Four years after The Customized Ride began, a new original series will tell the stories behind the cars, the shows, the miles and the family that has been building it along the way.
On October 16, 2022, The Customized Ride began with an idea, a phone and no real way of knowing where any of it would lead.
Four years later, there is plenty that people can see. There are thousands of automotive videos. There are car shows across the Southeast that have become familiar stops. There are millions upon millions of views, an audience spread across multiple social platforms and an archive filled with cars ranging from backyard builds to six-figure customs.
But there is another version of The Customized Ride story that has mostly remained off camera.
On October 16, 2026, exactly four years after TCR launched, we are beginning to tell it.
The Road We’ve Never Told is a new original series from The Customized Ride that will turn the camera around and tell some of the stories behind what we have spent the last four years building.
This isn’t intended to be a highlight reel. It isn’t a victory lap. And it definitely isn’t a story being told from the finish line.
We’re not there.
That is actually one of the biggest reasons we believe now is the right time to tell it.
There Was Always Another Story Behind the Cars
For most of TCR’s existence, the cars have been the story. That was intentional.
When we arrived at an automotive event, the goal was to capture as much of the show as possible. We filmed the cars. We photographed the builds. We walked miles through show fields looking for the next thing that might make somebody stop scrolling.
What we rarely did was turn the camera around.
People saw the finished videos, but they didn’t necessarily see what happened before or after them. They didn’t see the miles on the highway, the hotel rooms, the financial decisions, the mistakes, the exhaustion or the conversations about whether what we were doing made sense.
They didn’t see the videos that went nowhere sitting right beside the ones that reached millions.
They didn’t see the uncertainty behind some of the decisions that, looking backward, can easily appear more calculated than they really were.
The truth is, there was no master plan that predicted where The Customized Ride would be four years later.
There was an idea of what it could become. There were decisions we believed might give it a chance to grow. And there was a willingness to keep learning as we went.
Sometimes we got it right.
Sometimes we didn’t.
Those stories are part of The Road We’ve Never Told.
It Is Also a Family Story
There is another part of the journey that a follower watching a 30-second car video would have little reason to know.
The Customized Ride has created a lot of family memories.
Chris Benton founded TCR in 2022, and his son, Lil Chris, was there during those early trips. At first, Chris was the one filming. Lil Chris didn’t begin creating his own automotive content until the following year, and over time something started to change. The kid going to car shows with his dad began learning to capture the cars himself.
Eventually, he began developing his own style. In 2024, Hot Classic Rides was launched to give him a place to build an automotive identity of his own. Chris may have started the brand for him, but Lil Chris has been the one building it.
That father-and-son story is an important part of TCR, but it still isn’t the whole family story.
While Chris and Lil Chris were spending hours walking show fields, there were many trips where Sandy was back at the hotel taking care of their daughter, Katelynn. It isn’t something that appeared in the videos, but without Sandy doing that, many of those father-and-son days on the show field couldn’t have happened the way they did.
Sandy and Katelynn have their own memories from those trips. As the years have passed, both have naturally become more involved in the world surrounding TCR. Some of the stories we will tell in this series will involve them. Others will be primarily about Chris and Lil Chris. And plenty will have nothing to do with the Benton family at all.
The Customized Ride isn’t becoming a family reality show. The cars, owners, builders, events and automotive culture remain at the center of what we do.
But there is a family behind the cameras, and that family has been on this road too.
Why Tell It Now?
Because the story is changing.
For much of the first four years, The Customized Ride was primarily about creating automotive content and building an audience. Now we are asking a different question: Can we take what has been built and turn it into something larger?
Can The Customized Ride grow from a successful automotive social-media presence into a sustainable automotive media company?
That means exploring more original programming, owner and builder stories, interviews, event partnerships, sponsorships and other ways of telling automotive stories. It also means learning new skills, changing how we create some of our content and figuring out what kind of company we actually want TCR to become.
There is no guarantee any of that works.
And that is precisely why we don’t want to wait five or ten years to tell this story.
It would be easy someday, if everything works, to look backward and connect all the dots. Every risk could become a brilliant decision. Every setback could conveniently become something that “had to happen.” Every uncertain moment could be rewritten as though we knew exactly where we were going.
We don’t want to tell it that way.
We want to document some of it while the questions are still questions.
Opening the Archive — and Documenting What Comes Next
Some episodes of The Road We’ve Never Told will take us all the way back to 2022. Others will come from 2023, 2024, 2025 and the first four years of 2026.
We have an enormous archive to draw from: videos, photographs, screenshots, analytics, road trips, show footage and moments that didn’t seem historically important when they happened.
There are stories about the financial risk of traveling to major shows before TCR could pay its own way. There are viral videos we never expected to become viral. There are events and relationships that became important pieces of the journey. There are things we tried that didn’t work. There are times we questioned whether we should continue doing this at all.
There is also a $2,000 check from 1st sponsor that meant considerably more to us than the number written on it. It was the first meaningful sponsorship check we had hoped TCR could eventually earn and an early indication that something we had spent years building might have commercial value.
There are stories about Lil Chris growing up in this world, including moments that are happening right now as he begins becoming more comfortable speaking about cars on camera instead of only filming them.
There are family stories. Show stories. Business stories. Funny stories. Difficult stories. And probably stories buried in the archive that we haven’t even remembered yet.
But this series will not exist entirely in the past.
If something important happens next month, that can become part of The Road We’ve Never Told too. If we take a chance and it fails, that’s part of the road. If an opportunity comes along that changes TCR, we can document that. If something happens at a car show tomorrow that becomes a memory our family talks about for the next 20 years, that belongs here as much as something from 2022.
We are opening the archive while continuing to add to it.
We Don’t Know the Ending
Maybe that is the most important thing to understand about this series.
We don’t know how this story ends.
We have dreams for The Customized Ride. We would love to build a sustainable automotive media company that can pay its own expenses, fund its own travel, create opportunities for our family and other creators, and eventually contribute meaningfully to our family’s living.
We would love to see what Lil Chris builds as he gets older. We would love to expand the stories we tell, the shows we cover and the people we meet. There are ideas today that didn’t exist when the first TCR video was posted in 2022.
But those are dreams, not conclusions.
Four years ago, we didn’t know where this road was going.
Four years later, we still don’t.
We just know we’ve traveled far enough to realize there are stories behind us worth telling—and enough road still ahead that we want to document what happens next.
So on October 16, 2026, four years to the day after The Customized Ride began, we’re turning the camera around.
We’ll tell you about the road behind the videos, the cars, the shows and the numbers.
We’ll tell you some things that worked and some things that didn’t. We’ll introduce you to moments you never knew happened. We’ll tell you about the risks, the relationships, the family memories and the decisions that helped shape the first four years.
And while we’re telling those stories, we’ll keep building the next ones.
Because The Road We’ve Never Told isn’t the story of how The Customized Ride made it.
It’s the story of a family trying to find out just how far this road can take us.
And this time, we’re taking you along for the ride.
The Customized Ride covers car shows, car meets, car events etc..