I’m trying to get my (American) company more realistic to the times and I was wondering two things:
What year does the in game ‘‘dollars’’ count as? In terms of price inflation from the 40’s?
Is there actually some kind of calculator for Net HP to Gross (Since the game uses Net).
Or perhaps some kind of percentage that old companies usually increased their HP with.
The dollar in game is from 2010, also if you are caluclating for inflation you should use the “gold method” where you convert the price into ounces of gold then back into dollars of the year you are interested in.
Alright, any good calculators out there?
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com
I’ve been using that but I never knew what dollars the games are from.
Yeah, regarding NET vs GROSS there’s no universal way to calculate the conversion. The way the people rated their engines back then was pretty shady, in order to get higher power ratings.
Although one85db articule is about powertrain loss (flywheel hp vs hp at the wheels) the principle is rather the same in net vs gross.
Regarding the money thing, killrob once said that the money in automation was roughly based in 2010’s dollar, and he suggested to change the value to gold and then back to money, simply because the inflator calculators are horrible wrong, you always get really really low prices.
So “I came up” with the gold method, simply calculating the ounces of gold of the car and then converting back in gold for the year the car is supposed to be:
An example of how it works:
The bad thing abaout that method is that the sandmode prices are higher because they don’t count as reusing an existing factory and production shifts and staf, so using a markup you will normally use in tycoon mode (30% or higher) you end up with a slighty overprice car, but still closer to the normal price back in the day.
Interesting article, but that describes engine horsepower to wheel horsepower. Both SAE net and gross power are measured at the crank, before drivetrain losses. The difference is that net power accounts for parasitic losses such as the oil pump or alternator, while gross power does not.
However, there is also no consistent conversion from SAE net to SAE gross either; the difference can be less than 10% or more than 25%. If you want to compare with 60s muscle cars, I’d probably go with around 25%.
More info: http://ateupwithmotor.com/terms-technology-definitions/gross-versus-net-horsepower/
In order to use the gold conversion method, consider smoothing out the data with a centered moving average, gold can get into undervalued and overvalued phases too, hence you want to smooth that out to get the actual conversion. Even without this smoothing you will get pretty good results for the most part though.
hey uhh, i was using this to get a rough estimate of my car’s price, and i have a question, on the site u linked for gold prices, do we leave the adjust for inflation checkbox checked, or should we uncheck it?
I didn’t even noticed that checkbox. Well, play with it and see which returns the better values. I left it check it.
I’ll have to do some checks later, as I assume adjust for inflation puts it into today’s dollars instead of back then, tho I may be wrong
It doesn’t change anything 
No, don’t use that inflation adjusted stuff, it makes no sense whatsoever as it defeats the entire point of it. Governments have a huge interest in understating inflation numbers, which you see in these graphs, as they are still rising after the correction. Gold doesn’t become significantly more or less valuable, that’s the point. Since the 80s especially inflation calculations have been tampered with constantly, always adjusting it lower. Strange coincidence I guess. 
so basically, we just leave that box unchecked from what i’m getting at? thank you though 
