Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 244: A Fiery Love Letter to Horsepower

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 244: A Fiery Love Letter to Horsepower

The Valentine's Day/Chinese New Year long weekend has come and gone, and to celebrate I made a new trim of something I'd previously cooked up for a BeamNG-based Discord challenge: the Parana P600. In its original, Beam-friendly form, it had 580 horsepower from a 6.0-liter naturally aspirated V12 driving all four wheels via a six-speed manual gearbox and a luxury interior/CD stereo. However, the lore-accurate version is strictly rear-wheel drive, with 650 horsepower and a fully hand-built interior to better reflect its bespoke nature. Essentially, it's what my LVC LS60 (which follows a similar retro-futuristic aesthetic) would've been if it had an engine closer in size and RPM limit to what its chief rival, the AMS Archangel (another one of my original '90s hypercar designs), was fitted with, and was a true hand-built product in the vein of the WM Amadeus (which competes with both the LS60 and Archangel, despite making its debut five years before both of those cars did, according to my lore).

Since 2026 is the year of the Horse, or more specifically the Fire Horse, here's a set of screenshots showing the P600 with a red exterior and silver wheels (the Discord submission had a blue exterior and gold wheels of a different design), which fits the theme best (and also goes well with the Valentine's Day weekend that began three days before the official Chinese New Year celebrations) considering the topic of this post:

Above, from top: What if the LVC LS60 came out earlier, utilized an engine more like that of its chief rival (the AMS Archangel), and was fitted with a hand-built interior to match what the WM Amadeus had? The Parana P600 would've been the answer to that question.

This was my first fully detailed build to be based on any of the '88 Copy Cat body sets, but when revising the interior for the original version, I replaced the dashboard, center console, and door cards, while some of the other interior fixtures either had to be removed entirely. or were resized and repositioned to accommodate the constraints of the new interior fixtures.

In short, the P600 combines all the best aspects of all three of my favorite '90s V12 hypercar designs into a single build, while also incorporating lessons learned during their development.