Hey guys, this is the first community challenge that I’m hosting on the forums in several years. I’ve held a few on my discord and youtube in the mean time, but I decided that I want to give more people a chance to compete this time.
The target:
Build a 2020 luxury sedan for under 50.000$. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should set itself apart from other standard sedans in the price range which focus more on sporty handling or all-round practicality.
The inspiration:
The 2022 Genesis G70 (which with the Premium pack costs just over 50.000$)
quality sliders: anything between -5 and +5 is allowed on any part you want
Judging criteria:
Exterior design (interior not mandatory)
Realism (could this realistically be made and sold in real life?)
Your score in the Luxury demographic in the Automation markets (Gasmea market)
Ride quality in BeamNG (I will test each car on a rough piece of road in BeamNG)
Scoring:
For exterior design, realism and ride quality, each car will get a 1-10 score in each category. For market competitiveness in the Luxury market, the car with the highest competitiveness score will get the most points, the one with the lowest score will get the least points (like in a race or something).
The scores will then be added up. Highest overall score wins
Submissions:
To prevent double-entries, I will only take submissions through my discord channel: Tom Henks Chillout
drag and drop your file in the “community-challenge-files” subchannel to enter your car
Deadline: July 24th, 6pm CEST
I made a youtube video with all the rules here: 2020 Entry-Level Luxury Sedan Challenge - YouTube
On July 24th at 6pm CEST, I will stream the evaluation of all the submitted cars on my twitch channel: Twitch
But I will also post the results here the next day
I know not everyone typically sets up their cars for BeamNG, but that’s part of the challenge
You get 1-10 points for your exterior design, 1-10 points for realism, 1-10 points for ride quality and you get points for how well your car does in the Luxury demographic relative to the other cars. The exact amount of points for your competitiveness in the Luxury market will depend on how many entries we get.
In the end, all of these points are added up to determine the winner.
You’ll find that a cat and a muffler will make your engine quieter which improves comfort and therefore your competitiveness in the Luxury market segment. So it’s in your best interest, but if you don’t want to use a cat or mufflers, you don’t have to but your score will suffer.
fair enough. But I’d be surprised if anyone in this challenge doesn’t use a cat or mufflers. I didn’t put it in the rules because I expect that most people will use them anyway, and if they don’t, hey it’s a game. It’s just a game at the end of the day
Generally I reserve the “mandatory requirements” for stuff relating to legal matters, and use bins to get entries that technically legally do not have the stuff, but do not include the stuff that happens to be common and even essentially “required” by the market.
Using market stats to get a final score and rating is just a flat-out bad idea, especially considering the current state of the market calculations (absolutely and utterly fucked). Also using Beamng to get a comfort rating just seems complicated and tricky, as well as quite subjective. Like, you have a comfort stat right on the left side of the screen the instant you boot up the car?? This isn’t meant to be insulting, hosting a challenge for the first time is hard, I know. Generally, simpler scoring mechanisms will often have more correct stats. Hope you challenge pans out, I love working on cars from this segment.
I’m not hosting a challenge for the first time. I’m used to hosting challenges for my youtube viewers where we build cars in Automation and then I test them in BeamNG. Because Automation only spits out numbers “on paper” that often don’t correlate to how the car drives in BeamNG, I want to include both in a challenge like this. And because luxury cars aren’t about being fast on a race track, I had to come up with another test in BeamNG that’s actually relevant to these cars, so I found a way to test ride quality.
I’m not forcing anyone to enter my challenges. If you don’t like the challenge, feel free to move on to another one.
I will host plenty more challenges about sports cars or performance cars of any kind because then I can just race them in BeamNG against the clock to see which is fastest. I’ve done lots of challenges like that in the past, and I will do more of them in the future. But this time I wanted to do something different which required different testing.
From what I’ve been able to test, it seems pretty hard to get over 120 market score (which is frankly, quite shit) as “entry” level into the luxury catagory just doesn’t work. because theres premium market for that. The price is too low to use luxury interior items, and thats after cheaping out everywhere. Automation and beam have basically 0 correlation between eachother. I don’t really see how you’re going to test the suspension thing… Look at roll angle with your eyes? listen for bottom outs?
Usually automation challenges are preffered due to being able to make some sort of equations out of the stats to bring a bit more meaning to the tuning. Without exactly what you are testing, how do we know what to aim for in beam. If it was a time trial, well that has something you can work towards, But usually those ditch the automation stat side of things to focus on beam alone.
The main problem I see is the lack of sedan bodies near the 2020 build date. The year of the body you choose therefore has a notable impact on the luxury score due to the body age penalty.
well the thing is to have any sort of half decent luxury score, you have to use a big car, but the max size i’ve found is about 2.8-2.7m wheelbase because of the cost limits, otherwise it just doesnt work, you’re over the price for less comfort etc. choosing a 2.6m wheelbase is too small and hurts comfort anyway, there is no win here.
this is another thing where I would like to appeal to everyone’s common sense and logic. Sure, if you can fit, say, a 3.2m wheelbase body into your budget and make it competitive, go for it. But most likely, most people are gonna use something around 2.7-2.9m wheelbase. But if you want to stand out with a car that’s different and you can make it work, I don’t wanna be the one stopping you. That’s why there’s no maximum wheelbase, I want to leave room for creativity.
The ride quality test will test how well the car handles a piece of damaged road with lots of holes and bumps. Since it’s pretty short I will go both ways with each car. If a car bottoms out or gets easily upset by the rough road, that’s a bad score. If it stays composed and “floats” over the bumps and cracks, that’s a good score.
Now some of you might be saying “The quarter mile wasn’t in the original rules, why was it used to determine the winner?” The answer is simple: because there can only be 1 winner, not 3.
The astute among you might also say “Why did 3 cars go through the tie-breaker when only 2 were tied on points?”
This is due to my own mistake because as you may notice, on stream when viewing the Atlas Gemini V8 I said “I’m giving this car 9 points for design only because I want to leave room in case there’s another car I like even better” (or similar, at 6:58 in the VOD). Turns out there wasn’t, but on stream I didn’t come back to that statement and thus didn’t give the car the 10 points that I wanted to give it. 10 points in styling instead of 9 would have put this car also at 33 points, the same as the other 2 that went into the tie-breaker.
I know that some of you were already a bit torn on the ruleset and judging of this challenge to begin with, and I might get even more comments about the judging now, but at the end of the day, I think the right car won and I don’t feel bad about the decision. Congratulations to Sedan57Chevy again!
Today I will post another challenge which will have much more conventional judging so you might enjoy that one in case you didn’t like this one. Thanks again to everyone who participated.
