Gettin' It On The Road
Stone and I sat there, breathing a cautious sigh of relief.
We had successfully made it to our kickoff party, the night before we were set to leave for Vegas. We had chosen to drive the newly-built-and-decidely-not-yet-finished SpeedWagon from our garage to its new home for the week, our booth in Performance Hall at SEMA 2025. The far saner choice would have been to trailer it. It had been an all-out sprint that saw us firing up the car for the first time in months a mere 3 hours before our roadtrip kickoff party. Suffice to say we were tired… And excited… And more than a little nervous.
I'm willing to admit it now, since we made it there and back, but what we did, what I pushed us to do, was objectively risky. A swing for the fences. But sometimes you just have to go for it. I knew that driving our car would be a feat that car people would take note of. More specifically, a move that would give potential investors and customers confidence.
A year prior, we had gone to SEMA 2024 almost on a whim–we didn’t even come up with the idea until the end of summer, only a couple months before the show. I had a 2 month old baby. We had no car to take. So I bought one, covered it in foam, and shaped it as best I could with my limited time. We posted progress videos to Instagram, got a small booth at SEMA, coaxed friends to work the booth, trailered it there, and just like that we were in front of people.
We took some heat from trolls online for the car being just foam, but in person the excitement was clear and consistent. If we could bring our idea to life, people were most certainly interested in it. And despite the hate online, we managed to build a community of 15k followers in one month.
The demand and excitement for a V8 manual wagon was so palpable, our mission from the moment we broke down our 2024 booth was to come back in 2025 with a driving prototype. The only problem? We didn’t have any money to build it. Investors loved the idea, but they wanted to see a driving prototype before they bought in. Fair enough, so we turned to family and friends, and were lucky enough to find enough support from them to get a running prototype together.
We were on a tight timeline so I jumped in and spent money like a drunken sailor. We acquired another car, found part-time mechanic help, and I got to work. Stone set off on handling everything that wasn't the car–website, community outreach, legal, SEMA booth sponsors and materials, and organizing our West Coast road trip to engage as many fans as possible.
While we were hard at work, we still needed to make progress on the design. The design warrants its own newsletter, but the short version is that this car has been hard to design. It lives in an in-between space of classic car cues and a need to look and feel from its own unique time. One foot in the past, one in the future. We are heading in a completely different direction than the rest of the car industry, and our design needs to reflect that. Thankfully, a couple of fine gents approached us at SEMA 2024, and we have been working with Brooks Stevens ever since, collaborating on the design (more on this later).
With so much to do on the car, we chose to focus on 1) the drivetrain; 2) the electrical systems (including HVAC); and 3) the interior. The drivetrain and electrical system were a must-do for the roadtrip, but I prioritized the interior over the exterior because it was the aspect of the design and build that I understood the least. I needed to see the whole picture–get my hands on it–and just build it to see how it felt. To see what I and our followers would like.
So we worked. And pushed. We connected with car buffs. And solved every issue that popped up. We strung together all the thousands of tiny and grand thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams that had been floating around our brains (and yours) for years.
We built the damn thing.
Well, we built a bunch of it anyway. The whole point of a prototype, after all, is to put the idea to the ultimate test, and to turn our thesis statement into a roadmap for all future SpeedWagons.
It’s worth noting that our SpeedWagon prototype is still not done, but that is not a failure of the plan. We didn’t build the prototype just for SEMA, and we’ll likely never build a car just for a car event–the events are pressurizing tools to get as much done as possible and to help us push for specific milestones. For SEMA 2025, it pushed us to make the SpeedWagon driveable. Whatever we showed up to SEMA with, we knew it would help us move the conversation forward with the people who mattered most–our community of fans and potential customers, investors, partners and advocates.
2025 was a full year, and there will be more full years to come. But it was a huge turning point because we made the dream real. There have been all sorts of great outcomes from 2025, ones that I’m looking forward to sharing with you in the newsletters to come.
Until then, keep your cars dumb and your driving smart.
Silas
*Photo credit: Maris Saulits, Kevin11, and Jason Tang