Dave Kindig Reveals How Bitchin' Rides Is Officially ENDING After This Happened...

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]They came in, had us escorted off the property, was going to take over the business, but they did basically try to steal my company and turn it into [music] a Mopar restoration shop. For over a decade, [ __ ] and Rides redefined custom cars, 11 seasons, countless iconic builds, and a small Utah shop turned global. Now Dave Kick has dropped a bombshell. It's over. But that's not the full story. This wasn't about ratings. It wasn't about audiences losing interest. Something happened behind closed doors, far above the garage, where men in suits made decisions that no one on the show could control. And now Dave Kig is finally opening up about what really went down behind the scenes.

[00:00:42]The Instagram post that shattered a decade of dreams. A single post appeared on Dave Kig's Instagram in November 2024, and within minutes, comment sections across every car forum on the internet started lighting up. No leak before it, no rumor in the trade press, no quiet whisper that something was about to break. One day, the show was rolling forward like always. Next, it was finished. Season 11 would be the last season of [ __ ] and Rides. The wording of the post was careful. Dave thanked the fans who had stood by him for over a decade. He mentioned the Riddler award-winning project that had eaten 4 and 1/2 years of his shop's life. He talked about big plans coming for Kindigot Design. He kept it gracious, professional, almost gentle, the kind of post a man writes when he is trying very hard not to say what he really wants to say. The people who had followed Dave for years knew something was off. This was not the language of a man closing a chapter on his own terms.

[00:01:43]The phrasing was too clean. The timing is too sudden. Shows that rap on a creator's own decision arrive with a victory lap. a final season teased months in advance. This had none of that. This had the flat, controlled tone of someone delivering news he was forced to deliver. And then there was the detail nobody could explain. Season 11 had already been green lit. Production plans were [music] drawn up. The crew was in motion. None of those signals that a show is preparing to end. That signals a show preparing to keep going.

[00:02:16]Something had happened between the green light and the announcement, and the truth was uglier than fans expected. The answer was sitting thousands of miles from his Salt Lake City shop in boardrooms run by people who had never watched a panel get handshaped or smelled the inside of a working hot rod garage. But Dave was not ready to name that yet. Not publicly, not on Instagram. What he did instead was take the weight onto his own shoulders and start delivering the news as if it [music] were his to deliver.

[00:02:46]The fan event where Dave's voice cracked. The first place he carried that weight in person was [music] Salt Lake City. The day started normally. Diecast replicas under arms, posters rolled in tubes, engines rumbling in the parking lot. [music] Dave walked out smiling the way he always did. The people who knew him best caught it instantly. The smile was tight, a little too controlled. The eyes underneath were doing something different from the mouth. Employees off to the side started glancing at each other. that small silent language co-workers develop after years under the same roof. When the crowd settled, Dave looked toward his team standing off stage and took a long breath. This season of [ __ ] and Rides will be our last. The room did not erupt. It froze.

[00:03:31]Some fans laughed nervously, waiting for a punchline that never came. Dave's voice had not wavered, but his [music] face was telling a different story. He did not blame the network. He did not name the boardroom. Instead, he gave the crowd the part of the truth he was ready to share. The decision had been weighing on him for years. The cars that arrived clean and finished in 43 minutes of edited footage had cost something the cameras never showed. Sleepless stretches. Builds that had to be perfect because the cameras were watching while three other builds sat behind them waiting for the same level of attention.

[00:04:06]Then he dropped the line that emptied the room of any remaining doubt.

[00:04:09]Somewhere along the way, [music] the work stopped being fun. It was true. All of it was true, but it was not the whole truth, and the people closest to him knew it. There was another piece of the story Dave was still carrying, one he was not yet willing to put on a microphone in front of fans. That piece would surface later in interviews where his frustration finally outweighed his patience. For now, he absorbed the announcement himself and let the crowd believe what was easier to believe, the deal with television. Long before Velocity ever called him, Dave Kindig already knew exactly what cameras did to a working custom shop, and he hated it.

[00:04:46]He had seen it firsthand on hot rod television. California production crews would roll into a shop, take over the floor, and start staging scenes that had nothing to do with how cars actually got built. Work would stop. Mechanics would be asked to redo the same weld three times so the cameras could catch it from different angles. Customers waiting on real builds would watch their cars sit untouched while the production crew chased a shot. Momentum, the lifeblood of any working garage, would die in real time. Dave had watched that happen and made himself a quiet promise that if television ever came knocking, it would happen on his terms or it would not happen at all. Then it came knocking.

[00:05:25]Velocity reached out after the right project crossed their radar. The GM Futureliner restoration. One of only 12 Parade of Progress buses ever built. A piece of American automotive history most people have never seen a photograph of. Sitting inside a Salt Lake City shop in the middle of being brought back to life. The cars his shop built were not going to be television props. They were customer cars. [music] Real customers.

[00:05:52]People paying half a million dollars and up for builds that would live the rest of their lives on real roads. He was not going to rush a project for ratings. He was not going to compromise a finish for drama. He was not going to let his shop become a sound stage where work stopped every time someone needed a clean shot.

[00:06:09]If the production company could not agree to that, the deal was dead before it started. Fizer Productions agreed.

[00:06:16]That mattered because Fizer was not a typical reality TV outfit. Chris Fizer brought a documentary background that most car shows could only pretend to have. He had spent time on the open ocean catching great white sharks for research. The man knew how to capture something real without staging it.

[00:06:33]Capture reality. Do not create it. A Park City crew came down to do the sizzle reel and fell in love with everything they saw. The mezzanines packed with parts and tools. The way the team interacted, the cars sitting at every stage of transformation. They got it. The magic was already in the building. Their job was just to point a lens at it without breaking it. That single decision is what gave [ __ ] [music] and Rides its signature. There was no manufactured drama, no fake deadlines. No cars were torn apart and reassembled three times for camera angles. When fans saw a finished Kindigot build in person, they realized something most television cars could never claim. These were not props. These were real driving cars built so precisely that any mechanic working on them later would be terrified of getting something wrong. the pressure cooker behind the cameras. To anyone watching at home, Kindigot design looked like the cleanest version of a dream a car person could imagine. What fans were seeing on screen was real. What fans were not seeing was the size of the engine running underneath it and how hot that engine was getting every single year.

[00:07:42]The shop covered 27,000 square ft. 43 employees moved through it on any given day. 16 to 22 custom builds were [music] running simultaneously. Each one at a different stage. Some in tear down, some in fabrication, some in paint. Each one came with a different customer, a different budget, a different deadline.

[00:08:04]Running that floor required the kind of operational precision that would have impressed a hospital administrator. Then the camera showed up and the math got harder. Days started before sunrise [music] and ended long after the production crew packed up. Filming obligations stacked on top of customer builds. Sponsorship requests poured in.

[00:08:24]Every season had to be bigger than the last. Every reveal had to top the last reveal. The crew loved it at first. They were proud. They wanted to prove they could handle anything. No build was too complicated. No timeline too tight. But it kept getting heavier. Bronson, one of the most dependable fabricators in the building, settled into a rhythm of a 16-hour days. He would work through meals, skip breakfast, skip lunch, skip dinner. Dave watched him rub his eyes between cuts. Watched him spend more time with the steel on his bench than with his own family. Kevin Sheileely was supposed to be the foreman, but in practice he was holding the entire operation together by sheer personality.

[00:09:05]Some nights he slept in the shop office because going home and coming back would have wasted hours he did not have. He was juggling enough plates that one slip would have brought the whole stack down.

[00:09:15]And Dave, the man whose name was on the sign, was being pulled in more directions than any human being can be pulled in for very long. Design meetings, production briefings, customer calls, on camera interviews. He was the face of the show, the leader of [music] the team, the artist behind the work, and the operator of the business. Each of those roles alone could have been a full-time job. He was doing all four.

[00:09:42]Underneath all of it sat a problem nobody could solve. Television runs on schedules. Episodes need content.

[00:09:49]Audiences need payoff. Custom car building runs on something completely different. Parts arrive late. Problems show up halfway through tearown. Two timelines that do not match. Being forced to share the same room. The chiropractor lawsuit that threatened the empire.

[00:10:08]A 1974 Dodge Charger sat in a corner of the Kindigot design facility. Mostly stripped, mostly silent, mostly forgotten. The cameras never pointed at it. Most fans had no idea it was even there. But that car was about to become the centerpiece of a legal nightmare that would do something Dave Kig had spent his entire career trying to prevent. It would make people question whether the man on television was the same man behind the doors. The numbers were staggering before the lawsuit even hit the docket. More than 30 chiropractors had pulled their money together for the build. The agreed price tag was $670,000.

[00:10:45]Over $230,000 had already been paid in deposits and initial costs. By every standard a custom shop operates on, that car should have been deep into a transformation by the time the trouble started. [music] It was not. According to the plaintiffs, what they had received was the shell of a car. No drivetrain, no interior, no functional components, just the bones of a vehicle that should have been moving toward completion and was instead moving toward nothing at all. When they reached out for updates, the answers came back evasive when they came back at all. Long stretches of silence punctuated by vague reassurances that something was happening, even though the photographs of their car suggested otherwise. The timeline made the whole thing worse.

[00:11:28]Kind accepted the commission in 2019.

[00:11:31]The deposit cleared in early 2020. By 2021, the build was nowhere close to complete, and the clients had stopped accepting excuses. Mediation attempts followed in the middle of that year.

[00:11:43]Those collapsed. [music] There were no refund offers on the table that satisfied the chiropractors and no clear timeline that satisfied them either. By 2022, what had started as a frustrated group of customers had become a coordinated legal action filed against one of the most famous custom car shops in America. The accusation cut to the bone. Fraud, breach of contract. The charge was that Kindigot had taken money for work it never seriously intended to deliver on schedule. The legal team backed it up with photographs and invoices showing minimal progress since the initial tearown. the kind of paper trail that does not look good in front of a judge. The implication underneath the accusation was even sharper. The chiropractors were not just saying their car had been delayed. [music] They were saying it had been deliberately set aside while their money was used to fund the cars that were going to appear on television. Kindigot pushed back. The defense pointed to the pandemic, shipping issues, supply chain breakdowns. The company leaned on its reputation and its long [music] list of completed projects as proof that the delays were unintentional. But that defense rang thin to clients watching other builds get finished while their charger sat untouched. Then the floodgates cracked open. Other former customers started coming forward. The complaints had a familiar shape. Slow progress, poor communication, builds that stalled and never recovered. One client had been waiting more than 3 years for a Camaro restoration that had not advanced past the bodywork [music] stage. Each new voice added weight to the same uncomfortable question. Was Kindigot Design taking on more projects than it could actually finish? That question landed in 2022 like a hammer, but its real damage was in what it implied. If the answer was yes, then the same television fame that had built the brand had also been quietly breaking it.

[00:13:34]The earlier copyright war nobody talked about.

[00:13:39]Most fans had no idea Dave Kindig had already fought this kind of war once before. The chiropractor's lawsuit looked like a sudden crisis from the outside. From the inside, it was the second courtroom Dave had been pulled into. The first one happened in 2014. A Michigan-based company called Creative Controls, Inc. had landed on Dave's radar for reasons that had nothing to do with cars and everything to do with the things he had built around them.

[00:14:05]According to the lawsuit, Kindigit Design filed that year. Creative Controls had reproduced and used copyrighted works and patented inventions without permission. Dave was not asking for a polite cease and desist. He was demanding damages. He was protecting the kind of intellectual property that custom builders spend years developing and that competitors can quietly strip and resell if nobody pushes back hard enough. This is the part of the custom car industry that [music] the cameras never explain. The unique systems, the specific design solutions, the engineered components that take a builder years of trial and error to perfect. All of that lives in a strange legal space. Without proper protection, anyone with the right facility and the wrong ethics can take what you spent half a decade developing and start selling it under their own name. Dave had built a brand on innovation. He was not going to let anyone copy that brand into the ground without a fight. Creative Controls fought back and they fought back hard.

[00:15:04]Their first move was to challenge whether the case even belonged in Utah.

[00:15:08]The argument was procedural but lethal if it landed. They claimed they had no personal jurisdiction in Utah, no employees in the state, no regular business operations there. The case, they said, belonged in Michigan on their turf, where the geography and the local rhythms of the legal system would tilt slightly in their favor. Dave was not having it. His position was that creative controls operated a website that facilitated orders from customers, including Utah residents, and that was enough to keep the case rooted in Utah.

[00:15:39]What followed was not a quick decision.

[00:15:41]It was years of trench warfare. Every dollar that went to lawyers was a dollar that did not go to equipment. Every hour spent in depositions was an hour not spent designing a car. The pressure was the kind that does not show up in a single dramatic moment. It builds slowly. It eats into decisionm. It pulls a builder out of the part of his brain that designs and drops him into the part of his brain that survives. Dave later admitted the experience nearly broke him. January 2016 brought a partial ruling. [music] The Utah District Court found there was enough evidence to assert jurisdiction over creative controls for certain non-patent claims, but not for the patent claims. That decision did not end the case. It just rearranged the battlefield. April 2017 brought another setback. Dave filed a motion to compel further discovery, the legal equivalent of demanding more information from the other side. The court denied it. The motion had been filed a month after Discovery officially closed. Even if it had been timely, the judge ruled that the information being sought was not proportional to the needs of the case. Another wall. June 2017, the case was referred to a magistrate judge for settlement discussions. Both sides sat down. They could not [music] reach an agreement. July 2017, the case finally closed. Both parties filed a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice.

[00:17:04]They agreed to drop the claims, drop the counter claims, [music] and wave any rights to bring the same fight again on the same grounds. The [snorts] exact terms of the settlement were never made public. But one thing was clear. Dave had spent years and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars defending what he had built. The lesson he walked out with was not the one most people imagine. It was not about winning. It was about the cost of being successful enough to have something worth stealing. He thought when it was finally over that the legal battles were behind him. He was wrong.

[00:17:36]The biggest threat to his empire had not even shown up yet. And when it did, it would not come from a competitor. It would come from a corporate boardroom in a building Dave had never set foot inside.

[00:17:47]The corporate merger that killed everything. The decision to end [ __ ] and Rides was not made in Salt Lake City. It was made thousands of miles away by people who had never walked through Dave's shop, never watched a build come together, never met a single member of the crew whose lives they were about to upend. Warner Brothers and Discovery had merged in 2022. Two media giants becoming one. The newly combined leadership team began the same exercise every corporate merger triggers. The cold and methodical evaluation of every asset, every brand, every channel, every show under the new umbrella. The question was always the same. Does this fit the future or does it not? Motor Trend Network did not fit. That was the answer the executives arrived at and it landed like a guillotine. Motor Trend had a devoted, passionate, specialized audience. It was the home of automotive television. It was where gearheads went when [music] they wanted to see real cars built by real builders. None of that mattered. Warner Brothers Discovery had decided to consolidate its content strategy around broad appeal entertainment and scalable streaming platforms like Max. Specialized programming was being labeled noncore.

[00:18:55]Niche audiences, no matter how loyal, were being deprioritized in favor of content that could move the bigger numbers on a quarterly earnings report.

[00:19:04][ __ ] and Rides was performing well.

[00:19:05]That part was never in question. Season 11 was already in production. The show consistently delivered viewers. None of that saved it. The cancellation was not about ratings. It was about synergy and strategy and spreadsheets. Three words that have killed more good shows than every bad showrunner in history combined. The shutdown was abrupt.

[00:19:25]Entire production teams [music] who had spent years inside the Motor Trend ecosystem suddenly found themselves jobless. Projects that had been green lit [music] and partially filmed were frozen in place with no path forward.

[00:19:38]Independent production companies whose entire business models had been built around Motor Trends pipeline of automotive content suddenly had no client. In a matter of weeks, an entire ecosystem of shows, creators, crews, and the passionate community that supported them all started to evaporate under the weight of corporate consolidation. For Dave, the timing was beyond cruel. His team had just completed the Riddler award-winning project, 4 and 1/2 years of work. The Riddler is one of the most coveted prizes in the entire custom car industry, the kind of honor that crowns a career. Winning it was the absolute peak of everything Dave had been building toward. Season 11 was supposed to showcase that achievement to millions of viewers. Instead, it became something nobody wanted, a farewell season carrying the weight of a victory lap that nobody at the network was around to celebrate. The electric hot rod and the future nobody saw coming.

[00:20:36]The cameras were gone. The network was [music] gone. The show was gone. And Dave Kindig walked back into his shop and started building the things he had quietly been planning all along. The CF1 program is the centerpiece. Carbon fiber reimaginings of the 1953 Corvette. Each one unique, no two identical. The standard CF1 runs a high-performance V8, and orders have already pushed past car number 37. Then there is car number three, the ECF1. Dave's personal vehicle. And it is fully electric. Built around a hypercraft powertrain with dual rear motors. It puts out 580 horsepower and over 3,000 lb feet of torque.

[00:21:17]Purists nearly lost their minds. This is a guy who tracks a Ferrari 458 for fun.

[00:21:22]A car he still calls the best Ferrari ever made before the turbo era took over. But the ECF1 has taken over as his new favorite to drive. And the moment he felt that torque, he understood something he probably did not expect to understand this late in his career. The future of hot rods might not sound the way anyone assumed. Building cars is only half of it. The bigger move was launching Kindall Access on YouTube, his own channel built outside the corporate machine that killed [ __ ] and Rides. He posts about two episodes a week. No network gatekeepers. Recent episodes have followed builds like a Ferrari 308 GTB being transformed into a 288 GTO tribute, the kind of project that would have been buried in a 3minute montage on television. He is also prepping for the 2026 SEMA show, continuing his modern classic paint line with Axon Nobel and showing up at events like Mechham Kissm.

[00:22:18]Kind Design is still running at full strength. Dave is still in the bays alongside his wife, Charity, and longtime team members like Kevin Shily.

[00:22:27]The shop did not shrink when the show ended. It got quieter, but it got better. Don't miss the videos on screen now. They're just as interesting. Catch you in the next one.