Bottom Barrel Bargains
It’s the dawn of the 80’s.
Off the back of a rough decade with several oil crises and with large political change, people are beginning to yearn for a small, efficient, affordable car that they can live with no matter what happens in the world.
You work for a large automaker and your task is to design an A-Segment car to cater to these new buyers.
Essentially, the idea here is to create base model A-Segment cars from the period between 1975-1981.
These cars will then (as well as being judged for their realism) become the basis for further fun challenges in the future of a to be disclosed nature.
The key takeaway is realism here. No 500hp 7.8L V8 Mowdars, just plain, boring engineering, designed to get you from point to point (the exiting stuff comes later).
For reasons that will become apparent, i’m trusting that ya’ll are sensible with this one. The admittedly sparse and vague ruleset is not due to neglect or poor thought, it is intentional to avoid minimaxing for stat purposes (which isn’t fun for anyone), and because real cars (especially in this era) aren’t usually subject to some strange arbitrary requirements.
With that out of the way, here are some rules
- Engine config and size is free, but with the caveat that this must clearly be an economy car (if i see ultra advanced tech, Quality, or a V8 there better be a good reason why its in an ultra budget model)
- Likewise, body type is open, but the total length must not exceed 3.7m, these are A-Segment cars. Hatchbacks are the obvious choice here, but if you want to make a tiny saloon skoda style I wont stop you
- Tires must be square, no difference in size. End of story.
- Drivetrain and layout is free, but again, base model, bargain bin cars, realism focus.
- Price? Cheap. Cheap as is reasonable to expect. If it’s more then like 3k in material costs you’ve gone wrong somewhere.
- Likewise for PU, factories want to be churning out hundreds of these an hour. If your PU is high, explain why (maybe it was the unions demanding a different manufacturing process).
- Model year: 1975-1981
Sales: 2k in the sales manager is the bare minimum (You set the price, but be realistic, a send-back will incur a points penalty, and I really don’t want to send back any cars.)Sales min is removed due to game inconsistency, you still must set the price of your car realistically however.- Lore. Car brands don’t pop out of thin air. Who are you, how long have you been around, what do you sell ect. Likewise for why the car is designed as it is.
- And lastly, an exterior and at least an idea of an interior (there’s points in all these categories but really if you cant show what your car is without numbers what’s the point?)
If it’s clear your trying to exploit a loophole like techpool ect to gain an advantage, I reserve the right to send back designs.
Submissions
DM me @Rambow directly with the .car file and a picture of it, then feel free to make a post on this page in your own time (but don’t show any stats that may allude as to what you’ve engineered)
State below if you intend to join.
Scoring
Each car will be ranked out of 100 in categories such as (but not limited to): Realisim, Reliability, fuel economy, cost, sales, design, everyday liveability (you gain far more points here if you do an interior), lore/backstory, ect.
Each car will then be given two separate aggregate scores. One for the creative (Design ect) & one for the engineering.
The ranks in each combined aggregate will then be revealed to show the winners.
(who as a prize get to pick between them which phase out of a choice of 3 occurs next!)
Deadline
As I don’t expect the pickup on this to be particularly speedy this one’s a bit in the distance. It’s the 11th of October at 1am GMT.
Why so far away? Well many reasons, but mainly that for those of you in academia, the usual 2 weeks you might expect happens to correspond with the start of courses in some countries, and I don’t want that to be a reason people miss out. And also because I’ve been hosting this event on discord as far and I want anyone here to have enough time such that having a little head start shouldn’t impact you all that much.
This is my first time hosting a forum challenge so please bear with me if I’ve made any obvious mistakes.
