Building Rodin Cars’
Digital Engineering Backbone

Rodin Cars is redefining what a small but elite engineering organization can achieve. To support their aggressive development cycles, Sherpa Design implemented Teamcenter, tailored to Rodin’s exact needs with a custom data model as well as an integration with NX.

High Speed Engineering

Rodin Cars was founded by David Dicker, an Australian entrepreneur who built his success in the IT industry. Driven by a passion for racing, he purchased farmland in New Zealand and established a dedicated racetrack and a full production facility. The company focused on designing and manufacturing high-performance race cars, producing almost every component onsite. Rodin’s key projects include an open-wheel single-seater race car (now available globally), a re-engineered two-seater sports car, and the FZERO, a car developed without Formula 1 restrictions, targeting the fastest lap times in the world.

_{Rodin Cars headquarters, with test tracks and manufacturing facilities set in the beautiful countryside of New Zealand.}

Why Teamcenter

At Rodin every component is safety-critical, high-performance, and deeply interdependent. At this level, a single bracket must consider the demanding constraints driven by suspension geometry, aero loads, and manufacturing processes. Rodin needed PLM architecture where part definitions, revisions, and attributes carry far more intelligence than a typical OEM. They chose Teamcenter and reached out to Sherpa to help with the complex implementation effort.

Working with Sherpa

Sherpa started the engagement by conducting a series of workshops. During these sessions, Rodin explained how their business operates, including their processes, systems, data, and team, as well as what they needed Teamcenter to accomplish. It was clear from the workshops that the engineering team at Rodin was prepared, having their needs for the platform very well thought out.

“As newbies, we leaned on Sherpa to help determine the best approaches for setting us up for an implementation that would help us successfully reach our goals,” explained Felix Edgar, senior engineer at Rodin Cars.

_{A Rodin Cars assembly technician under the hood of the Sintura prototype race car.}

Using insights from these Workshops, Sherpa constructed a complete Teamcenter BMIDE data model reflecting the company’s parts, documents, workflows, and engineering roles.

Core Issues the Implementation Addressed

Intelligent Part Numbering solution

A defined part numbering system was a major element of the deployment. “We wanted to use a bespoke intelligent part numbering system, where seeing the part number would tell you where it lived in the vehicle. This concept would have brought challenges with Teamcenter, but the Sherpa team was able to architect it into the system,” Felix noted.

The numbering engine is fully rule driven and dynamically adapts based on user selections, project membership, and subsystem choices. It preserves engineering intent at extreme scale, which means Rodin can effectively engineer thousands of unique components per program.

“Having the part numbering automated meant we could lose the huge Excel sheets we had been using (a system that often-created duplicates and non-compliant parts),” Felix added.

Central control of NX environments

Rodin needed NX to behave consistently, no matter which engineer was working on the platform. Central control of the NX environment allows for rapid deployment of new customizations quickly. Sherpa implemented a complete NXCustom site directory, ensuring that every engineer runs NX with standardized templates, drafting resources, attributes, materials, and menu customizations. This delivers consistency across hundreds of CAD models and ensures that Rodin’s data quality remains world-class.

_{Rodin Cars engineer Felix Edgar working on the complex NX CAD assembly on the Sintura.}

Release Workflows

Rodin pushes designs from concept to prototype to refinement at a very fast rate. Automated workflows, lifecycle management, revision rules, and validation logic that Teamcenter provides minimizes manual overhead, eliminates errors, and enforces engineering governance at speed. Sherpa developed release workflows utilizing automation to maintain discipline.

Traceability

Every part and its entire history needed to be accessible: Who designed it, who reviewed it, and what project it is on, has it been tested (virtually or on a track), which revision is track-ready, what material is used, is that material special, or does it have a long lead time? The Intelligent Part Numbering (IPN) was the backbone of this element, along with multi-field keys for uniqueness enforcing, revision naming rules, automated property population, and dynamic LOVs for user groups.

_{A Rodin Cars machinist reviewing a production drawing of the bespoke RC.TEN 4.0L V10 engine.}

Driving the Future

“Working with Sherpa has been fantastic. The level of expertise in the team has blown us away. The quality, in terms of maintenance and support, has all been top notch. So very impressed!” exclaimed Felix.

At Rodin Cars, engineering moves at racing car pace with F1-level complexity, a small team, and zero tolerance for mistakes. They needed a digital backbone that could keep up.

Sherpa engineered an intelligent part numbering system that thinks like their engineers, automated classification so nothing gets lost in the noise, and created an NX environment that launches every model like it came straight from race control.

This system gives them supercharged speed, bulletproof traceability, and the confidence to design at the edge of what’s possible.

_{The FZERO, a prototype single-seat race car in development to achieve the fastest lap times in the world.}

Looking ahead, Rodin Cars plans to introduce Teamcenter Manufacturing, bring their ERP system into the PLM environment, and enable Change Management for tighter governance. The current system was intentionally engineered to support these expansions exactly as Rodin envisions them. Sherpa’s role will be to implement each capability according to Rodin’s defined requirements and timeline.

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