Mechanical Engineering complexity of converting a High Performance muscle car to RHD

Converting an American muscle car from left-hand drive to right-hand drive is a complex engineering feat, however when you take on the RHD conversion of truly high-performance and highly tuned muscle car such as Hennessey Performance’s H1000 Dodge Challenger Hellcat or the Hennessey 1000HP Exorcist Camaro – the engineering challenges gets a whole lot more complex!

American Muscle Cars are built for performance, nevertheless once a performance specialist such as Hennessey have worked their magic on the original vehicle, the RHD conversion becomes even more challenging as the vehicle has undergone a stage of complex, performance focused enhancements.

The H1000 Hellcat and the Exorcist 1000HP Camaro are incredibly high-performance vehicles designed to be driven hard and fast; and Autogroup International’s right-hand drive variant and the engineering that backs it up – must take these factors into consideration.

The exceptionally engineered high performance Muscle Cars are always enthusiastically welcomed by our team of Mechanical Engineers and indeed the entire AGI family! Fortunately, the team at Autogroup International has over the past 20-years converted 100’s of specialist high-performance muscle cars amongst the 1000’s of vehicles we have safely converted – so we know how to engineer the solutions.

Moving on to more insight on the re-engineering procedures on these vehicles, the team follow the following phases to ensure that the vehicle delivers the exact performance intended by the original manufacturer and the performance tuner after the ‘Mirror Conversion’ of this vehicle to right hand drive.

• Thoroughly examine the Mechanical systems, connections and fixtures prior to disassembling and obtaining all the critical measurements.
• Identifying the components to be modified & converted according to the nature of the vehicle, its performance characteristics and its assemblies.
• Digitalizing the critical components to be modified using top-tier technological means including 3D scanning, CAD and reverse engineering tools.
• Brainstorming on the safest methods to conduct the conversions and the modifications on the critical components.
• Modeling of the components with respect to the finalized concepts.
• Verification of the modeled components and ensuring their proper functionality by incorporating advanced technology prior to proceeding with the manufacturing stage.
• The manufacturing stage of the modeled components where the material and its composition & specifications are crucially taken into consideration.
• Verification process of the manufactured components to ensure the expected functionality.
• Proceeding with final assembling and verification procedures, both mechanically and electrically.
• Ensuring the completed RHD variant complies to all safety standards including ISO 9001 and our ADR compliance for legal import.

The elaborate steps become more complex and challenging for high performance muscle cars; as it often triples the engineering workload.  The Autogroup International engineering team of 30+ highly experienced automotive engineers consider every component which is being modified as it could directly and indirectly affect the performance and safety of the vehicle.

Safely and performance are treated equally by Autogroup International‘s engineering team as a high performance, highly tuned muscle car in right hand drive must be perfectly engineered – similar in many ways to a F1 car – there is no room for error which is why Autogroup International has been the leading global supplier of right hand drive high performance muscle cars for 20-years.