An idea: Fleet Allocation Challenge

Community Challenges & Competitions
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If this has been done before, please link me. I found no tournament/challenge types equivalent to something I’ve done in real life for myself and for clients, and that I wonder if would work well here. The idea is to meet an entity’s (an individual, a family, or a small business) transportation needs, with the understanding that it’ll take more than one vehicle to do so.

For example, ages ago I learned that the combination of a pickup truck and a sports sedan covered 99% of my vehicle tasks, which included commuting, occasional track days, and medium-large cargo hauling. More recently, my fleet was headed in the direction of three vehicles: a 4wd truck (81 Toyota Hilux) for cargo, snow, and utility use; a teeny econobox (03 Honda Insight) for routine personal transportation; and a full-fat luxury barge (92 Mercedes 500SEL) for roadtrips, passenger hauling, and special occasions.

I spent some time analyzing the problem systematically, and coming up with a model and algorithm to guide the decision of how to allocate money, parking spaces, and other resources to get the best distribution of vehicle functions for a given set of needs.

I wonder if a similar task might make for a good competition. For now, I’m just kicking around the idea; an actual posted challenge would be a lot more detailed, but the gist is something like this:

"It’s 1990. The Addams family has $60000 to spend. They need to be able to…

  • Haul 1000kg with 40 off-road ability
  • Transport two people with at least 30 comfort and at most 7L consumption
  • Transport five people with at least 80 comfort and more emphasis on style
  • Aunt Fester is having a mid-life crisis and wants a 40’s or 50’s-body convertible that’ll do 0-100 in four seconds.

Design at least two vehicles that between them meet all these requirements. Maintenance is taken into account, so bonus points for sharing engines or other equipment. If you somehow manage to come up with a 50’s-body convertible SUV with a 1990 engine that does all that for under 30k, great; the family will take two, please. But they anticipate three, maybe four different rigs."

As the emphasis is on function rather than form, entries would be encouraged to go light on styling details and pay more attention to engineering.

What do you think?

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Normally multi car challenges don’t do too well, but this one seems harmless enough. To flesh out the rules how about some techpool limitations, and maybe a year restriction?
Rules in a bullet point style would help as well as it’s fairly difficult to read at the moment.

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For now, I’m just kicking around the idea; an actual posted challenge would have a lot more detailed rules, but I cleaned up the text some.

Got any examples of prior multi-car challenges so I can see what worked and what didn’t?

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Wow that sounds so fun :slight_smile: A great idea. I like the idea of fleet building challenge!!

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I think this sounds like a fun, really ambitious challenge idea. If you go forward with it, I would join. I would suspect that it would take a lot of testing to make a good ruleset, so make plenty of mules and take your time.

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What car in the 40’s -50’s put down 0 to 100 times in 4 seconds?

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I assumed it is supposed to be a modern restomod

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Multi-car challenges usually tend to only attract people with lots of time on their hands, as making several cars for the same challenge can be daunting. This is how a series known as PDC came to an end, when the host asked for 3 cars to form a Presidential motorcade.

Challenges with more than 1 car to submit work best when the deadlines are long, the level of sophistication in terms of design isn’t too great (design is not a high priority and interiors are not required) and, ideally, cars are allowed to share a platform.

I actually do like some of the multi-car ideas presented recently, though. Yours is a pretty neat concept, and as a person who has a similar arrangement with my cars (one practical, one enthusiast) I can appreciate a consumer asking themselves that question.

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This all makes sense. I had in mind that scoring criteria would look less at design or possibly not at all. Also, I favor the degree and type of flexibility for body choices that would make people’s existing cars readily adaptable.

No visual design at all would be boring, but it would also be useful as a test/pilot round to help figure out good settings. I’ve in mind something like the above, just as test mules with no regard to fixtures (other than aero) or design (other than morphs that affect stats). A suggestion would be to start with one or two of your existing cars and make one or two others to complement/overlap its functions.

I can make mules ad nauseum, but working with other people’s interpretations of the rules would be way more useful. I’ll organize a test round if there’s interest. Who’s interested?//

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It reminds me of a CSR/QFC, but with the premise modified and expanded to require entrants to make multiple different vehicles, one for each client’s set needs.

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You could do it that way, but there is value in a smaller quantity of more diversely capable vehicles. The rules could raise this value - say, with registration and insurance costs added per vehicle.

The scenario above could perhaps have the following competitive entries:

  1. $40000 huge ridiculous 40’s-bodied SUV convertible (Dragula, pretty much), $20000 econobox.

  2. $15000 no-frills offroad truck, $35000 efficient luxury car, $10000 cheap muscle kit car.

  3. $15k truck, $35k fat retro convertible with modern tech, $10k city car.

  4. $15k truck, $20k family car, $10k city car, $15k retro kit car.

  5. $25k 50’s hotrod truck, $35k eco-lux.

And I’m sure others will think of more.

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Wow that sounds so fun, the sooner the challenge is posted the better I think, excited!

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Best bet is to keep it at 2 cars, set a reasonable price limit and post the challenge.

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I definitely wouldn’t mind more than 2 cars though, as long as it’s balanced so that having 2 cars isn’t so much better than 3 cars

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I think it’d be wise to have several brains’ worth of creative output, not just my own, to help figure out rules. Someone’s bound to think of something within the rules that would never occur to me, and either break or wildly remake the game.

Who’s down for a test-mule dry run?

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16

omg sounds like fun I love doing tests :slight_smile: