Hot Rod And Kustom Legend Gene Winfield, Creator Of Star Trek Shuttles And Amazing Hot Rods, Dead at 97

One of the true greats of the Kustom car and hot rod scene, as well as the designer and builder of numerous famous movie and television vehicles, Gene Winfield, has died today at the age of 97, leaving behind an incredible legacy of cars, design, engineering, art, innovative techniques, and countless lives enhanced by his works, teachings, and kind demeanor.

Winfield began his career modifying and building cars about as modestly as possible, behind a chicken coop at his mother’s house in Modesto, California. Eventually Winfield grew from a chicken coop-adjacent space to a whole shop called Winfield’s Custom Shop in Mojave, California. When he was young, Gene built a hamburger wagon on an old truck chassis, which eventually turned into the small restaurant his mom would run.

He would take pictures of cars and car modifications everywhere he encountered them, and then study the photos carefully. This led to some of Gene’s earliest cars, a 1929 Ford Model A coupé, and shortly after that a Model A roadster and then a Model T roadster, all of which Gene modified in various ways.

Winfield also was interested in racing, and in 1951 built a racing Model T that hit 135 mph at Bonneville Speedway; you can see the car above (it’s named The Thing).

Gene later came up with a novel way to mix paint colors in full-fade paint jobs, and used his new technique in 1959 to paint a custom known as the Jade Idol, made from a ’56 Mercury and a Chrysler New Yorker, which brought him widespread recognition.

Gene worked with Aluminum Model Toys (AMT) in the early ’60s, as a designer for model kits; after all, the model industry was one of the major ways the custom car scene was able to monetize its work.

In 1964, Winfield built the remarkable Reactor, which was built on a Citroën DS chassis, complete with its hydropneumatic suspension and a beautiful chromed Corvair flat-six engine. The car was so striking that it was used in multiple television shows of the era, with a whole episode of the suburban-witch-themed show Bewitched writing a whole episode around it:

…and an episode of Star Trek used it as a car built in an alien world, known as the Jupiter 8, seen here with Captain Kirk himself:

Speaking of Star Trek, Winfield also designed the iconic shuttlecraft used in the first series, known as Galileo. Gene redesigned the original, more complex design into something that used more flat panels and straight edges so it could actually be built in the extremely limited time demanded by the studio.

Here’s a whole video about the building and restoration of the shuttle, with lots of time from Gene himself:

Gene kept building custom cars for movies, including some VW Beetle-based futuro-cars for the 1973 Woody Allen movie Sleeper, when Allen was just funny and not creepy yet:

In 1987, Winfield designed the satirical 6000 SUX used in the sorta dystopian movie Robocop, a car that got its own commercial in the movie:

As if that’s not enough, Gene also made some of the police Spinners used in another 1980s dystopian movie, Blade Runner:

Gene absolutely left his mark on the whole custom car world and movie/television car world, and perhaps as importantly, he was known to be a genuinely kind person.

Gene will definitely be missed by so many in the automotive world and beyond, and he has brought fascination and joy to so many people who perhaps never even realized who he was.

But we know, and we wish him eternal peace.