Gearhead’s 2015 Ford Mustang Eleanor Project Seized Over Trademark Infringement

Back in March this year, Chris Steinbacher of B is for Build garage / YouTube channel announced that the team’s latest project would see a 2015 Ford Mustang GT restomodded into an Eleanor replica. To that end, they had stripped the 2015 car of the chassis and had set out to put a 1967 fastback body instead, with all that entailed.

As with every other project from B is for Build, this one too was widely documented on both video and photo. All footage and pics of the project have now been removed from the garage’s official channels, but this is the Internet we’re talking about and nothing ever really disappears. An abundance of photos of the never-completed replica still exist, and you can see some of them in the gallery attached.

Then, on June 1, Chris broke the news that their Eleanor tribute was gone. It hadn’t been stolen or destroyed or been zapped out of existence by evil aliens, but had been seized the Gone in Sixty Seconds trademark holder. Apparently, as he explains in the video at the bottom of the page, before setting out to build an Eleanor, Chris did not bother to research whether he was allowed to.

Indeed, no one is allowed to build Eleanors (and call them that) without explicit permission from the trademark holder, which, in this case, is Denice Halicki, widow of director and actor H.B. Halicki, from the original 1974 movie. Through Eleanor Licensing LLC, Halicki owns all Eleanor rights, which means no one can make a replica of the world-famous Mustang and call it by that name without her prior approval.

When the 2000 movie of the same name, with Nicholas Cage and Angelina Jolie, came out, Halicki even sued Carroll Shelby over infringement for creating an Eleanor, even though it had nothing in common with the original 1967 Mustang Shelby GT500. In 2008, the two parties were still duking it out in court, with Halicki saying anything (“even a bus”) called Eleanor was infringement, and Carroll citing his own patent filing for the build as defense.

Chris had no idea of that, so his project has been seized. It wasn’t completed, but the replica was functional and driveable, and had even been taken out for a couple of test drives.

He doesn’t go into the details of the legal dispute because, he says, his lawyer advised him against it, but he does make it clear: he had no right to build an Eleanor, no matter where he started from. So the car has been seized.

On the bright side, he and his team are now working on three different projects: three cars to survive the Apocalypse.