up to 67.

Okay.

Right.

So it's the smiley bus.

Yeah.

Split window bus.

Yeah.

The joy machine is really what it is.

Right.

So that's kind of fun when you're going to vehicle development.

You know, I always, if you want to see what the next model is, by the way,

go to my driveway.

I'm always driving an unrestored version for a year to figure out what we want to keep

and what we want to get rid of.

Driving the bus, it was pretty easy to identify what we want to get rid of.

Sure.

You know, so that car had 46 horsepower, right?

It has drum brakes.

So you have to really kind of head to stop that car.

It has bicycle tires.

They're really narrow.

They're very narrow.

So they're just, it's not a stable vehicle.

Sure.

You know, and honestly, the use case of the car dwindles to, you know, nothing when

you can't take it on the highway.

You're not comfortable.

It's going to stop.

You don't want to bring your family in there.

There's no seat belts.

There's no headrest.

There's no air conditioning.

There's no stereo.

Right.

You know.

Right.

So even a nicely restored VW bus isn't modernized enough to actually enjoy it.

So we've had so much fun redesigning that bus.

We convert all our, we buy original buses, obviously, tear them all the way down.

We convert them to electric.

And then we also, we convert them to 21 window or 23 window buses, right?

So, but in the context of doing that, we go four wheel disc brakes.

So we have perfect balance in that car.

25% weight per wheel.

So it's extremely stable.

That's the first thing you notice when you drive it.

It has 294 horsepower.

So you get plenty of power to get on the highway.

It has redesigned interior with headrest and seat belts and coupé stereo system.

It's just a highly functional car.

So that is our current obsession, I can grade.

It's about to go into production.

So it'll be in production April 1st.

And we're sold out for the year on the buses as we go forward.

And then behind the scenes, we're working on our next model, which is sports car,

which will announce in March of 2026.

We're really excited about that one too.

That's the one I'm currently driving by the way.

What have you changed in terms of the way that you operate the business now

versus when you started?

Yeah, you know, we had a business plan, all the details on it.

Then you actually get into production and throw it all out the window.

Yeah.

I think the major thing is, you know, we're having a bunch of people who know what you're doing.

Right.

So we hired the guy that ran Tesla Model 3 line runs our production now.

So that we're really taking that very seriously.

Very KPI metrics driven, which is really important for us.

We've owned a lot on the sales and marketing side,

kind of what works, where we want to be with our cars and where we don't.

And how we work with dealers is something we're learning right now,

which is super fun for us.

So many lessons, you know, you've got to be very resilient

to start a company and grow at those significant scales.

I think that's probably one word that really fits us while resilient.

Yeah.

And in the next generation of the company, I mean, what could it look like

as you continue to expand out products?

And just grow what you're doing and do a much bigger formula.

The two things that are going to change the most in the next couple of years probably are,

we've got this beautiful building on on Meri Island,

a former Navy base up there in Vallejo.

And we restored that building and we're restoring these cars in there.

But that building can only in about five models.

And then we're going to need to put another building.

So that'd be a fun hunt for us to identify another market

that I think has a similar story that has an area that needs to be revitalized,

the building that's underutilized and a desire to create this cool job.

So Kindred will be on the hunt for another building here in the next 18 months,

which I think would be really fun.

And I think the other thing that's really changed is we now have credibility enough

with the dealers of the world, auto dealer dealers of the world,

that they're starting to carry Kindred as a new brand.

And that's fundamentally different because in the rest of the mod world,

as you talked about, every car is custom, so the dealers could never sell that car.

And we have standardized builds and we have standardized parts,

so the dealers know they can get parts from us.

So for the first time, the dealer is looking at us and saying,

wow, that's a company that actually has a car, I understand.

And for the first time, I get access to some vintage cars in a scalable way.

So that doesn't happen very often in the dealership world, that a new brand shows up.

And here at NADA, Scouts shows up and it's a new brand,

but it's not going through the dealer network.

And Kindred showing up, we know we're going to benefit from going through the dealers

and forward deploying our inventory, they can do the test drives,

they can do most importantly the service.

When you think about reinventing vintage car ownership,

we reinvented the car, so it's fully modernized.

You reinventing the buyer experience,

where you get to buy it from the same dealer you bought your last car,

reinventing the service equation.

They offer service for this car, which is something that's not available anywhere.

And I think that is kind of where the seismic shift starts to happen,

is that when you see Kindred showroom starting to show up here in Mexico for years,

you think we're headed towards being that brand over top of the vintage car world

that breaks through with the dealers out there.

Well, and I could imagine Ford dealers would love this idea.

I mean, they already have a new iteration of Bronco.

However, this sitting next to it seems like a pretty good idea.

I think so too.

And what's fascinating is these are all used cars, Kindreds, right?

These cars are original vans with original chain encusted all the way through.

So we don't run a foul of all these franchise agreements and arrangements.

And Kindred's really easy to work with.

We have great flexibility on what the building looks like and the allocation

and co-marketing spend and things like that.

So we're early on in that development program,

but I think that really opens up our audience to what's bigger in the world.

And if you expand, as you say that you will in the Volkswagen,

there are just other brands that will, again, another brand that has taken its own vehicle

and redefined it in some way.

You know, there's a complementary aspect to this, so there's no problem.

I think there is.

I would guess, though, that this will eventually evolve into a Kindred storefront,

a Kindred showroom that will have Fords and VWs and others in there.

And Kindred will be the overarching brand in there,

as opposed to kind of introducing individual models into your various rooftops.

Probably is going to evolve into a dedicated storefront.

In fact, we're seeing that with our dealer in New York, actually on Levitt Avenue,

where they have a dedicated storefront and will be a Kindred brand of storefront for us,

which is going to be a real breakthrough for us.

Yeah, fascinating.

You've got some interesting investors who have taken their own share over the product.

Talk a little bit about this.

Yeah, I mean, different motivations from all of them.

Robert Donnie Jr.'s an investor.

For him, it was the EV side of what we do.

He's a big car guy, and he wanted to go all-electric.

And he tried to convert some of his cars to electric himself and saw how hard it was.

And then when we were chatting, he realized that we've unlocked the equation on how to do it.

Invest in that EV platform.

We call that EV platform, Grayback.

It's our standardized platform, because these are fossil cars.

He saw that as the answer here.

So for him, he's an investor early on in the business, actually,

because he believed in the EV vision of bringing these old cars to life.

Remember, these old cars are not only guessing, but they're incredibly inefficient.

They're the most environmentally unfriendly cars in the world, right?

Whereas a Bronco convert to electric is one of the more environmentally friendly cars in the world,

because you don't have to re-manufacture the car, right?

So that was his motivation.

We have Michael Strahan, who's, you know, NFL Hall of Famer, good morning, America.

Yep, yep.

He's a huge car guy, too.

Yes.

So when he came to visit, he resonated with all three parts of the company,

the job creation I talked about, he was inspiring for him.

He loves the cars themselves, so the products,

but he loves the business model.

He understands how what we're doing is different than what's been applied before,

and it's a very large industry, and that we're kind of on the right path.

So for him, it was, you know, kind of, he's a true savvy investor,

and he loves our cars.

In fact, we bought several of our cars.

All right.

Wonderful.

Yeah.

And Visitation Factory, give him a little of that.

Can you believe it?

We actually offer customers the chance to come to the building and work on their car,

right?

And the reality is, because we have all the work instructions in our tech,

I could put you in for the day into any one of our areas, and you could work on the car.

Work on the car.

Yeah.

You might have to redo some of the stuff you did.

Yeah, work likely.

At least, you know, you'd have the work instructions, the videos and the photographs

to drive you through.

So about half our customers actually do, they come to the building,

and some of them are just going to Instagram, check me out, kind of things,

but others just won't leave the building.

They really love that.

And, you know, for us, it's really a unique experience to offer.

We can do it because of who we are, but it's also,

it builds a lot to those customers that come.

They really enjoy the experience of feeling like they're part of the company,

and looking at that and saying, I built that in my car.

Right.

That's a very unique thing.

Well, and there's so much, you know, speaking of that, there's so much within this vehicle

that just screams craftsmanship and quality, and not 1966 or eight or whatever, right?

I mean, you're using the best materials here in order to recreate.

And that means, you know, great leather, great seats, great functioning knobs.

I mean, you've got the whole package, and I'm guessing the sourcing on that is pretty amazing.

And it's a lot of work, as you mentioned, but it's also, it's craftsmanship.

Yeah.

You know, and a lot of this is a lost art, right?

When you come into our upholstery shop, there's not upholstery people out there anymore, right?

So we have a group of experienced upholsters that are craftsmen, and we hire entry-level people

and train them up to become that, right?

So that's fascinating.

We're actually reintroducing craftsmanship into the trades, which is really a fun thing to do,

but it allows us to control the quality.

And when you compare this car to a new car, a car like a Tesla,

this is about 30 hours of human labor to put that car together.

It's all robots.

For this car, 1,200 hours of labor, no robots, right?

So it's really kind of a throwback for the car, but also how it's built is also a throwback,

which is a lot of the value, honestly, in the car.

I applaud you in your efforts, and I know that none of this is easy,

and it all started with employee number one, you.

And now here we are in contracting all kinds of attention in Las Vegas and beyond with

Kindred Motors, so thank you so much.

Thanks for the opportunity, Jason.

Big thanks to my guest today from Las Vegas, Rob Howard, the founder of Kindred Motorworks.

To see more cars and culture interviews, visit the Cars and Culture YouTube channel,

subscribe, comment, check out hundreds of conversations with the creators, collectors,

and culture makers driving this industry forward.

That's this week's episode number 244 in our catalog.

I'm your host, Jason Stein.

We'll see you down the road.

Episode 244: Kindred CEO Rob Howard

About this episode

modifying

reimagining classic vehicles

restoring

Ford Bronco

Volkswagen Buses

modern drivability

electrification

automotive heritage

sustainability

restoration

manufacturing

Kindred Motorworks

rear view camera

four-wheel disc brakes

restomod

electric vehicle

aftermarket parts

supply chain

scale

Blueprint

vehicle development

horsepower

drum brakes

bicycle tires

weight distribution

production

sports car

KPI metrics

franchise agreements

showroom

EV

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