Might as well reveal mine. And yes, it does in fact have a 1 liter engine.
The Storm Prince, in Deluxe trim.
The Storm Prince, in Deluxe trim.
Sorry for the delay on the fixed fixtures model Packbat, it has kinda drowned in everything I want to do, but it has not been forgotten!
@Puffster: Much thanks! And no sweat - in the worst-case scenario, I’ll just use a dramatic silhouette instead. 
Might as well post my land yacht now…
Because 5.0L and 248 hp in 1955 is necessary to move 1.6 tonnes of steel to almost 200 km/h.
staggers out of room, bleary-eyed
Update: all the calculations are complete, and the spreadsheet is full of delicious, nutritious, and only sometimes outright misleading numbers. Now I have to figure out what they mean, take pictures of the cars I need to feature, and write the results post.
I feel for you, just trying to figure out what to focus was hard enough, imagine calculating it all is… immense!
Mmph - the creative writing is always the hardest part for me. Okay, question time: which would people prefer?
(a) Results today, in “here’s why So-and-so won and here’s a link to the spreadsheet” format?
(b) Results … ‘soon’, but with a modicum of style (roughly comparable to the Hoon Competition results)?
If “soon” < 1 week; than (b)
B. I’m willing to wait for some style.
Same as the above 
Note: all prices have been converted from 2010 dollars to 1955 dollars using the Consumer Price Index. Works out to about 12% of the Automation in-game prices.
1955 is shaping up to be a year of tremendous international growth for the automobile industry, with customers flocking to showrooms around the world looking for new cars and light trucks. Many manufacturers are looking for any way they can to increase production to meet demand; let’s look at three of them that we see as having especial upside potential.
The company we see as having the greatest upward potential is, of course, Žnoprešk Avtotehnika, based in Trieste, Italy. The Žnoprešk Z5755-V12, pictured above, is the luxury car par excellence, with a well-cushioned leather interior (including an optional phonograph!), well-cushioned double-wishbone suspension, and a V12 that delivers power more smoothly than you can imagine.
And you’ll probably have to imagine, at least for the forseeable future; the Z5755-V12 is the sought-after car of the year. The $4,900 price tag is no deterrent to sales; customers have already queued up well into next year for their vehicles, and rumor has it that speculators have sold Žnoprešks to impatient buyers for prices in excess of $10,000.
While the Norwegian company ABR Designs does not have any car with the same appeal as the Žnoprešk, there is no-one in the world who has sold more cars than ABR, and no ABR that has sold better than the Cricket Econo.
Built in Oslo, Norway, the outstanding characteristic of the Econo - and, indeed, of all Crickets (more on that anon) - is its exceptional nimbleness. It is tiny, it is lightweight, and it is responsive. Those in need of passenger space or luggage capacity will have to look elsewhere, but for everyone else (and at a sales price barely over $1,000 for a car with better than 30 mpg, I mean everyone else), the Cricket Econo is simply too good a deal to pass up.
Unless, of course, you want something a bit more … exciting. In that case, you’ll have to go west to ABR’s smaller factory in Drammen, where you’ll find for $1,720 the Cricket Sport. The same 1.2L block that produced 40 hp in the Econo is spitting out 69 hp here, and in a car that weighs barely 1,420 lbs, that’ll go from 0 to 60 in just eleven seconds - and even on standard tyres, take the corners like a thoroughbred racecar.
The third company we advise you to keep an eye on is right here in the United States - Grey Skies Industries, in Los Angeles, California - who build two cars with a little bit of an avian theme: the $1,000 GSI Pigeon and $1,650 GSI Nightingale. The Pigeon is a perfectly acceptable little city car - and with a galvanized steel chassis and all-around solid construction, a sturdy one at that - but of the two, it’s the Nightingale that really caught our eye.
The great thing about the GSI Nightingale is that it does basically everything. (Well, except off-roading.) It has five seats and adequate cargo space, good fuel economy and decent safety, and sporty performance from a miniature 2.4L twin-carb V8. (Its cornering is nowhere near as sharp as the Cricket Sport, but it’ll do 0 to 60 in under ten seconds - 128 hp making itself fully known!)
The car doesn’t have as much unmet demand as the ABRs or the Žnoprešk - it is less chic than the Z5755-V12, less fun than the Cricket Sport, and less cheap than the Cricket Economy - but if you’re looking for the most impractical practical sedan out there, you need look no farther.
Thank you all for your patience, and congratulations to NormanVauxhall, Puffster, and oppositelock! Spreadsheets and futher commentary to come.
wait. so umm, how is the market share??
im a little bit confused here.
anyway, congrats to you 3 the winners in this season of PCTC.
Market share is coming - I’ll talk about that when I post the spreadsheet.
Wooohoooo!!!
Seems my all in gamble on volume payed off, really excited to see the total stats. Thanks for a great challenge Packbat, and once again sorry for being a hold-up in the process. And thanks koolkei 
[size=150]The Spreadsheet[/size]
I was originally going to post the .xlsx file, here, but I’ve decided to upload it to Google Sheets instead: “Entry Data v2”, with the list of entries, their stats, and their performance in the market.
I feel like I’ve learned a lot from this competition, and one of the biggest things I learned is that the spreadsheet I publish for the players to use needs to be much, much more informative. With 13 cars entered, there were theoretically 2.6 million customers to be served; but if all 11 factories worked at full tilt, they would only be able to produce 2.4 million cars in total. The only factory that didn’t end up at max capacity is Desert Mountains Automotive’s Socorro, NM facility - which was merely producing 81% of its theoretical maximum. I think a lot of that comes down to not giving players a clear idea of how many cars they might sell.
That being the case, I had to work out a better metric for company success than profitability. After all, if your car is the people’s fifth choice, and a distant fifth at that, then the moment anyone in the top four gets another production line rolling your customers will evaporate. To that end, I generated two new metrics: fraction of market served when a car sold out, and fraction of buyers for whom the car was their first choice. The latter especially was key for two reasons:
[ul]]This was the “upward sales potential” I was talking about in the reviews./:m]
]This gave me a way to estimate how much profitability a car could potentially lose when its competitors got their acts together./:m][/ul]
From this, I was able to narrow the field of competitors down to the top three I listed in the reviews. All three had Sales/First-Choice ratios below 1 on at least one car (“upward potential”) and a positive ROI on first-choice customers alone. The other competitors I am not ranking; how you sort them depends pretty heavily on how quickly you imagine each company ramps up their production, as this will determine what fraction of my so-called ‘actual’ sales they make before the supply numbers change - and therefore how much profit. The order they appear in the spreadsheet is purely an artifact of the calculation method - the cars that sell out earlier are listed higher and the cars that sell out later are listed lower.
[size=150]Market Demographic Results[/size]
Because there’s such a significant difference between first-choice sales and actual sales, I’m going to go ahead and list first and second place in both. This is copied straight off the spreadsheet, but while the Conditional Formatting rules in Excel highlight the appropriate entries for me, those rules didn’t survive the import to Google Sheets.
[ul]
]Commuter:
[list]]Actual Sales: ABR Cricket Econo, Vanquist Theodora Wagon/:m]
]First-Choice Customers: ABR Cricket Econo, GSI Pigeon/:m][/ul]/:m]
]City:
[ul]]Actual Sales: ABR Cricket Econo, Vanquist Theodora Wagon/:m]
]First-Choice Customers: ABR Cricket Econo, GSI Pigeon/:m][/ul]/:m]
]Family:
[ul]]Actual Sales: ABR Cricket Econo, Vanquist Theodora Wagon/:m]
]First-Choice Customers: ABR Cricket Econo, GSI Nightingale/:m][/ul]/:m]
]Sport:
[ul]]Actual Sales: ABR Cricket Sport, Storm Prince Deluxe/:m]
]First-Choice Customers: ABR Cricket Sport, ABR Cricked Econo/:m][/ul]/:m]
]Luxury:
[ul]]Actual Sales: Solo Jetstream Deluxe, Storm Prince Deluxe/:m]
]First-Choice Customers: Žnoprešk Z5755-V12, Solo Jetstream Deluxe/:m][/ul]/:m]
]Offroad:
[ul]]Actual Sales: DMA 055 F & 055 T (almost tied), Kasuar Excellent City/:m]
]First-Choice Customers: DMA 055 F & 055 T (almost tied), Cricket Econo/:m][/ul]/:m]
]Utility:
[ul]]Actual Sales: DMA 055 F, DMA 055 T/:m]
]First-Choice Customers: DMA 055 F, Kasuar Excellent Family/:m][/ul]/:m]
]Muscle/Super:
[ul]]Actual Sales: GSI Nightingale, DMA 055 F/:m]
]First-Choice Customers: Žnoprešk Z5755-V12, GSI Nightingale/:m][/ul]/:m]
]Track:
[ul]]Actual Sales: ABR Cricket Sport, GSI Pigeon/:m]
]First-Choice Customers: ABR Cricket Sport, GSI Pigeon/:m][/ul]/:m][/list:u]
Thank you all again for your entries - hope this was fun!
Woot! Thanks a bunch, great competition.
Good to see the Jetstream Deluxe was a sales success, that’s what I optimised for, even if it wasn’t first choice.
Congrats to the winners!
boy oh boy.
- so the number of consumers were multiplied by the number of entrants? this, i didn’t knew, or i misinterpreted this. i thought that the total of 200k customer were the total of potential customer we were sharing. which was why i picked the smaller factory.
- so my ‘city’ car seems to be doing okay in offroad? and my ‘family’ car in utility? O_o u w0t m8?
- so i lost purely due to the pure production capacity? which was why the cricket almost dominates every major market?
- so why are only zabhawkin’s and my cars are the only one highlighted? is this supposed to represent something?
that said, this is more interesting than it was entertaining for me.
the amount of work you put into this is really mind blowing. i can’t even understand most of the sheets. huge huuuge thanks to you packbat.
so now we have an example of what people did wrong, i really hope that we can get more participant next round 
I don’t understand the “theoretical first choice” aspect of the cars, since it doesn’t correlate with actual sales numbers. Is it that some cars that were better for certain demographics were not produced enough, so a less desirable car with higher production numbers got the most sales?
Edit: Nevermind, I looked more closely into the data and it answered my question. 
[quote=“koolkei”]boy oh boy.
- so the number of consumers were multiplied by the number of entrants? this, i didn’t knew, or i misinterpreted this. i thought that the total of 200k customer were the total of potential customer we were sharing. which was why i picked the smaller factory.[/quote]
Better spreadsheets. Definitely better spreadsheets.
Yep. Ladder chassis and solid rear axle = lots of utility and decent offroad capability.
I wouldn’t say you lost. Honestly, every company in this competition had strongly positive ROI (return on investment), and I suspect you’d still be in the black even if ABR had had as much Cricket production as they had potential customers.
Honestly, the Crickets dominated because they just had better desirability numbers than almost everyone else. That’s why they could sell out that honking big factory.
Those are the only ones that are built in shared factories. Every other trim has its own factory.
[quote]that said, this is more interesting than it was entertaining for me.
the amount of work you put into this is really mind blowing. i can’t even understand most of the sheets. huge huuuge thanks to you packbat.
so now we have an example of what people did wrong, i really hope that we can get more participant next round 
[/quote]
That’s fair enough. Thank you, and I hope I’ll get more entries next time as well.