Cameron Davis of DC MotorWerks: Putting a Clutch Pedal in AMGs That Never Had One

Cameron Davis co-owns DC MotorWerks, an independent Mercedes-Benz shop in Alpharetta. It has become known well beyond Georgia for one job: putting a clutch pedal in AMGs that only ever came with an automatic. You drop off an automatic, and about two weeks later you pick up a manual.

Throttlecast host Grant Brewer found the shop through Ed Bolian, who sent him there when he needed someone to service his AMG. He found every generation of Mercedes on the lot, plus a growing row of V12 Lamborghinis. On this episode Cameron talks about growing up around dealerships, starting a business during COVID, and how a cross-country drive turned into a manual-swap program.

A first tooth on a car

Cameron’s mom likes to say his first tooth went on a car. He came to Georgia a little after age two and grew up in Marietta and then Brookhaven. His dad was CFO for a group of car dealerships, and Cameron and his brother ran through the showrooms as kids. His grandfather fixed and flipped cars. Later, his mom went to work at Mercedes-Benz.

The Mercedes hook came at eight, when a German neighbor bought a new W220 S-Class. In high school he talked a family friend into pulling an R129 SL out of the garage where it had sat for about nine years. They got it running together, and the friend let Cameron drive it before he had a license. When the friend passed away a year or two later, Cameron bought the car from his family. The R129 is the logo of the business today.

It also taught him to do his own work. He paid a shop once, $900 for a radiator, and it drained his bank account. “If I’m going to have stuff like this, I need to do it myself.”

The name comes from the same period. DC stands for DaimlerChrysler, the era when Cameron and his partner Andy got deep into the brand.

Starting DC MotorWerks in 2020

Cameron and Andy met at orientation at a Mercedes dealership. Cameron was a service advisor. Andy, a technician from South Georgia, quickly became his favorite person in the building, and Cameron spent too much time in his bay learning from him. Cameron never wanted to be a flat-rate technician. Chasing the next dollar would have ruined the hobby.

COVID cost Cameron his job, and he started working on cars in his home garage for contacts from earlier jobs. He filed the LLC in September 2020. His wife, with a young daughter at home, told him to go for it. Years earlier, at Andy’s kitchen table, Andy’s wife had mentioned that Andy always wanted his own shop. Cameron had filed that away.

He found a small two-bay space behind a used car dealer, with cheap rent in exchange for reconditioning the dealer’s cars. By then he had already quit his full-time job, so his pitch to Andy was close to an ultimatum. Andy followed two weeks later. The first retail customer was Cameron’s buddy Lewis, who is still a customer.

Once they outgrew that arrangement, finding a building was hard. Landlords don’t want repair shops, even where the zoning allows them. The one they found was more than they could afford, so they borrowed from a close friend at what Cameron calls a credit-card-level rate to cover the first three months of rent. It felt too big to ever fill. Within a year or two it was full. It now has four two-post lifts and a four-post, and he’d like double that.

Today Cameron runs the front end, customers and admin. Andy, nicknamed “Tink” for his tinkering, runs the back and can fix anything in the building.

How Ed Bolian found DC MotorWerks

Before the business existed, Cameron’s shop foreman at the time asked him to help recondition and sell a CL65. Cameron listed it on Facebook and got a message from Ed Bolian, whose channel he had watched for years. The sale didn’t happen, but Cameron knew Ed was about to drive an S55 to Alaska and offered to look it over. He found the upper idler pulley close to breaking in half.

That relationship is where the exotic work came from. Ed later brought in a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow with about two weeks to get it ready for a cross-country drive. It made the trip, using some fluids along the way. Asked what scares him, Cameron says not much. “It’s nuts and bolts at the end of the day.”

Where the manual swaps started

It began with Cameron’s own Mercedes 6.9, a 1970s sedan with a three-speed automatic and no overdrive. At 120 mph it sat near redline, and it burned oil. Before the US Express, he and his co-driver found a company in Europe that builds Getrag six-speeds with a Mercedes bell housing welded on, including a double overdrive. They installed it on a deadline and drove across the country.

Clients noticed. Lewis offered his CLK55 as the guinea pig. Cameron worked with friends in the swap community, the video went up on YouTube, and calls came in from owners of a CLK63 Black Series and a C63 507 Edition at almost the same time. Now it’s several calls a week.

How a DC MotorWerks swap works:

• Turnaround: drop the car off and come back about two weeks later.
• Parts: about 90% OEM. The transmission, pedal box, and pedal bracket are factory Mercedes parts. The clutch is the main change, because the factory manual clutch was built for a far less powerful car.
• Electronics: mostly software coding, since factory manual versions of these cars existed somewhere in the world.
• Sourcing: Cameron finds part numbers by searching Europe-only manual models, such as an E220 diesel, and friends overseas forward parts from sellers who won’t ship to the US.

The result is a different car. “You’re taking an old lazy torque converter automatic and turning it into a true three-pedal manual,” he says. He doesn’t promise a profit. He expects these to follow the paddle-shift-to-gated conversions on Ferraris, where a car is worth what a good example costs plus the conversion, maybe a little more.

He brought a manual E55 AMG wagon to the taping, built for an owner who went looking for the car because he knew it could be converted. The shifter, pedals, and pedal pads are factory, and the gauge cluster has no PRND. Cameron’s favorite part is watching people walk past it at car shows and then do a double take.

One customer bought a CLK430 new as an automatic because his wife wanted to be able to drive it. In 20 years she drove it about twice. His son found DC MotorWerks on YouTube, and the car is a manual now.

His own garage

Cameron’s Ferrari 360 is a gated manual, and it has a history. Ed Bolian always talked about missing a 360 from his exotic rental days, and Cameron kept track of that car over the years. Two weeks after Cameron bought a Viper, Ed told him it was for sale. Cameron flew out and drove it home in freezing weather with a friend. The Viper is gone now. The Ferrari has about 70,000 miles, or 111,000 kilometers, and around $30,000 of recent work, including a new top.

Rapid fire

• Greatest AMG ever built: all of them, but anything with a V12.
• Most undervalued Mercedes: the SLK55, “a Mercedes Miata with a V8,” and the R-Class.
• Most exciting car in the shop: the manual Black Series.
• Dream three-car garage: a Murciélago, his 360, and something with the M156 V8.

Ten years from now, he wants the name to mean the same thing it does today: “Just car guys doing business, having a great time.”

Watch the full episode

The full conversation with Cameron Davis is above and on YouTube, including the story of his mint Chrysler Town & Country minivan. Find the shop at DC MotorWerks, and see the shop floor in his second Throttlecast appearance.

The Ride Lounge is a private car club with climate-controlled car storage in Peachtree Corners and Midtown Atlanta, and Throttlecast is recorded on its floor. Members keep their cars in monitored, climate-controlled bays, whether that’s an AMG or a gated Ferrari. Browse more Throttlecast episodes.