There it is. The Ilaris Imperial III Turbo L stands in a category of its own. It has 66.7 comfort, a comfortable lead over the next lowest car. Following the war, Ilaris brought out a far more expensive version of the Imperial Turbo L. They invested substantially more into just about everything, especially the interior, with the sticker price being far higher than the prior models but not outside the reach of their buyers. Select panels are aluminium, seemingly because Ilaris can and because they’re proud of their aerospace work. A smooth V8, an electronic automatic gearbox, a soft and smooth suspension, it’s perfect for the sort of person who just wants to kick back as someone else drives. They spent so much money making it comfortable and perfecting the systems that it’s just never going to break down for the luxury buyers. Even if it’s not part of a rotation with another car, everything’s so refined that it can’t really go wrong with the sort of mileage it will see. The one potential concern is environmental resistance, but these buyers are getting a new Ilaris by the time that becomes a concern. Performance is acceptable for a luxury car. It’s not racing anywhere, sure, but it doesn’t need to be. Being a big, heavy sedan allows it to last a little over a month between refuels, even though it’s on E70. Even if the buyer is the driver, even if the buyer has to actually fuel the car with the plebians, it’s not an issue.
I don’t want to compare stats too much with the past round, but I do want to compare visuals a bit. The Imperial III does bare a resemblance to the Imperial of the 1970s, but it’s ten years newer and it shows. It’s gotten bigger and taller, with a boot that starts higher and stays higher, the overall body is different. Many of the changes are small and incremental ones, but you can see why. It’s a design that doesn’t feel dated yet, not for 1980, not on that body. The slanted chrome trim that makes it seem like it leans forward is gone and replaced with a line of protection strips that flow from the bumpers, the light covers are squared-off and no longer look so angry, and the hood bulges up rather than down. There’s incremental improvements to the likes of aerodynamics, and substantially more branding including a hood ornament, but it’s still incremental work.
The interior has taken a substantial step, however. The Imperial of the 70s bore a period-accurate interior, in terms of features. A gauge cluster, a radio with a few knobs and presets, an AC that only knows “hotter or colder” and “faster or slower”, along with some standard Automation interior shortcuts. Nothing wrong there, mind you, but the Imperial III is a massive step up. The interior is far more modelled, with a gauge cluster lit up with all manner of seven-segment displays. There’s modelling work that’s gone into storage bins, into speakers, into wood trim and such. It even has floor mats. There’s a cassette player with all the multi-functional buttons involved, and a fancy temperature-based climate control. They’re preset fixtures, sure, but there’s additional work in additional buttons and laying out the items. The whole thing probably has as many buttons as one of Ilaris’s fancy rockets, really. The end result for the Imperial III Turbo L is a very competent luxury car which would probably stand on its own even with competition. Needless to say, it will sell very well with those who are rich but not disgustingly so. A perfect car for the likes of dentists, important lawyers, other small business owners, people like that.
But what about those who are disgustingly rich?
This brings us to the next pair of cars. The first is a DCMW that I received advance notice of and was sort of dreading. How do you review a car with a sticker price of 173 thousand dollars? How do you review a car that stands alone, in a price bracket all to its own? An excessive and impractical level of luxury?
Oh, how quaint that idea was. A second uber-expensive hyper-luxury car has hit the challenge, and this one has a sticker price of a modest 318 thousand dollars. The Stockholm 1221FLH. I didn’t want to believe it when I first saw it. The imports for this challenge took almost 3 minutes, maybe there was a bug there.
There wasn’t. That’s the nice thing about Al Rilma, I can just crack open the save files in a text editor and see what you sent. This car costs 318 thousand dollars, and it incurred every single cent of that cost. It shouldn’t have, though. Sixty thousand dollars of that cost was spent working out how to use aluminium but only for part of the car, rather than just aluminium. This delivered negligible benefits. The decision is emblematic of the car as a whole. It spends a lot of money maxing out the quality sliders, with nine at the full +15.
What does this price get you? Well, it’s diminishing returns. Perhaps if this car had a cost closer to the DCMW, it would have been received better. It’s a bit easier to drive with traction control, but the DCMW is in the 60s and that’s the driver’s concern. Similarly, both cars just about break the scale of ADPR with the Stockholm a little ahead but in an irrelevant manner. A bit sportier due to the DCMW’s joy-sapping but passenger-coddling CVT, but that’s not the buyer’s concern. I’m beating around the bush though, aren’t I? The DCMW edges out the Stockholm in terms of comfort, notching four additional points. Sure, it’s four points up near 100 but it’s a bad look. The DCMW’s price is justified by offering 50% better comfort than the Ilaris. Sure, for 2.5 times the cost, but I can see someone buying it. Meanwhile, the Stockholm’s sticker price is so high that you could buy an Al-Sheikh and DCMW’s other ludicrously expensive halo car (the Minajj supercar) for just ten grand more than a single Stockholm. The DCMW does boast lesser stats in the engine, an iron six-cylinder rather than an aluminium V12. The DCMW makes just 143 kW, but the Stockholm is only about 14 kW up and substantially lacking on torque for getting the ball rolling. The DCMW is allegedly turbocharged, allegedly, but the turbocharger is really just a third muffler. It generates 0.12 bars of boost, saps the engine of power practically everywhere and totally muders the responsiveness, but it does make the engine unbelievably quiet. If it weren’t for the fact that the engine is near-bulletproof, the complexity would be a drawback, but I just have to tip my hat to the audacity.
The comparison gets worse when you actually look at the cars. The DCMW is a highly-ornamented, ornate work of automotive sculpture. The grille, the fins, the turbined wheels are all reminiscent of the luxury autos of old. The rear lights are entirely form over function, the hidden headlamps sit out of view and allow the grille and lights to evoke the streamliners of the 30s with their pinched-in grilles and wide, swooping fenders. It’s still recognisably DCMW, the flourishes are all familiar from prior rounds, but this is something more. The engineering time tells us that 25 years were spent creating this car, and it feels like 25 years were spent styling it as well.
The engineering time tells us that 57 years were spent creating the Stockholm. Setting aside any concerns over realism, over whether ET should be limited in future rounds, it just doesn’t feel as finely-crafted. Broadly speaking, the Stockholm is substantially similar to its downmarket cousins. Oh, sure, a few items have been swapped to chrome and a few items have been slightly resized, but… It’s the same. I’ll assess it more when I get to that part of the market and review the other two Stockholms.
Take a look at the Toyota Century, specifically the third generation G60 Century. It shares a platform with the Mark X, Crown and various Lexuses. It’s still got a unique and distinct visual identity. You can look through the N platform and spot the Century, it stands out in the lineup. It’s not just a Crown with the dial turned to eleven, it’s a unique identity. It may approach things differently, it may be substantially more excessive than the comparably restrained Century, but the DCMW Al Sheikh Supremacy Six achieves something similar. It looks expensive and important. The Stockholm 1221FLH does not.
The Al Sheikh justifies its price. The Al Sheikh is to the Ilaris what the Ilaris is to everything else. When I first saw the price, my comment was to keep it wherever it makes sense as a product and I think it does. Yes, it may be over three times the budget once fixed costs are included, but it’s such a massive improvement in terms of comfort and it’s such a way to stake a claim for importance. It makes sense as a car to spend 191 thousand on across the life of the car, the entire package carries it. The Stockholm 1221FLH does not. It costs so much more, and it only trades off with the Al Sheikh in ways that ultimately do not help it. The name doesn’t help either, it’s like a monitor and it doesn’t do anything to differentiate the car from its stablemates. The Al Sheikh is named for royalty, setting it apart from the various utility vehicles.
The Stockholm 1221FLH also lacks a modelled interior, while the Al Sheikh has one. Sure, if there was a more competitive price point, the interior wouldn’t be likely to push the Al Sheikh over the edge… But looking inside, the comparison to the Century was apt for the Al Sheikh, and I can’t help but do a writeup on it. It starts with the driver’s seat, where sumptuous red fabric sits underneath layered wood trim. The cathedral window theme from the rear lights has been carried through to the centre console, where the FM radio boasts a six-band equaliser. Looking behind the seat, there is a tinted glass partition which leads into the real bounty of the rear passenger’s compartment. The centre console now boasts a large screen with a VHS player and a carphone. Okay, it’s only 11 inches, but that’s large by the standards of 1980! You can draw the curtains and get some privacy, sequestered from the outside world. It’s an exceptional level of detail, it’s an exceptional level of craftsmanship. It’s just incredibly well-done and constructed.
I decided to look into what I’d need to do in order to “fix” the Stockholm and it’s just more things than I’d be comfortable with. The panels are a massive cost, they should be all-alu, the massive use of +15 quality hurts too. Direct-Acting OHC isn’t great, Mechanical Fuel Injection is actively terrible when EFI is around, a performance head really hurts loudness and smoothness which is doubly bad for comfort, the list goes on. I was able to substantially cut the cost, down below 170 grand, without compromising comfort at all. Weight, fuel economy and WES level were all better, so that’s another front where it’s cheaper. The issue is that these fixes a lot more stuff than just sliding a techpool value or correcting for one problem in the game. Even if I adjust the most notable issue, the way that the partial alu panels make it so expensive, it’s still got a substantial cost disadvantage due to spending elsewhere and a pretty massive styling disadvantage.
In summary, the Al-Sheikh is a car that might only sell in limited numbers, in the very highest rarified air, perhaps only dozens in this top trim… But it’s a car that would absolutely delight the customers who do have the ability to purchase it. It would succeed through sheer power of margin and draw people in. The Stockholm 1221FLH, meanwhile, is not; it lacks sufficient differentiation from the regular line and makes several substantial missteps in how it interacts with the game’s systems. It shouldn’t cost this much, both in terms of engineering and stats. Fortune once described Maybach’s ploy for the ultra-luxury market as “remarkably clumsy”, and the Stockholm unfortunately feels much the same.
