Our Story
A lifelong passion for cars, and a hard lesson about trust.
Cars were a passion since childhood, then a hobby, then a business. A partner stole in silence for a year. Autodyssey is full transparency for everyone who touches your car.
Origin
A vintage Defender company across four countries, the year I lost half of it, and then I lost all of it.
I ran a vintage Land Rover Defender import and restoration company for years, sourcing trucks out of England and Spain, refurbishing them through workshops in South Africa and the UK, and delivering them to owners back home in Minnesota and across the United States. Every truck moved through a documentation process that was meant to keep customers honest about what they were buying and keep us honest about what we were building.
We loved this work. The customer and the car were always the point. Every photograph, receipt, and inspection note existed so that a Defender we sent home would still be telling the truth about itself a decade later.
The Year
A general manager who treated honesty as optional, and a documentation process he learned to slip around.
The general manager who also served as director of our UK workshop spent a long time quietly finding his way around that process. He skimmed time. He skimmed resources. He skimmed money. He skimmed the talent of a team I had trusted him with.
He redirected funds away from the duties he had signed up for as a director. He told customers stories about restorations that were finished when the work had barely started. He treated the whole arrangement as a private opportunity, and self-interest was the only ledger he kept honestly.
It took me a year of patient digging to understand the shape of what he had done. Autodyssey is the system that would have caught him inside a week, and the reason every record in the Vault is append-only and impossible to quietly alter.
What we believe
Four ideas we keep coming back to.
A documented car is a better car
A car with proof of every service, every restoration and every owner is worth more, sells faster and earns the trust of insurers and judges who would otherwise shrug. The proof has to live somewhere serious. That is the entire point of the Vault.
The record outlives the driver
Decades of careful work sit in shoeboxes, on phones, in email threads with shops, in the heads of the people who did the work. When the car sells, half of it is lost. When the owner dies, almost all of it is. The Vault refuses to let that keep happening.
Heritage is a daily practice
Heritage is what you do every weekend with a torque wrench and a notebook. It is the receipts you keep, the photographs you label, the friend you call when the wiring loom defeats you. We built a brand that respects the practice and gets out of its way.
The Raconteur runs the room
The motoring internet is loud, paid for, and almost never written by anyone who has held a spanner. We tell stories the way the best garages do, in a long calm voice with a strong opinion, and we keep the room civilised.
Where this is going
We built the system we always wanted. Now we are sharing it with you.
Open a free Garage, document a car you love, and watch its Provenance Score climb every time you add a receipt, a photograph or a fresh entry from the workshop.