It’s not every day that a car customization TV show amazes and keeps people on the edges of their seats, but somehow “Bad Chad Customs” was that show for many people. Despite its short-lived, two-season-long run on TV, “Bad Chad Customs” did wonders to heighten its audience’s love for cars, by focusing on challenging and highly creative projects which most people wouldn’t dare contemplate working on.
The genius at the center of the show is Chad Hiltz, whose decades-long experience as a designer and car builder allows him to showcase the best of his talents on TV. There’s also Jolene MacIntyre, Chad’s fianceé who manages the business side of everything, and is credited for bringing his best ideas to reality.
So how does Jolene manage everything behind “Bad Chad Customs”? What’s her and Chad’s love story? What was he doing before she came into his life? This and more you’ll discover in this video!
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How Did They Meet?
The story of Jolene MacIntyre and Chad Hiltz is as great as the cars they build. The pair met for the first time in 2016, just a little after Jolene graduated with a Business major, and was working at a tavern in New Minas, a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada.
As the couple recalled in a video from 2023, Chad and his daughter parked outside the tavern on their way to a car show. It was then that Jolene and her friend approached Chad to ask about the Green Goblin, the car he was driving at the time, and which is well-known by fans of “Bad Chad Customs”.
While the strange car was the first thing that Jolene noticed about Chad, he was more focused on her beauty and personality. Chad did his best to stay in contact with her, sending her ‘kind messages’ for six months, which was the time it took Jolene to start responding to him before accepting a coffee date. Then it didn’t take the pair long to get together, and become the couple we’ve admired on TV.
Building A Business Together
After starting a relationship, Chad and Jolene worked together to bring Hiltz Auto to life, as a revamp of Chad’s previous business named Green Goblin Customs.
As Jolene affirmed in an interview with Monsters & Critics, one of the first steps while taking Chad’s business to the next level was to invest time and effort in self-promotion. In her mission to bring Chad the recognition she thought he deserved, she started filming the projects he was working on in the business. The one special project among the rest in his garage was the replica of Ralph Lauren’s $40 million Bugatti, famous for the complexity and rarity of its design.
Jolene chose this car when Chad offered to make it for her, starting a project which soon took the attention of their internet audience, increasingly entertained by how the car turned out.
Initially, Bad Chad’s online content was mostly focused on Facebook, eventually expanding to YouTube after the pandemic. Nevertheless, taking so long to build their audience on said video platform was one of Jolene’s biggest regrets, as she affirmed in an interview with The Motorsports Agency.
All in all, Jolene has played a very important role in the success of “Bad Chad Customs” and Hiltz Auto.
Chad’s Beginnings
While most of us were introduced to Chad Hiltz’s work through his social media or Discovery’s “Bad Chad Customs”, he’d been building cars for a long time before becoming famous.
Car customization wasn’t something that Chad learned in one go, but had to work hard for. As he revealed in an interview with AutoWise, he became a father at 16 years old, so had no other option but to leave school and make money. Going through a tough financial situation taught Chad how valuable it was to make things himself and from scratch, which is a drive he had felt for a huge part of his life.
Even though Chad worked at a lot of places, he admits that none of those jobs ‘fulfilled’ him. Instead, he was compelled to create and be original even when his budget was limited, which was what led him to find junk cars and all types of parts to rebuild them. It’s the experience of making his car dreams come true that led him to start his business Green Goblin Customs, later changed to Hiltz Auto upon Jolene’s idea.
With that being said, it isn’t hard to see that Jolene is more than just the business mind behind Bad Chad – she’s also the one who is there to support Chad’s biggest dreams.
Was The Show Canceled?
Despite airing two successful seasons, “Bad Chad Customs” hasn’t aired new episodes since late 2020. While the show was never officially canceled, the possibility of it getting a new season seems far from real now, given the path that Chad and Jolene are following.
Even though Chad told AutoWise in late 2020 that he and Jolene had already been signed by Discovery for a third season of “Bad Chad Customs”,ultimately that didn’t seem to come around. Nevertheless, although the pandemic cut filming, it allowed Jolene and Chad to grow their online audience to massive numbers, especially with their YouTube channel.
As Jolene opened up in a Facebook video from early 2023, the show worked differently from that shown on screen. As it happens, most of the cars built by Chad weren’t paid for by the on-screen customers, but by Discovery, which also paid for the materials and everything related to Chad’s builds. However, Chad and Jolene did everything in their power to build back most of the cars in the show, thinking of them as pieces of art instead of just cars.
In that same video, Jolene affirmed that many aspects of reality TV were ‘formulated’, yet Chad and the team did their best to keep the car-building magic real.
Projects For The Future
These days, Chad and Jolene are mostly focused on creating content for social media, expanding the Bad Chad brand everywhere. This formula has served the couple well, as not only do they have over a million followers across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, but have become famous enough to quite often attend car events in North America and around the world.
On the other hand, it’s been a while since the couple last updated their followers about their long-announced wedding plans, but from the things Jolene and Chad have shown about their relationship on social media, it’s evident that they’re better than ever when it comes to love.
All in all, it’s great to see such a hard-working couple accomplishing their goals in so many ways, both business and in their personal lives.
