Current Project: Japanese Zaibatsu Automotive Division

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I have decided to expand the IMP Automotive Empire with a tripartite alliance between IMP, a currently unnamed japanese manufacturer (this one right here) and a specialised italian manufacturer operating on a small scale (awaiting development). It’ll be the axis powers all over again.

I still don’t know what to call the japanese member of the IMP Axis (Its difficult to come up with something that sounds good and is linguistically correct if you know almost a dozen Japanese words), but a few details of its history as well as some cars already exist.

-Founded 1877 in Niimi (Okayama Prefecture) as a Steel processing plant
-Branched out into heavy machinery in 1891
-Began manufacturing Railway components in 1900, expanded into full railway carriages in 1912
-Started manufacturing military equipment in 1922
-Manufactured trucks for the Japanese Imperial Army during the 1930s and 1940s
-Built its first car intended for municipal and taxi usage, called the “LA1”, in 1948:

2954×1094 3 MB

It had a 993cc Inline four engine with 31hp and the flattest torque curve ever

1595×831 374 KB

mated to an unsynchronized gearbox. It also had front and rear live axle suspension and its body was made from aluminium as steel was still rationalized. Not many were built until 1950 (around 190 units), and even less have survived.

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Hello fellow asian motor company. I’m doing something similar, I need a couple of companies so my main company would run smoothly.

Most of the Japanese car companies are last names, I got mine in a Japanese name generator, and some are the mix of several words, like Datsun = son of DAT.

By that time, Japan was broken due to the war, so I think is a good detail that not many were built. But to avoid taxes, some companies used small 4 stroke engines or just plainly motorcycle engines… And your engine needs a higher Rev limiter :sweat:

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This particular company is probably the most developed of mine. Every car is designed to adhere to the regulations and trends of the time. The LA1 was designed to fit in the <1000cc tax bracket for “compact” cars because that was the only market segment where japanese companies actually built cars. The private car market was virtually nonexistent at that point in time as Kei cars hadn’t been invented yet, leaving police forces and taxi cabs as the only operators of such early japanese cars. The move to the higher 1500cc and 2000cc tax brackets will happen at a later point in time. And no the engine doesn’t need a higher rpm limit. At 4100rpm it gains like 0.3hp. Beyond that valve float kills both power and reliability.