Right-hand drive Camaro available in Australia for a measly $128,500 USD
2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS - click above image for hi-res gallery
For years and years, avid American car enthusiasts thought of a certain Holden as the Holy Grail. In hushed tones and with furtive looks, we let each other know that, yeah, the BMW E39 M5 is pretty dang sweet, but there's this Australian car... a four-door with a six-speed and a Corvette motor... and it's... dare we say it... better? However, it remained a piece of Automotive apocrypha not only because we couldn't have it, but because no one could remember the name (HSV GTS, of all the nonsensical, alphabet soup letter combos Holden could have selected).
We mention the legendary HSV GTS because Australian Camaro fans might now be experiencing what us muscle car-starved Yanks went through at the beginning of the decade -- withdrawal! Because not only are there are no right-hand drive Camaros (Aussies still insist on pretending they're British/Japanese), but the 2010 update to the original Mustang competitor is based almost totally on native Holden underpinnings. Ouch!
But fear not, Performax International has figured out how to move the steering wheel to the opposite side of the transmission tunnel and will sell those of you living in the Land Down Unda a right-hand drive Camaro SS for just $139,000 AUD. That's $128,500 U.S. American dollars to you and me. Which is... psychotic, says us. Especially considering that in America, a Camaro SS costs $33,745. But despite what we think, half a dozen customers have already placed orders with Performax International for a Aussie-spec'd Camaro.
Gallery: Review: 2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS
[Source: Carscoop]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
SVTCobra 7:06PM (10/27/2009)
Outrageous
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some1 7:15PM (10/27/2009)
nice autoblog...
i like how you guys simply inverted the picture to make it look right hand drive, go go backwards badging!
PumaGTO 7:06PM (10/27/2009)
that´s quite some extra cost..
you´re only surprised by this because car prices in US are ridiculously low. Nowere else in the world (not sure about the Emirate, though...) you can buy cars as cheap as in the US. Be proud and thankfull.
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Skybreak 8:57PM (10/27/2009)
A lot of the price is for Performax to recover the cost of their engineering work.
They had to work out how to move all the steering and wiring, and how to build a whole new dash facia (ie - take one appart, experiment with moulds, build a new dash that fits, looks good, is at least equal to the quality of the original, etc...).
Holden know how to do all this - but they where hardly going to *give* this info away.
Australian law also requires quoting the car with taxes (GST, and in this case the Luxury Car Tax) included in the price.
And lastly, Performax wants to make a profit. It'll hardly sell in great numbers, but there are enough cashed up fans to make it worth there while.
It's just a damn shame Holden weren't given the go ahread to sell it themselves.
jv2k 12:58PM (10/28/2009)
We really do have one of the best automarkets in the world.
Cheap gas.
Cheap cars.
Wide open roads.
Literally wide roads that make driving large cars anyway a breeze.
If there is one reason to like being american it's cars.
John H. 7:19PM (10/27/2009)
I thought that if you wanted to import a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car, you'd go Godzilla for a R32 - R34 GT-R, rather than Holden...
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Taglane 7:19PM (10/27/2009)
WTF?!?!?!
btw, I love how you flipped the pic and it just automatically becomes RHD... lol
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Jonny Lieberman 7:22PM (10/27/2009)
Glad you caught that... snuck it past the editors... tee hee hee
ForgedInternals 7:22PM (10/27/2009)
Australia's car are usually alot more than ours. An FPV goes for something around 80,000+ AUD. This is why the G8 had to be so discontented for our market and GM took a hit every time they sold one.
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Kaveh 7:25PM (10/27/2009)
Thats crazy, thats a brand new 911 Turbo money.
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andre lavoie 7:25PM (10/27/2009)
The Camaro is cool, but not that cool.
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Mahoro 7:28PM (10/27/2009)
For slight more, you can afford an Audi R8.....
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Skybreak 9:10PM (10/27/2009)
Round here an R8 starts at about AUD$260,000
Kattleox 7:41PM (10/27/2009)
no ill take a Z06 and an Elise instead, please.
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Rich 7:44PM (10/27/2009)
You don't *have* to convert it to RHD, do you? It's not true of the UK. Shipping insurance is 1%, import duty is 10%, VAT is 17.5%, all cumulative (slightly more than 30.5% on the original cost). Add testing fees for about 150 quid after conversion for about 600 quid, and it's pretty cheap to import a US-spec car to the UK.
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Geeky1 7:59PM (10/27/2009)
I'm not an Australian so I can't answer for sure, but I did research it a bit last year as I was looking at moving down there for a while. My understanding of Australian law is that the car has to be converted to RHD to be allowed to drive down there for more than a period of a few months. I could be totally wrong, but that's how I understood it.
Skybreak 8:43PM (10/27/2009)
Rich,
The short answer is "yes", you do have to convert it and get ADR (Australian Design Regulations) approval to sell it as a "new" car.
You can import LHD and drive cars in Australia, but is it gets a different class of registration, and I think you can only get it for cars beyond a certain age (ie - classic cars).
LHD cars are no where near as common here as in the UK - we don't have LHD neigbours who can conviently bring them on a train or ferry in a couple of hours.
Brian P 9:21PM (10/27/2009)
The odd thing is that at least some tooling exists for GM to make an OEM RHD version of this car.
I know this for a fact, because I worked on that tooling. Not sure why GM gave up on it so late in the game.
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randomguy 8:12PM (10/27/2009)
I'm moving to Australia next month for a job, and upon discovering the ridiculous price of cars there, I've already decided to forgo the luxury and buy a motorcycle for my time there. I really don't understand how the prices become so inflated. Shipping the cars there cannot be the reason for it. Does Australia tariff the crap out of cars or what?
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VictorRaikkonen 8:47PM (10/27/2009)
It's not inflation mate. If you're moving here the first thing you need to do is stop comparing Ozzie prices to American prices. Although our dollar is nearly on par with the green back, it's generally around 60-70c to the US dollar. so when you factor that in the prices generally even out. Further, we have this silly little thing called the 'luxury car tax', in which the government rapes you for any vehicle over 54 or 56,000AU. It's ridiculous but no one is making any moves to repeal the tax.
Some commentators believe that the tax originated to protect the Australian car market from foreign cars much in the same way Regan did in the 80's to protect the American car market from the Japanese. However, to get around the law Japanese manufacturers started building more vehicles in the US, and or bringing the parts in and assembling them in the states. I.e. go to a Honda/Acura dealership you will see that more than 90% of the parts come from Japan and the vehicles is assembled someone in the states. Fortunately, the Japanese did the same thing here, however vehicles like VW/Audi, BMW, etc are still shipped in so the prices remain high as sin.