The building is as much a survivor as anything that rolls out of it. A hundred thousand square feet of steel and glass on Mare Island, where trains once clattered down the center to deliver parts for the war effort. For fifty years, it roared with the sound of welders, rivet guns, and shipbuilders racing against the clock that was World War II. Then it went silent. Dirt floors collected decades of dust. Fires took some of the neighboring structures. The rest were left to stand in the wind, monuments to a time when the country could turn out a battleship in weeks. A time when what was possible was dictated by what was necessary.
Today, the space hums again. Not with the urgency of war, but with the methodical rhythm of another kind of resurrection. In bays where warships once took shape, old Broncos, Scouts, buses, and pickups are torn down to bare frames and built back up into something new. The parallels are hard to ignore: the same bones, re-engineered for a new life.
Kindred Motorworks calls this place home, and like the building, its work lives in the tension between past and present. That tension is where the word "restomod" lives too, a word some enthusiasts react to as if it were a bitter taste. In the purest circles, updating a vintage car is seen as erasing the story it has been telling for decades. The dents, the worn-through paint on a steering wheel, the way an old bus limps down the road, those flaws are character.
There is truth in that. You cannot fake patina. Some cars wear their history like a broken-in pair of leather work gloves that still carry the shape of its owner's hand. To some, starting over with fresh paint and new guts can feel like replacing the planks and sails of an old ship until nothing original remains, then still calling it the same vessel. But there is another truth too: a lot of those "original" cars do not get driven. They sit. Their stories end in garages and warehouses, or worse, in the hands of people who want them to look like they have been places, but never will again. Which is the greater loss, watching a machine slowly fade away through neglect, or altering it in the name of restoration so it can keep living?
Kindred's answer is not to strip the past away. It is to make sure the past can keep moving. That starts with respect for the original. Every build begins with a real donor vehicle, its factory VIN still stamped in the frame. The frame gets stripped, inspected, reinforced. Rusted sections are cut out and replaced. About ten percent are beyond saving, sent to the parts yard while another survivor takes their place. There is no VIN swapping here, no shortcuts to skirt the effort of reviving what is left.
From there, the process looks more like an automaker's development program than a custom shop's. Kindred makes a significant financial investment in engineering for each model, tearing one down and building it back up again and again until it drives the way they want. Every step is documented: 5,000 individual tasks for their electric Volkswagen bus alone, 1,250 parts, torque specs for every bolt. Once the formula is right, it is repeated exactly. No one-off customs. No changing direction mid build because someone saw something neat on Instagram.
That discipline gives them the freedom to focus on the balance: what to modernize, and what to leave alone. Some people can live, and even enjoy, quirks like unassisted drum brakes or steering boxes with an eighth turn of play, but many cannot, and in the end, these are machines and it's all about getting people out and driving. Kindred fits four wheel discs, rack and pinion steering, and suspension that can keep up with highway speeds. Three point belts, headrests, rear view cameras, the things that make it feel less like strapping into a time machine without a safety net. But the parts you see and touch, the cabin you sit in, keep their period lines. Gauges, dash, seating, restored with a goal to feel right for the era.
For the purist, and for me as the one telling you this story, it is hard to write about this without bias because I believe, deeply, that flaws make the car. The vague, wandering feel of a worm-and-roller steering system on an old Land Rover is technically outdated, even dangerous when worn, and yet it defines a portion of the car's character. Erase that, and you erase the essence. But for a lot of people, those flaws are why they do not drive them. Kindred's philosophy is that joy comes from use, and you cannot enjoy a machine you are afraid to take out of the garage.
That is not a compromise made lightly. The founder Rob Howard, has been on both sides of the equation. He grew up in Philadelphia in a house where if something broke, you fixed it: toaster, TV, car. Later, after a career in engineering and tech, he found himself craving work with his hands. Late nights in the garage turned into full restorations: Mustangs, a '57 Chevy wagon for his kids, the kind of deep dive projects where you know every bolt because you have touched every bolt.
He also knows the other side, the disappointment when a years-long restoration finally rolls out under its own power and still cannot stop worth a damn, or needs a ten minute warm up that fills the house with fumes. After enough of those, he wanted to build something different, a place that could deliver a finished car you could use the way you use a modern one, without losing what made it worth saving in the first place.
Kindred's lineup started with a Bronco and has grown to include electric VW buses, vintage pickups, and more in the pipeline. Each one is chosen for its cultural gravity. They only tackle vehicles with a strong, living community and, often, a manufacturer revival, the kind of models that pull people in even if they have never owned one. That means parts supply is strong, and the emotional hook is already there.
Electric conversions have become a bigger part of that story. Kindred offers both gas and EV builds, but the balance is tilting toward electric. Lower maintenance, instant torque, and the ability to engineer an entire drivetrain from scratch make a compelling case, especially when you have already done the hard work of cooling systems, battery boxes, and software integration.
None of it happens fast. Development on a new model can take six to nine months of tearing down, refining, and testing before production even starts. The advantage is that once a model's blueprint is locked, it stays in production indefinitely, each one as consistent as the last. That is where the shipyard analogy deepens: building at scale, with repeatable quality, while still honoring the craft.
Walking through the Mare Island facility, you see it in motion. Donor trucks stripped to bare frames. Electric buses with Corvette sourced front suspension. Engineers hunched over laptops next to techs fitting trim by hand. It is industrial, but there is an undercurrent of something older, the sense that these are machines built to be used, not just displayed.
The Mare Island building could have been leveled, replaced by another anonymous warehouse. Instead, it is back to doing what it was built for: turning raw material into something ready to take on the world. The cars leaving its doors may not be exactly as they were the day they were born, but if the measure is whether they will be out there in another fifty years, history might just forgive the updates.
