It was 2012 when our founder, Scott, started following Tim Burton, aka Shmee150, on Instagram. Tim, a young YouTuber passionate about exotic cars, began making YouTube videos for his Shmee150 channel in 2010. By 2015, Scott had mentioned Tim to everyone in the Rover Dome and became determined to have him visit our custom Land Rover facility. “We’ve got to get him here,” we’ve all heard it several times over the years. But the YouTuber was based out of his home country in the U.K., and it didn’t seem like he’d be visiting our British lads here in the states anytime soon. 

Shmee Visits ECD

Today, Tim’s Shmee150 brand has a whopping 3.7 million followers across his Instagram and YouTube channels. As we do every year, we invited him out to the Rover Dome; this just happened to be the year he opened his exotic vehicle obsession to American soil and heard back that he’d be adding ECD to his itinerary. While Tim doesn’t frequently feature SUVs, overland, or off-road vehicles in his content, the ECD team was excited to get to show him that speed and detail can also come in rather large packages. Other than the new 2020 Land Rover Defender, it would seem that ECD is the first Defender builder that Shmee has reviewed and tested. So we, of course, planned for him to have the full experience, from test driving a supercharged LT4 powered Defender 110, trying out one of our Electric motor Defender 110s, touring our facility, to even seeing his custom Defender 110 in our full 3D rendering experience we have for clients. 

Not only were the restomod features enough to make him swoon, but it was also the feel of the Defenders as he drove each one and our insane level of customization for every vehicle we built that was truly jaw-dropping for even someone who has seen hundreds of one-of-one custom luxury vehicles. 

You can watch Tim’s full ECD experience on his YouTube channel here, Shmee Visits Defender Builder, and learn why he refers to ECD as “The Singer of Defenders” and “The Pinnace of Land Rovers.” Let’s just say it has something to do with the direct quote from Shmee 150 himself, “There is not another auto builder in the world who allows you to choose the needle size on your gauges.”