A PPLH owner in Sydney bought a re-built left-hand drive AS350 from Canada - the only things from the original wreck were the dataplate and 2 small items which weren't damaged, basically a complete new aircraft - it saved a massive amount of tax levied on the creation of a new dataplate.
The throttle quadrant is at the left door, instead of between the 2 front seats. This made it very difficult for an instructor to endorse me on it, because he had to be able to manipulate the throttle for the emergency sequences, so I had to change seats and sit on the right. Comes time for an auto, he pulls the throttle, I enter auto, lever to the floor, and all is looking good, here comes the flare, RRPM starting to rise, so I pull the lever a little to control them - but the lever is stuck to the floor.
"IT'S STUCK!" says i to the instructor, "THE LEVER IS STUCK!" as I continue the flare.
He looks down to the left, sees that the collective lock has engaged itself, so he tries to unlatch it, but he has to push down on the lever to do that, while I am pulling up on it. I won.
Knowing that there would be no collective to cushion, I had lowered the nose while we still had some speed, and prepared to run it onto the grass next to the runway. We bounced. Luckily, actually, because we hopped over an elevated taxiway which would have caught the toes and torn off the skids or tipped us over. When we landed again on the grass, we narrowly missed a drainage ditch on the left, and skidded to a halt with a cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-Ho Silver.
I unstrapped, walked around to the left door, opened it, and unlatched the collective lock, and then broke it off so it couldn't do it again. There was no damage to the aircraft, so it is possible to say that an AS350 can endure an auto without collective.
I complained to the (then) Aerospatiale agent in Oz, and he said "Zat ees not a dezign feature of our aircraft. Eet ees a modification from Canada. We have no control over zem."
There was also a crash in Scottsdale Az in 2004 for the same reason, but theirs happened at 1200' and they didn't get a good landing off it.