Rich Benoit of Rich Rebuilds is running an arc of YouTube videos about Hellcat-swapping a minivan. But he’s not so much engine swapping as he is hacking up a Dodge Charger Hellcat and a Chrysler Town and Country and dropping the van body onto the sedan powertrain. It’s the perfect kind of project to watch from afar—because it looks miserable to be working on.
The video really kind of starts at the 04:30 mark, where Benoit broadly explains the concept of body swapping with a couple of toy cars. If two vehicles have similar wheelbases, the body from one should fit on the chassis of the other, right?
Well, like the flag hanging in the shop in the video says: “We do this not because it’s easy. We did it because we thought it would be easy.” I think I saw that on a Zazzle t-shirt at some point and I think about it all the time, because, yeah, I can blame many of my own stalled projects on exactly that stream of thinking. I like sawing things and throwing sparks as much as the next red-blooded American but I’m so glad I’m watching this on YouTube and not in person, listening to the screetch of saws for hours and hours.
A way into the video, Benoit shares an observation we probably could have made without cutting two cars in half: “Even though these two vehicles are pretty much the same wheelbase, there is a heck of a lot more space in the van than the Hellcat.” Ha, no kidding!
But this video isn’t really about precision engineering. Well, outside of some tape-measure stats Benoit’s fellow wrench-turner Joey scribbled onto the van’s firewall.
Measuring and re-measuring by hand was, clearly, not particularly effective at setting this project up for success. “We’re just gonna start cutting, and when it doesn’t work, we’ll hot glue it,” says Joey at one point. He’s kind of joking, but, also not.
Body swapping cars from the ’60s would have been one thing—they were pretty much all just sheet metal designs bolted to ladder frames. But modern cars are much more complicated, in shape, structure, and assembly. This hour-long video gives you a glimpse of the challenges these guys faced mating the Town and Country body to the Charger powertrain, and trust, many hours of hacking and cutting and cussing had to have taken place in between shots.
I love seeing cutaways of cars and diagrams of their structures so I did enjoy watching how Rich and Joey chipped away at the bones of these two cars to try and make them into one vehicle. But it also made me pretty confident I’ll never attempt to body-swap any remotely modern vehicles in my life. Heck, after seeing this, I don’t even really want to ride in one.
One of the big projects that made Rich Rebuilds such a cool YouTube channel was a V8-powered Tesla Model S named, perfectly, “ICE T.” That took about two years to complete, involving custom-made powertrain mounts and complex body modifications to adapt the electric sedan to accomodate a large gas-burning engine pretty darn cleanly. This, by the video hosts’ own admission, is a hackjob in comparison.
Benoit talks about prioritizing safety, welding in structural reinforcements, a roll cage, swaybars, and subframe mounts. There are certainly some good ideas in there, but I wouldn’t be in a rush to ride in this thing. There are so many question marks in the department of structural integrity—some little crease or seam that looked trivial in one of the original bodies could have been important in holding the minivan, or sedan, in one piece. I don’t think there will be any chance of making this road-legal, either. Certainly not in Benoit’s home base of Massachusetts, which has draconian strictness in its annual vehicle inspections.
But “why would you ever do that” projects can be the most fun to watch. “Couldn’t somebody just thwack a minivan body on top of a Charger,” is a thought that’s occured to me in the shower at least once. Now, we can see exactly why that has never been attempted until now. You can hear the car rumble at the very end of this video, but we’ll have to wait for another installment to actually see it drive. The good stuff, the guts, is all here though.
Seen any other radical body-swap projects? Drop the author a line at andrew@thedrive.com