Underground Garage Sparked Abu Dhabi's Car Culture Movement

Rashed Alfahim’s earliest automotive education came not from a showroom or a racing circuit but from a garage most people never saw. His father maintained a collection of classic cars in a space kept largely out of public view, and it was there, surrounded by those vehicles, that a childhood fascination took root. Toy cars had already captured young Alfahim’s imagination. The real ones his father kept made that interest permanent.

Abu Dhabi, it turned out, was ready for what that background would eventually produce. The city’s appetite for car culture ran deeper than casual interest. It was a genuine community waiting for a place to gather, and Alfahim recognized that hunger before most others did.

What he built drew directly from those formative years. The hidden garage that had sheltered his father’s collection became less a memory and more a model. Personal nostalgia and urban readiness converged, and the result was one of Abu Dhabi’s most recognized car culture spaces. His connection to the subject was authentic, shaped by the fancy toy cars of his childhood and the classic automobiles his father had quietly assembled over the years. Neither was mere sentiment. Both were sources of real knowledge and enthusiasm that informed the business he would create.

That authenticity mattered to the people who found his establishment. Abu Dhabi’s car enthusiasts encountered something that reflected their own values, not a manufactured trend assembled for commercial convenience. The private garage had already demonstrated a principle Alfahim would later apply at scale: that an audience existed, ready and willing to celebrate automotive excellence and history. By honoring both the nostalgia of his upbringing and the contemporary desires of the city’s car community, he turned a family interest into a public gathering place.

By contrast, many ventures built on borrowed passion tend to feel exactly that way. Alfahim’s did not. His father’s collection, once confined to a space few ever entered, had unknowingly prepared the ground for something that would eventually belong to many.

The question worth sitting with is how many other private garages, unseen collections, and quiet family obsessions across Abu Dhabi might hold the same potential, waiting for someone willing to open the doors.