What year is it? These Georgia-made cars look classic, but only on the outside.
For someone who grew up with his bedroom plastered with classic car posters, Chau Nguyen doesn’t have much nice to say about his experience once he made that dream come true.
Sure, nothing on the road turns heads quite like a hot rod or vintage vehicle in pristine condition. But Nguyen isn’t shy about the shortcomings of his first classic car, an iconic 1970 Ford Bronco.
“It basically looked good from 10 feet away, but everything about that truck was bad,” Nguyen, a serial entrepreneur, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The steering was really loose, the brakes barely worked, it leaked everywhere, it broke down and it smelled bad.”
Despite breakdowns, including once being stranded on I-85, he managed to keep fixing and driving it while building out a collection of classic cars. But the breaking point came when his wife refused to let their young children near any of his half-century-old vehicles, which lacked air bags and the safety features standard in even the cheapest modern cars.
Nguyen said that led to an epiphany — and the creation of an Atlanta-area business that has caught the attention of social media scrollers, celebrity clientele and global automakers.
“Our customers don’t want a classic car,” he said. “They want a classic-looking car.”
Nguyen founded Vintage Modern, formerly known as Vintage Broncos, to wrap classic car veneers around the latest vehicle undercarriages. The company is based in Gwinnett County and specializes in mimicking the appearance of 1970s-era Ford Broncos and Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons with all the bells, whistles and customization of new luxury vehicles.
Georgia’s place in the national automotive ecosystem might be anchored by the likes of Hyundai and Kia, which operate sprawling factories here employing thousands, but Vintage Modern is finding its niche.
The startup has more than 160 employees and is preparing to move to a 130,000-square-foot facility in Duluth, which will triple the company’s annual output to 750 vehicles. The company is also preparing to launch a new vehicle model this fall.
Vintage Modern’s cars aren’t cheap, often starting at $250,000. But they’ve captured the eye of several celebrities, including Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Hart, LeBron James, Tyler Perry and Jennifer Lopez. The company’s fleet of Broncos has also drawn the ire of Ford over alleged trademark and advertising violations, sparking a lawsuit that remains pending.
But as Vintage Modern expands its operations, Nguyen said it aims to continue turning heads through its unique blend of old and new car design.
“One of the most common questions is, ‘What year is it?’” he said. “And our customers can tell them 2026.”
Building new classics
Restoring old vehicles is nothing new, but it presents a lot of challenges.
Several companies specialize in “restomods,” a blend of restoration and modification that takes classic vehicles and incorporates modern engines, but there are limitations. Many of the luxuries and safety features seen as standard today, such as console screens or air bags, are difficult to jam into spaces that were never designed for them.
Nguyen decided to flip that problem on its head. Rather than making an old car feel more modern, he’s aiming to bring new vehicles back in time.
Sourcing parts primarily from partners in Detroit, Vintage Modern uses the bones of 2026 luxury models and then shapes the exterior to look like it’s decades old. For example, the bones of his company’s G-Wagons are a Mercedes-Benz’s 2026 undercarriage made to look like its 1970s-era predecessors.
“We keep all the things that are great about it like the frame, the drive train, the safety features and the technology,” he said. “Everything else, we either built or we heavily modified.”
That’s evident in the hundreds of potential color options available to customize the company’s Bronco-esque vehicles. Interiors can be enrobed in leather matching the pattern of a handbag, while backup cameras are embedded into chrome bumpers.
Each vehicle takes about 900 hours of labor to assemble, all of which is done by hand. The company launched its first vehicle in 2024 and could only make one vehicle a month, but it now produces about one per day.
“It’s not like an automation line where you hit a button and it’s all robotic,” Nguyen said. “These are people handcrafting the product.”
Pistons, pivots and precedent
Nguyen started the company fresh off two other startup successes.
He helped build Campus Special, a digital platform that offered discounts to college students, which sold for $17 million to education technology firm Chegg in 2014. He then built the job-seeking application Hirewire, which was sold to Seasoned in 2016 for an undisclosed price.
That startup ingenuity is evident at Vintage Modern as it quickly grows.
“Being a smaller company at an earlier stage, our advantage is that we’re nimble,” he said. “A lot of our people come from big companies where there’s like 10,000 or 50,000 employees. Here, they have the ability to really be a player.”
The company in September plans to announce its third vehicle model, which Nguyen said is a departure from the company’s bread-and-butter SUV lineup. The only hint he’d give is that the model will ramp up the horsepower to 810, going from 0 to 60 mph in 2.8 seconds.
Vintage’s startup speed has resulted in some bumps in the road, namely a trademark infringement lawsuit from Ford.
In 2024, the Detroit auto giant alleged the startup’s branding and Bronco lookalikes crossed into false advertising. Amid the lawsuit, the company rebranded to Vintage Modern, disclosing on its marketing and website that it “is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Ford Motor Company or the Ford Bronco brand.”
“Vintage Broncos’ unauthorized modifications and resale of modern Ford Broncos, reselling them as ‘vintage,’ is misleading and unfairly profits from Ford and Bronco brand assets that we have spent decades building,” a Ford spokesperson told the AJC. “We have an obligation to take all appropriate steps to stop those who put customers at risk and ride on the coattails of Ford’s significant investment and reputation.”
Nguyen said the rebranding was always a plan as the company expanded its model offerings, adding that he’s “confident in our position” as the lawsuit proceeds.
“We’re pretty confident that we’ll end up in an amicable commercial agreement at some point in time,” he said.
Nguyen said the company will remain in Georgia as it scales, and he expects the market for his luxury vehicles to only increase. He expects his clientele, those willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a car, to want their vehicles to drive as well as they look.
“I didn’t spend all this money to have the car sit in the garage,” he said.