This '70 Chevy C20 Looks Untouched. Underneath, It's a Brand-New Silverado.

Most restomods are built to look better than the original. ICON 4x4's Derelict series does the opposite on purpose. The Los Angeles shop's latest, built around a 1970 Chevrolet C20, starts from a genuine survivor truck — the same California family owned it from new, and it wore five decades of sun, dust, and honest use without ever going through a major restoration. ICON left almost all of that alone. The patina, the dents, the faded paint — it's original, not distressed by a painter trying to fake it.

What's hidden underneath is where the actual engineering happened. ICON built the truck on a current Chevrolet Silverado 4x4 platform, meaning the C20's weathered body now sits over a modern frame, suspension, and powertrain — the mechanical guts of a brand-new truck wearing a fifty-plus-year-old skin. It's the founding idea behind everything Jonathan Ward's shop does: take a design that already worked and give it the chassis, safety, and drivability people expect from a new vehicle, without erasing what made the original worth keeping in the first place.

ICON has described the Derelict philosophy as being built around the idea that studying the past is how you get to something better in the future — a line the shop has explicitly traced back to Confucius. In practice that means the C20 sits alongside a similarly patina'd Derelict Bronco Roadster, built from a rare single-year 1966 model, as part of an ongoing sub-series that treats unrestored survivor bodywork as a feature rather than a flaw to be sanded away.

It's a genuinely different philosophy from either a numbers-matching restoration or a full custom build. The C20 isn't trying to look like new, and it isn't trying to look customized — it's trying to look exactly like what it is: an old truck that happens to drive, stop, and handle like a current one. Whether that reads as clever or as cheating depends on how strict your definition of "restoration" is, but it's hard to argue the result doesn't turn heads for exactly the reason ICON wants it to.