I love the engine builder, but as for the car builder, I’d honestly be happier with more simplified controls and options rather than a near-simulation. Hours and hours of tweaking was not what I expected from this game, especially since it doesn’t take much to build a decent engine. It seems the car builder is more complex in it’s scope than the engine builder, and doesn’t need to be since two engines with the same design can be made greatly different with much simpler controls.
I realise i don’t have to spend hours tweaking my cars. I just find the car-builder is more complex than the engine-builder. I hope future versions will work to make the car-builder more simplified while still being able to make wide changes between cars as the engine-builder is capable of doing.
Are you talking about the cardesigner, where you pick your transmission, aerodynamics, brakes etc.? Or in the design part where you choose the headlights and all other fixtures?
You can build a pretty good car in a few minutes, if you know in which aspect the car should be good. The only complex thing right now is suspension settings and that will be simplified with an easy mode functionality (like for turbos) in the future (not in the next update). I’d even say that building cars in the game is easier than building engines because you can make less mistakes which lead to total failure. But wait for the next update, then you can really see how much tweaking it needs to get good results (i.e. main car stats).
I would second the notion that the Engine Designer has more complexity than the Car Designer. Have you considered how much time you’ve spent in the Engine Designer till now and how used you are to building decent engines quickly? An experienced player will be able to put together a good engine that serves its purpose well within ~2 minutes and it takes about ~2 more minutes to get the Model Designer things right once the suspension easy mode is in the game. How much time you spend on placing fixtures is a different story of course.
All in all I would say that the current issue is not one of complexity, but one of a lack of descriptions and, more importantly, proper feedback from the game. That will change greatly in the next update after this one and when polishing up the Car Designer. Currently it still feels a bit like flying blind in the Model Designer.