The Music Man Car Guy Nadeem Khan Builds Bridges that Break Down Barriers Marc Middleton
Nadeem Kahn puts the OMG in DIY. One day, he brought home the metal needed to build a carport. “My wife immediately said, you’re not capable and nixed the idea,” he recalls. “She was right, but I couldn’t take the metal back, so I used it.” Working in the driveway (a carport would have been nice), Kahn and his son, Miles, used the metal to fabricate the frame for a street rod. Pleased with their ingenuity, they went full blown Dr. Frankenstein; finding, adapting, handcrafting, and cobbling together bits and pieces from dozens of cars: Buicks, Chevys, Fords, Edsels and more. You name it and a piece of it has likely found its way into Kahn’s right-hand drive T-Bucket hot rod complete with a Daimler V8 powertrain. Kahn’s journey into automotive eccentricity began when he was a teenage boy growing up in England and first saw a concept car called the Lincoln Futura. The Futura was hand built in 1955 at a cost of $250,000 (equivalent to $2,400,000 in 2021). After a successful run on the show circuit, Ford Motor Company sold it to car customizer George Barris for one dollar. In 1965, the producers of a new TV show called Batman asked Barris if he could fabricate “a Batmobile” on a nearly impossible timeline. In two weeks, the Futura became the Batmobile, Barris became famous, and Kahn became hooked on car culture. “There were no cool cars that you actually saw on the street,” Kahn recalls. “But occasionally, you'd see a big American car and that was mindblowing for a child. You can imagine how my imagination ran wild when my dad, who was quite the storyteller, told me that he was close personal friends with Batman and Robin. He said all he had to do was make a phone call and they'd come over. He was a bus driver. How could he be friends with Batman and Robin? But I was just a child and I really believed him.”
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