The Hellwig Rule Breaker Does Away With Your Assumptions on Truck Campers

The Hellwig Rule Breaker is a combined effort by Hellwig Products, Lance Campers, Bushwacker, Icon, MagaFlow, Torklift International, Warn and Falken. Mike Hellwig of Hellwig Productions was creative lead on it, and his idea was that they deliver a truck camper unlike any other that had been done before.

The Rule Breaker is based on a 2016 Nissan Titan XD, which had just been introduced the year before, and has a Lance 650 camper on top. The idea seems a simple one, but the challenges were many and involved mostly putting this kind of payload on top of a truck and not have the whole thing tumble over itself when going through a rougher patch.

The Titan XD had to be customized to improve its offroad capabilities, as well as its drivability. It was the first choice for Hellwig because of its considerable payload capacity and the Cummins 5.0-liter turbo-diesel V-8 engine with 310 horsepower and 555 lb-ft of torque at 1,600 rpm. It was a perfect fit for the camper, but Hellwig still had to make sure such a big and tall vehicle could go off-road without toppling.

Hellwig Products specializes in sway bars, helper leaf springs and airbags since 1946, and they’ve been going to SEMA since 1967. The Rule Breaker, like all their other builds, was the perfect way to showcase their products without standing out like a sore thumb: Big Wig airbags, Hellwig rear sway bar and helper leaf springs.

At the same time, though, they wanted to create something that would stand out on its own and something that anyone could build on their own.

“The Rule Breaker [is] not breaking any legal rules, but it’s shattering the old assumptions many folks have about truck campers,” Hellwig says in an older interview with Truck Camper. “This is a rig that you can have fun with and it stands out from the crowd. It’s not just a pretty showcase piece. It’s a fully functional overland rig. Best of all, a consumer can build this rig with 100-percent off-the-shelf products.”

If you remove the camper, you can still drive your Nissan Titan XD like a regular pickup truck. More importantly for thrill-seekers, you could head out, drop your camper on the site and then drive off to your next adventure.

The camper is comfortable enough to be your home away from home: Hellwig says he’s spent up to two weeks in a row cooped up in it and didn’t feel like leaving. It has a sleeping area with a generous bed, a small kitchen with a dining area, and a small wet bathroom with toilet and shower. In the video below, the fridge seems small and strangely located (at the foot of the bed), but Hellwig promises you can rest easy about drinking warm beer. There’s also a TV in there.

For outdoor fun, Hellwig added a proper audio system. For nighttime driving, the Rule Breaker comes with projection lights, Baja design lights, fog lights and a full light bar.

Being his brainchild, Hellwig heaps on the praise on the Rule Breaker, calling it “the ultimate overland camper,” as you can see in the video below. He means that it’s the ultimate overland camper with the exception of dedicated overland camping rigs, as he explains in the aforementioned interview. “This is as ultimate as you can get while still being able to use the truck as a pickup once the camper is removed,” he says. And that is no small feat.

The tally for the Rule Breaker was $119,000, of which $69,600 was spent on the Titan XD.