Richrebuilds

Rich Rebuilds is run by Rich Benoit, who co-founded the channel alongside Carl Hewitt. Benoit uses his real first name on camera, so Rich Rebuilds functions as a brand rather than a pseudonym. The channel's YouTube bio credits both Benoit and Hewitt as co-founders of the operation.

Yes — Rich bought a $300,000 Bentley listed as scrap-only for around $5,000 and documented using baby oil as part of the repair process, with the car actually running afterward. The video became one of his most-watched because it perfectly captures the channel's core premise: fix expensive cars that everyone else has written off using whatever works. Dealers had warned the car should never be started again.

Rich Rebuilds swapped a traditional V8 combustion engine into a Tesla body — essentially inverting the entire point of an electric vehicle. It's listed in his Instagram bio alongside the Hellcat Minivan as one of his signature "bad ideas that occasionally work." The build draws attention precisely because it goes against everything Tesla's engineering philosophy stands for.

The Hellcat Minivan is one of Rich's most iconic builds — a family minivan powered by a supercharged Dodge Hellcat V8, pairing maximum family-vehicle practicality with muscle-car performance. It's name-checked directly in his Instagram bio as a defining project. Builds like this define the channel's tone: genuinely funny engineering that actually functions.

Rich flew to China to personally investigate why the U.S. government is blocking Chinese electric vehicles from the American market. Rather than covering the story from a desk, he documented the trip firsthand — testing Chinese EVs and talking to people inside the industry. It represents a more investigative, travel-journalism side of his channel compared to his typical garage builds.

Yes — Rich Benoit publicly documented Tesla's refusal to sell him parts and deny repair support for salvage Tesla rebuilds, which became a major ongoing storyline on his channel. The conflict made him one of the most prominent voices in the right-to-repair movement for electric vehicles. His independent EV shop, The Electrified Garage, was directly shaped by the difficulty of getting Tesla to cooperate with outside repair operations.

The Electrified Garage is Rich Benoit's EV repair shop in Massachusetts, which grew out of his YouTube channel's focus on rebuilding salvage electric vehicles. It specializes in repairing Teslas and other EVs that insurance companies have totaled, making it one of the few independent EV repair operations in New England. The shop and the channel are tightly intertwined — most of the builds documented on YouTube happen there.

Carl Hewitt is the co-founder of Rich Rebuilds, named alongside Rich Benoit in the channel's official YouTube bio. While Benoit is the primary on-camera personality, the channel formally credits both men as the people behind the operation. Hewitt's involvement is part of what makes Rich Rebuilds a collaborative project rather than a solo creator channel.

Rich Rebuilds has partnered with Manscaped (he's part of #teammanscaped), Insta360, and Yoshino Power — a solid-state battery brand that fits naturally with his EV focus. More recent sponsorships include ShipStation, PLAUD.AI, and Temu, showing the channel's brand appeal extends well beyond the automotive category.

Audi told Rich his $160,000 S8 needed a $35,000 engine replacement — but he found a different root cause that Audi's diagnosis had missed entirely. The video documents him proving the dealer's catastrophic repair estimate wrong, which is a recurring theme on his channel: expensive cars condemned by official service departments that he fixes for far less. It's one of several recent builds where a luxury brand's worst-case scenario turns out to be fixable.