Automation Grand Forum Challenge
Many Automation players have, over the course of their play in the game, created vast amounts of rich lore to go along with their car creations. It’s time that we start sharing that for everyone to see, and what better way than to create your own car company thread on the official Automation forums?
Challenge Guidelines
It’s pretty simple - create a new thread for your lore car or engine company in the Car or Engine Design Sharing subforums of the Official Automation forums, and post about your cars! You can make up their backstories, the backstory of your car company; whatever you want! Tie it in with your challenge entries or other community events as well, collaborate with other lore car companies, fill in the gaps in the already-known lore of your company and more…really, what your ultimate goal will be is entirely up to you!
Starting in December of 2025, we will pick monthly winners for the rest of the year in the following categories; Best New Post and Best New Car Company Thread, from nominations submitted by the community. We will take what you present to us into consideration - this means, if you present a heavily-formatted CSS post, we will take that into account in our evaluation, but instead if you want to focus on the lore behind your car(s), or the cars themselves, we won’t penalise you for making a hugely complex CSS post either. Winners of each category will win an Automation sticker pack, and they will automatically be entered into the year-end finale of the challenge, to be held in December of 2026!
As always, we ask players from refraining to refer to real-world brands in as much as possible; we don’t need our friends in the automotive industry cracking down on us because someone has decided to roleplay as “real-world manufacturer, but they only make terrible cars”! Another thing to consider is that if you want to refer to lore companies that other Automation players have created, we strongly encourage you to ask for permission beforehand!
So what constitutes a “car company”?
Well, that’s up to you. If you want to make a car brand and show off its cars and its history, that’s fine. If you want to roleplay as a tuning house, taking other people’s cars and tuning them, that’s fine too. Fancy posting about a racing team? That’s eligible as well! Do you want to do a company that’s focused on engines primarily in the Engine Design Sharing Subforum? That’s allowed too! All we ask is that your companies be largely plausible as coming from Automation; we don’t really want companies that only make cellphones or mechs or kitchen appliances, unless you can tie in an automotive aspect to it believably! On that subject, you can base your company wherever you want, whether its based in a place in the real world, or in a place based in the Automation world!
Challenge Rules
For the monthly Best Post nominations, the post must have been made during the calendar month for which the voting takes place. For example, a specific post made in February is ONLY eligible to win in February, not in March or April or any other month; the same rule applies for Best New Thread as well.
ALL Car Design or Engine Design Sharing Subforum threads, new or old, are eligible to have nominations in the monthly Best Post category! Players nominating their own threads or posts will not be eligible entries in the monthly voting.
As mentioned, the monthly winners will go on to the year-end finale to be voted on for Best Post of the Year and Best Thread of the Year. The year-end finale will have other categories as well, for which nominations will occur during November of 2026 - Best Overall Lore, Best Overall Cars, and Most Improvement, so there is incentive to keep posting in your threads after you’ve started them so you can win one of these big categories!
Best of luck to everyone who participates, and have fun!