ICON's EV Bronco restomod is a crazy 9k electric beast and we drove it

ICON’s EV Bronco restomod is a crazy $449k electric beast and we drove it

Published

6 months ago

April 2, 2025

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ICON invited us up to its office in Chatsworth, CA, to have a chat with its founder, Jonathan Ward, and to take a quick spin in its bonkers new Bronco EV restomod.

Jonathan Ward is stuck in the past.

His office is littered with cars, newspaper clippings, toys, and furniture that are all half a century old, at a minimum.

He lives an analog existence, and has built a name for himself in an analog business. Ward runs ICON, a company focused on restoring old vehicles to absolute perfect condition, or making hand-built modernized versions of the classics. Ward has made quite a name for himself, and is considered by many to be the best in the business of restomods.

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Some of Wards “Derelict” series – the patina belies a modern powertrain underneath

But time does not stand still for any man.

The automotive industry is changing, more than it has in a century. And even the grognards need to adapt.

This is not to say that Ward is an entirely begrudging participant in the transition – his “GAS GUZZLER – NO ACCESS” mock carpool lane sticker notwithstanding. He merely says that he wants to ensure the transition happens in what he considers the right way – he wants to carry over the analog processes that he appreciates from the past and apply them alongside the technology we have right now.

Ward has toyed with electrification before, with a few one-off projects – a 1974 VW Thing, a 1966 Fiat Giardiniera and a 1949 Mercury Coupe.

But he never thought the technology was quite ready to make a scaled-up project – at least until now.

So, Ward has created the ICON EV Bronco, and it’s something else.

Broncos have been a popular platform for restomods both electric and otherwise, with multiple other companies doing their take on the same era of the Ford classic. ICON itself has a gas-powered Bronco restomod, which it calls the ICON BR.

The ICON EV Bronco builds on the ICON BR chassis. But it replaces the powerplant and software with an electric drivetrain with 500hp and 440lb-ft of torque – much more than the 100-200hp from the straight-six or V8 options in the first-generation Ford Bronco the ICON EV Bronco is based on, and also more than the 426hp of the gas-powered version of the restomod.

ICON says it spent about 5,000 hours of development on the EV Bronco over the course of 18 months, in partnership with Marc Davis and Moment Motors in Austin, Texas. Moment is another shop focusing on vintage restomods, but with more of a focus on electrification than ICON has had in the past.

Ward brought Davis on for his electrification expertise in particular – while Ward was happy to talk with us about CNCed billet aluminum, powder coated chassis and locking front differentials, he paused and called in the cavalry when we started asking questions about fast charging (it should manage around a 100kW peak charge rate, Davis told us, or about an hour to fill the 105kWh pack from 20-80% on DC – otherwise, it has a 6.6kW level 2 charger).

The 105kWh battery pack should be good for somewhere around 180-200 miles of range. It’s not the most efficient vehicle, but it’s not trying to be.

Drivetrain and Performance Specs
440+ lb-ft of torque
500+ hp
Full-time All Wheel Drive for on and off road performance
Currie axles with rear LSD and ARB locking front differentials
Advanced Ringer Adjustable Suspension
Brembo Brakes
Eco, Normal, and Sport driving modes to control performance and power usage
Battery Pack and Charging Specs
Industry standard 400V architecture
105kWh capacity for 175-200 miles of range
IP67* Waterproof Standard tested battery enclosures
Full thermal management to keep the pack in the optimal temperature range at
all times
On board 6.6kW Level 2 charger for easy at-home overnight charging
Level 3 CCS Fast charging via all the leading charging networks
VCU and System Control Specs
Completely integrated Battery Management, Power Management, and Vehicle
Management for complete control of the entire EV drivetrain
OTA remote diagnostics and updates
Traditional ICON gauges transformed to show essential EV stats at a glance
Head Unit with complete system monitoring and control available in the center
console along with CarPlay and Android Auto Compatibility
Ancillary System Specs
Fully electro-hydraulic power steering
Electric power brakes and parking brakes
Electric heat and Air Conditioning
Traditional ICON gauges now reflect basic EV stats at a glance, then the center
console mounted Audio head unit provides even more EV system stats and
controls along with a reverse Camera. Apple Carplay and Android compatible.
Dimensions (estimated)
LENGTH ……………….14’9” (177”)
WIDTH …………..…….6’3” (75”)
WHEELBASE………7.59 3/8” (91 3/8”)
HEIGHT ………………. 6’6” (79”)
TRACK WIDTH FRONT……5’9”” (69”)
TRACK WIDTH REAR……..5’7”” (67”)
Curb Weight………..5420 lbs.

We took the Bronco EV for a short drive around the streets of Chatsworth – not necessarily the best spot to get a feel for performance or to find many stretches of unoccupied pavement, but it’ll have to do.

The car is, obviously, full of ancient character (and I’m not just referring to Ward himself). The switches, the seats, the shifter, all have their retro flavor, though many have been updated behind the scenes (e.g. the window levers are electronic, but look manual).

The one thing that betrays the car’s modern underpinnings is the screen between the seats, which allows control of vehicle functions and even includes CarPlay and Android Auto

There are a few other modern touches as well, like my favorite, an electric step that automatically pops out when you open the door. Given how high the stepover is to get into this truck, the step will be appreciated by many.

I do think the drive software on this pre-production vehicle could use some more refinement. While the ICON EV Bronco does offer different drive modes thanks to drive software provided by Ampere EV, the instant 440 lb-ft of torque available to us is honestly too much for such a tall vehicle (79″) with such a short wheelbase (91 3/8″).

As a result, torque just has to be limited on the low end, even despite its all-time all-wheel drive. It would be too squirrelly without. It can get from 0-60 in 4.5 seconds, but there will likely be a good amount of drama on the way there.

The various drive modes do provide vastly different drive feel. Ward himself likes to drive in Eco mode, which he says is uncharacteristic for him, but that the car just too much without something to moderate all that power. I preferred the responsiveness of Sport mode, since I’m a stickler for rapid throttle response, but it was still very easy to spin the tires on this topheavy vehicle even during the simplest of maneuvers. So, maybe Ward is right on this one.

But, amazingly enough, this exercise in analog thinking also includes something that even many modern cars (and certainly most restomods) don’t: over-the-air software updates. So, even though we drove a development version, there’s even the possibility that post-release vehicles could be tweaked over time.

It even has off-throttle regenerative braking, something rare in the EV restomod scene.

Compounding the squirreliness of the accelerator, the steering system in the EV Bronco carries over much of the character of the original (though it has been upgraded with electro-hydraulic power steering) – which is to say, a big steering wheel with a lot of “play.”

We didn’t get a chance to try the Bronco EV off-road, but it felt like its driving dynamics would be most at home in the dirt, where it can use all that torque for rock climbing instead of racing.

For those purposes, the Bronco is packed with all the equipment you’d need, with off-road components carried over from the ICON BR chassis – Reiger Suspension, Brembo brakes, Currie axles, ARB locking front/ limited slip rear differentials, and multi-link suspension. And the ample ground clearance and approach angles you’d expect out of a box on stilts.

All that said, this is not a vehicle for a casual buyer – which you might have guessed from the $449k pricetag. It is obviously lacking much of what you might want in a regular vehicle on the road these days, and a lot of the things that you would expect out of an EV.

But if you’re looking for classic charm mixed with new technology underneath, and you happen to have recently found a bitcoin drive you lost in 2011, you know who to call.

Ward plans to make ten examples of the EV Bronco, each customized to their respective buyers’ tastes such that no two are alike. The buyers will be able to choose from the same design packages ICON offers for the gas-powered BR (New School, Old School, and Derelict) and body styles (soft top, hard top, roadster), with additional customizations for color, seating position, and so on.

And he wants to scale up from here. Heading into the future, Ward hopes to offer an electric powertrain as an option on all of his builds sometime in the next 3-5 years.

With what we’ve seen out of this one (and his past derelict builds in particular), we’re certainly excited to see what crazy projects he comes up with next.

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Environment

This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI’s nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

Published

4 hours ago

October 5, 2025

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Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.

OpenAI

It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.

Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.

“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”

His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.

Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.

Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”

The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.

“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.

Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.

With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.

The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.

“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.

A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.

‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’

Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.

In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.

Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.

“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”

Competition is fierce.

Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.

The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.

Shelby Tauber | Reuters

Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.

OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.

And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.

While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.

However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.

OpenAI's stealth site search drew more than 800 bids since January 2025

“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.

Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.

“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”

The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.

“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.

He understands why many people are skeptical.

“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”

WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

Environment

Cadillac’s quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

Published

5 hours ago

October 5, 2025

admin

Cadillac's quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.

GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.

As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.

Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.

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EV MODEL	Q3 25/Q3 24	Q3 25	Q3 24	YTD 25/YTD 24	YTD 25	YTD 24
Chevrolet Equinox EV	+156.70%	25,085	9,772	+389.88%	52,834	10,785
Chevrolet Blazer EV	+1.14%	8,089	7,998	+36.72%	20,825	15,232
Chevrolet Silverado EV	+97.49%	3,940	1,995	+78.58%	9,379	5,252
Chevrolet BrightDrop	*	2,384	*	*	3,976	0
GMC Hummer EV Pickup	+21.86%	5,246	4,305	+48.65%	13,233	8,902
GMC Sierra EV	+771.84%	3,374	387	+1,488.37%	6,147	387
Cadillac Optiq	*	4,886	*	*	9,826	0
Cadillac Lyriq	+1.18%	7,309	7,224	-18.17%	16,626	20,318
Cadillac Vistiq	*	3,924	*	*	5,669	0
Cadillac Escalade IQ	*	2,264	*	*	6,030	0
Total	+109.91%	66,501	31,681	+137.44%	144,545	60,876

Source: GM Authority / GM Q3 2025 sales report.

That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).

It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.

You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.

Cadillac Escalade IQ review

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SOURCE | IMAGES: GM, via GM Authority.

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Environment

Tesla teases mysterious new product unveiling this week

Published

5 hours ago

October 5, 2025

admin

Tesla teases mysterious new product unveiling this week

Tesla is teasing the unveiling of a mysterious new product planned for Tuesday, October 7th this week.

The teaser is ambiguous, which is sparking speculation.

On Sunday, Tesla released a short teaser on X featuring a few seconds of what appears to be a wheel or a fan spinning and ending with the date “10/7”: