The designer behind Mark Zuckerberg’s Porsche minivan said the car was one of his most technically challenging builds

West Coast Customs CEO Ryan Friedlinghaus has built custom cars for high-profile clients for nearly 30 years. 

The mind behind Mark Zuckerberg’s custom Porsche Cayenne minivan told B-17 that the car was one of the most technically challenging builds he’s worked on to date.

In October, Zuckerberg showed off in an Instagram post the custom car that was built for his wife, Priscilla Chan. Pictures and a video showed a Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT, a $200,000 SUV, was stretched and retrofitted with automatic sliding doors often seen in minivans.

“New side quest. Priscilla wanted a minivan, so I’ve been designing something I’m pretty sure should exist: a Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT Minivan,” he said in the post. “Threw in a manual GT3 Touring to make it his and hers.”

For his request, the Meta CEO turned to West Coast Customs, a California-based auto shop that has become iconic for its loud and elaborate custom car work for high-profile celebrities, including Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, and Shaquille O’Neal.

The owner of West Coast Customs who was personally responsible for bringing Zuckerberg’s car dream to fruition is a West Coast icon in his own right: Ryan Friedlinghaus.

“That Porsche was probably one of the most technical, craziest ones we’ve ever done,” Friedlinghaus said, speaking with B-17 from the LA Auto Show, which promotes the future of the auto industry. West Coast Customs collaborated with CART Department, an automotive arts platform founded by New York City mega-collector Larry Warsh, to debut an exhibit of custom-made cars at the auto show.

Friedlinghaus said one of the biggest challenges in creating a family-oriented Porsche minivan was installing the sliding doors.

“Originally, it was supposed to have one door, and they wanted two doors and they wanted it to open like the Toyota Sienna minivan,” he said.

West Coast Customs can’t reveal too much more about the specs and modifications of the car due to a nondisclosure agreement. But Friedlinghaus also said working with a car from a luxury company like Porsche is always a challenge since loyal followers of the brand typically like to adhere to original designs.

“Everybody’s such a purist in that space so modifying anything is always a challenge,” he said. “So I’m like: I need this to look good obviously for the family and for it to be functional. But what I also want is for people to look at it and be like, ‘Wow, did Porsche make that?’ And I think we nailed it on that one.”

Zuckerberg’s minivan is likely to be a one-of-a-kind on the roads. A Porsche spokesperson previously told B-17 in an email that the company has a “special wishes” department that allows customers to build their own Porsche to their “precise requirements.”

“To date we’ve not yet been asked to create a minivan!” the spokesperson said.

Friedlinghaus started West Coast Customs in the early 1990s with a small shop in Orange County, California. The shop was thrust in the national spotlight in the early 2000s when it served as the main hub for MTV’s “Pimp My Ride.” The show, hosted by rapper Xhibit, refreshed people’s beater rides with outlandish car mods like a hot tub or a pool table in the back of a truck bed.

West Coast Customs built a custom carbon fiber car for producer will.i.am using the chassis of a Tesla Roadster. 

“It’s definitely been a journey,” Friedlinghaus said. “I started in a 1,500 square foot shop in Laguna Niguel in ’93 and then grew it into the 60,000 square foot shop that we now have in Burbank.”

Friedlinghaus said his Burbank, California, shop is mostly on “cruise control” and that his main point of focus for the past three years has been West Coast Customs Academy, a nonprofit organization that provides students hands-on training for customizing cars.

Friedlinghaus said he first envisioned the academy to be a paid program, where students would be pay a tuition. But the founder said he turned the academy into a free training program after he felt the students who couldn’t afford the tuition had a higher appreciation for the work and opportunity.

“I feel like that’s going to be the legacy of my brand and everything is going to fall back on this,” Friedlinghaus said. “The West Coast Customs Academy is going to be my final chapter.”