To her millions of online followers, Emelia Hartford is the woman making fast cars go even faster.
The Youtuber, actress, and world-record car builder has amassed a following by documenting ambitious car transformations and adrenaline-fueled challenges on the road. In one of Hartford’s most popular videos, she sends a car flying through the dirt in an off-road drift. With sand exploding everywhere, the bumper tears clean off the car amidst the chaos. Most people might call it a disaster, but Hartford smiles at the camera instead.
“I think that went well,” she says.
That kind of fast-paced, high-risk content has been a signature part of Hartford’s channel, and a clear example of her personality.
The Los Angeles native was one of the first female—and is now one of the most recognizable—car builders online. Even more impressively, nearly everything Hartford knows about cars, she taught herself. And that need for adrenaline and speed seems to have been there from the start.
Long before Hartford became synonymous with cars, racing, or YouTube, she was a kid climbing dangerously high things. Her mom had a nickname for her growing up: Daredevil.
“Growing up I was very competitive and adventurous,” she says. She’d dig up flower beds and play with Tonka trucks in the mud. Whenever her mom would take her to the playground, she’d jump off structures no matter how high. “I definitely kept my mom on her toes.”
Hartford smiles when she re-tells the story of having a pink Barbie Jeep growing up. “My mom said I could drive it better than my grandpa could drive his car,” she laughs.
But actual cars came much later. Hartford says there weren’t mechanics in the family and no inherited love of engines. In fact, Hartford’s earliest memory involving a car is far less glamorous than expected: When Hartford was 13, she begged her mom to let her drive the family Toyota Prius. Eventually, during one drive, her mom caved in and pulled over. They switched seats, and Hartford finally got her first taste of being behind the wheel. But the moment didn’t last long. Almost immediately, a cop pulled them over.
“I was panicking. I didn’t even know how to roll down the window,” Hartford says. “I’d never been in the driver’s seat before.”
The officer, clocking that she was a new driver, gave her a thumbs up, which she returned. The police car proceeded to quietly tail them for nearly a mile. “My first time driving was with a cop following me,” she laughs. “My mom was petrified. She’s not much of a rule-breaker.”
For all the humor Hartford brings to these memories, childhood was far from easy. When Hartford was 15, her father died by suicide after struggling with addiction. She describes her childhood home life as difficult and abusive–physically, emotionally, and mentally.
After her father died, Hartford, her younger brother, and mother moved to Indiana because the cost of living in California had become impossible. Her mother, once a stay-at-home mom, returned to school for graphic design. Hartford got a job, while still in school, to help support the family.
“It was a pretty rough upbringing. I was thrown into being an adult a lot younger than most people were,” she says. “But it’s something that I’m very thankful for now. I don’t think I would be the person that I am today if none of it had happened.”
Indiana is also where something unexpected happened: she found the car community, which eventually became her “found family”. At age 16, Hartford was driving her first car–a bright green Infiniti G35–when another driver pulled up beside her and invited her to a local car meet, which just so happened to take place at a parking garage in the middle of the night.
“I was 16, meeting a significantly older man in the middle of the night in downtown Bloomington, Indiana,” she says, aware of how alarming it sounds. “In hindsight, I’m like, ‘What the hell was I doing?’”
But when she arrived at the top of the garage, a whole world opened up to her. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen before,” she says. Rows of modified cars. Beautiful fabrication work. People obsessed with building something better than what they had. Guys who teased her a little, talked trash, and eventually taught her how to work on cars.
“I’m really grateful for them,” she acknowledges. “They became like big brothers, like fatherly figures.”
More than that, Hartford found the satisfaction of fixing and upgrading cars. Even as a kid, she loved taking things apart and rebuilding them. She vividly remembers repairing an Xbox with the dreaded “red ring of death” by taking it apart, stacking pennies inside, and somehow bringing it back to life.
Building cars, it turned out, just made sense to her.
“It gave me a great distraction at the time,” she reminisces. “But also a great sense of freedom. It allowed me to get out of the house while everything was going down.”
And while cars became a huge part of Hartford’s life, YouTube came later. At 18, she drove alone across the country to Los Angeles to pursue acting, which was “something I’ve wanted to do my entire life, and way before cars,” she says.
Hartford lived paycheck to paycheck, working restaurant jobs for years while surviving on food stamps and attending acting workshops whenever she could. She slept on an air mattress, furnished her apartment with Craigslist finds, and learned to make do with very little. She still remembers sitting on the floor of her rent-controlled apartment, eating a sandwich and thinking, ‘Oh shit. What did I just do?’
“People think with what I do now that I must’ve had money or connections. I genuinely came from nothing.”
And she means it.
When Hartford bought her first camera–a used G7X–she spent every dollar in her bank account buying it from a stranger. The idea to start filming actually came from her mom, who suggested she upload videos about the cars she was already working on.
“When I moved to California I couldn’t afford a mechanic, so I was doing my own labor,” she remembers.
To her surprise, her first video–vlogging the build of her Nissan 240SX–unexpectedly took off, reaching half a million views in a short amount of time. Not enough to change her life overnight, but enough to suggest a possibility: maybe this thing could help her make rent? Then came the grind.
For years, Hartford balanced server shifts, reaching out to agents and managers, and a relentless upload schedule, posting three videos a week while teaching herself how to build a career online. She’d work late into the night at restaurants, often not getting home until 3 a.m., then spend her days filming, editing, wrenching on cars, and trying to hold onto the dream that brought her to Los Angeles in the first place.
At 24, she says, she genuinely believed she had failed. Her friends had graduated college and started building stable careers, while she was still struggling to get by in Los Angeles. “I thought I made the biggest mistake of my life.”
Hartford talks warmly about failure–not just surviving it, but documenting it. In an online world built on polished success stories, she has made a habit of showing the setbacks, breakdowns, and mistakes too.
“How lucky are you to fail?” she says, repeating a quote she loves. “Because that means you learned.”
On the acting front, Hartford appeared in several films and TV shows before achieving her big break: landing a role in the 2023 racing film Gran Turismo, where she played Leah Vega, an American GT Academy student driver alongside Archie Madekwe, David Harbour, and Orlando Bloom. The role felt less like a departure from her career and more like a perfect blend of the worlds she had already been trying to build. She has also appeared in projects including Nightfall, From Mexico With Love, and A Hollywood Christmas.
It was also recently announced that she will be hosting a new show, Hot Laps, for FOX Creator Studios where she’ll be interviewing celebrities on a high-speed racetrack.
“As a host, it challenges me in a very different way than Circuits in Focus,” she says. “With Hot Laps, I’m balancing driving at speed, interviewing, and reacting in real time, which taps a different skill set and lets me connect with guests in a more natural way.”
But even as acting opportunities expanded, Hartford never stopped posting. If anything, her video concepts got even bigger.
Hartford says YouTube looked very different when she first started. Back then, creators largely made “everyday life” vlogs with far less pressure to constantly level up. Now, there’s a lot of pressure to attempt bigger and bolder stunts–and when it comes to cars, that can bring in a lot more danger.
“When I first started Youtubing, I would build a car in an entire year. Now I have to do it in three weeks,” she says. “The amount of work has skyrocketed. It’s almost unrealistic because even major shops don’t do that kind of labor.”
With the mounting pressure and responsibility to her fans and online community, Hartford is well aware she needs to take care of her mental health as well. Whenever she needs a break, she does something unexpectedly radical for a person whose career exists online: she puts her phone in a drawer. Not on Do Not Disturb. Not face down across the room. In a literal drawer.
“It’s so easy to get caught up in the craziness of social media and just chronically being online. For me, it’s kind of resetting and training myself not to constantly go to my phone.”
That reset, she says, also involves physical activity, like hiking or surfing.
When Hartford talked with BUST, she was preparing to fly to London to continue filming a Formula 1 project. She had also recently broken a record at Pikes Peak International Hill Climb as the fastest female in the Pikes Peak GT4 Trophy by Yomaha-Turbo division.
“Pikes Peak demands everything from you. The altitude affects your body and your car, the course demands absolute focus, and there’s no room for complacency. One mistake can end your race in an instant,” Hartford says. “When I crossed the finish line and realized I had become the fastest woman to ever drive Pikes Peak, it was hard to put into words. It’s a record I’m incredibly proud of, but more than anything, I hope it inspires the next generation of women in racing to believe they belong here too.”
After Pikes Peak, she was headed overseas again.
The schedule sounds exhausting, but Hartford says it matter-of-factly, like someone reading off a grocery list.
“I made sure to take a calm, quiet weekend,” she says. “just to prepare for all this craziness ahead.”
Still, there’s optimism underneath everything Hartford says, especially when the conversation turns to the young women who see her videos. When Hartford first entered the automotive world online, there were almost no women publicly building cars. But now, “there are so many girls working on cars,” she says. “And it’s so cool to see.”
Her advice to women curious about cars is simple: just start. Go to a car meet or a car show. “But bring a friend!” she laughs. Learn how to change your oil. Let yourself feel intimidated and do it anyway.
“It’s OK if you feel lost or intimidated. Cars are intimidating,” she says. “But they’re not as scary as they seem.”
Early in her career she signed up for mechanic school, but she says she wasn’t learning anything by reading textbooks all day. She learned far more by actually doing–a philosophy that extends far beyond cars. For Hartford, waiting around for permission has never felt like much of a strategy.
“If you’re only ever just an actress, you’re always going to be waiting for someone to call you. Get together with friends and create your own content. Write your own scripts.”
These days, Hartford is writing scripts herself, including a pilot loosely based on her own life. Her long-term goal, is to become the female version of Dwayne Johnson or Tom Cruise–someone who gets to merge action, storytelling, and adrenaline into one career.
It’s hard not to think about everything Hartford has lived through while listening to her talk about the future: the kid jumping off playground equipment. The teenager rebuilding herself in Indiana. The broke, aspiring actress eating sandwiches on the floor of an apartment she could barely afford. The young woman who kept filming and kept moving because she loved doing what she loved. She, if anything, will be on the move for a very long time.
“I don’t recommend half of what I did. It was definitely, definitely a grind,” she says. “But I am still so thankful for all of it.”
Photography: Jonny Marlow
Styling: Amanda Lim
Hair: Laura Rugetti
Makeup: Kendail Fedail
