Somewhere in Echo Park, an 18-year-old named Remy Kushner is column-shifting a 1969 Dodge Dart through traffic, waiting out the street sweeper, running a big-block swap he did himself. His mother, acclaimed novelist Rachel Kushner, rides shotgun in a car with questionable interior and zero pretension. The family Subaru Outback sits at home. It only comes out when it rains.
Road & Track recently sat down with the Kushners in their Los Angeles living room, and the resulting conversation is one of the more honest assessments of where hot rod culture stands in 2026. It’s not a eulogy. It’s not a victory lap, either. It’s something messier and more real than both.
Remy grew up watching Roadkill on YouTube, idolizing David Freiburger’s brand of vehicular stupidity. He started from what he calls “a place of ignorance,” buying the Dart and learning its systems one failure at a time. Leaking wheel cylinders, shot control arm bushings, a rusted hub with a drum slipping back and forth.
Now he’s swapped in a new motor, a new transmission, and a different rear end. He knows nearly every bolt on the car.
Rachel, for her part, has owned a 1964 Ford Galaxie since 1993. She bought it from a guy near Sacramento, stored it on blocks in Calaveras County for years while she lived in New York, then drove it down to L.A. when she moved in 2003. She’s not a mechanic and doesn’t pretend to be.
But she drives the thing to Silver Lake, up the Angeles Crest, through Hollywood and Burbank. Her son keeps it running.
The pair has even crewed a Top Fuel dragster in Kentucky. Rachel’s novels and essays are laced with vehicular obsession, from fictionalized Bonneville land-speed runs in The Flamethrowers to her real Cabo 1000 rally aboard a Kawasaki Ninja 600.
What makes the Kushners’ perspective valuable is their refusal to romanticize the struggle while also refusing to abandon it. Remy compares driving a classic car to fishing. The element of chance is the point.
You might break down. You might not make it. That uncertainty is what makes the good days worth having. Rachel jokes that if largemouth bass were as reliable as a Subaru Outback, nobody would bother casting a line.
Remy spends time on A-body forums populated mostly by 70-year-olds who insist on 11.5-to-1 compression ratios and cams so aggressive it takes an hour to fire the engine. He respects their four decades of knowledge while quietly noting they don’t seem to understand what the 101 freeway is like during rush hour.
The conversation turned to a chance encounter with Jay Leno, broken down on the side of the road in a ’68 Dart. Remy recognized the taillights before he recognized the man. Leno insisted his people were coming and blamed vapor lock.
Remy smelled race gas and had his doubts. Rachel told her own story about a stranger on a bicycle who spotted her Galaxie outside a grocery store and struck up a conversation. He’d just moved from Tennessee with an inherited ’63-and-a-half.
Old cars, she said, make you visible to other people in the tribe. Without the Galaxie, she’d signify nothing.
On the question of whether hot rodding survives electrification, parts scarcity, and the creeping complexity of modern vehicles, both Kushners are clear-eyed. Remy searches junkyard inventories weekly for Mopar parts and acknowledges the supply is finite. New old stock will run out eventually.
Working on 1960s iron forever isn’t realistic. He figures he’s riding the tail end of an era.
Rachel pointed to a San Francisco friend named Jim Hoogerhyde who’s been setting land-speed records in an electric streamliner and scavenging EV components from junkyards the same way hot rodders have always scrounged. The essence of the thing, she argued, isn’t about internal combustion. It’s about looking at a machine and knowing there’s more power hiding inside it.
That instinct doesn’t die with a fuel type.
She also took a shot at the restomod scene infecting wealthy Los Angeles, where film industry executives pay shops to build them immaculate LS-swapped C10s they never touched with their own hands. “It just looks like the thing,” she said, “but it isn’t the thing.”
The thing, apparently, is a kid in Echo Park who taught himself to rebuild drum brakes, a novelist who chose the Galaxie over the Subaru on a grocery run, and the strangers they keep meeting because of it.
