QFC56 - The Price of Perception [ROUND 2!]

Community Challenges & Competitions
1



PROLOGUE

Tatiana exhaled slowly, her fingers gliding over the screen of her phone as she scrolled through car listings. Beside her, a half-filled glass of Sauvignon Blanc rested on the cool marble countertop, catching the dim kitchen light in soft, golden ripples. Outside, in its designated spot, the white BMW 325i stood motionless—a relic of the life she had once inhabited so effortlessly. But that life was shifting, narrowing. The lease was expiring, and with it, another thread of her carefully woven image threatened to unravel. The divorce had been civil enough. She kept the flat in the centre of Dortmund, received generous child support, and maintained a routine that still, at least on the surface, resembled the one she had before. But cracks had begun to show. Her salary as a retail manager could cover the necessities, but not the indulgences that had once seemed like second nature. The designer bags, the standing spa appointments, the sun-drenched brunches where prosecco flowed freely—what were once effortless pleasures now felt like obligations, like armor she was slowly losing the means to maintain. And then there were the whispers. She could already hear them, delicate and insidious, slipping between the clinking of coffee cups and the rustle of fresh linen napkins. Did you see Tatiana? She’s driving a—what is that—a Kia? The thought alone made her stomach tighten. She would not become the subject of idle conversation, reduced to a cautionary tale of faded glamour. She refused to be the tea; she had only ever been the one to sip it. So the search continued, a balancing act between necessity and perception. It had to be practical—something safe, something reliable. But more than that, it had to be her. Sleek. Understated. A whisper of luxury that still carried weight. If it meant cutting corners elsewhere, so be it. A skipped lunch, a delayed purchase, a quiet sacrifice here and there—those were prices she could pay. Some illusions were too precious to let slip.



BRIEF
Tatiana, navigating life after divorce, faces the looming end of her BMW 325i lease—a symbol of the luxury she’s struggling to maintain. Though financially stable, her retail salary can’t sustain the indulgences she once took for granted. Determined to uphold appearances and avoid becoming the subject of gossip, she searches for a car that balances prestige and affordability. Sacrifices may be necessary, but she’ll make them discreetly—some illusions are too precious to let go.





:star::star::star:

DESIGN & APPERENCES
Tatiana seeks a design that is both elegant and stylish, ensuring a refined aesthetic. She prefers a thoughtfully crafted appearance and will not accept anything that appears poorly conceived. While she is open to both bold and understated designs, it is important to maintain a balance appropriate for an entry-level premium vehicle.

REALISM
Make a car that could exist in real life. Make plausible engineering choices and spend some time on tuning and you have a good shot at making it to the finals. Design must be realistic and road legal which means your car should have a third brakelight, functioning lights etc.

Your are aiming for the bottom of the food chain of premium cars here. Think in the likes of the Mercedes A180 or even A160, BMW 118i/116i. Having 170bhp as a base spec isn’t realistic. Don’t focus only on the stats!

PRESTIEGE
The whole point of Tatiana buying an entry-level premium car instead of a fully specced out VW Polo is prestige, so don’t make her regret not buying a Polo instead.
Having a complex multilink suspension probably won’t impress Tatiana’s girlfriends but a sleek infotainment might will.

LEASING COST
Tatiana is looking for a bargain. Sure, she is willing to spend a bit more than 500 euros monthly, but it must be worth it!


:star::star:

DRIVABILITY
Tatiana wants something that is hassle-free to drive in the city, that can keep up with traffic on the motorway and overtake when needed.

COMFORT
There are certain expectations from a premium vehicle. The engine shouldn’t be too loud, the car should be stable at speed, suspension should be nicely calibrated…

SAFETY
Even the base specs cars of the premium brands come with good safety equipment

FUEL ECONOMY
From now on, she is paying for fuel, and she doesn’t want to choose between filling up and taking a day off at a spa.



:star:

PRACTICALITY
She wants something that can comfortably swallow hers and her children’s bags when they go on travels. Tatiana has twins, age 8, which means the rear seats get to be used quite often, having limited access to them might be inconvenient, but if the looks can justify the lack of the rear doors she is more than happy to put up with it.

RELIABILITY
She plans to switch to a new car when the lease is up, but Tatiana doesn’t want to get stranded on the side of the road.






















RULES

Model and Engine Year: 2011-2016
Trim and Variant Year: 2016

Body Styles: SUV, Hatchback, Sedan, Fastback, Coupe, Convertible
Advanced Trim Settings: Within reason, this should be the last resort.
Maximum Wheelbase: 2.7m
Seats: 5 full sized seats (Exceptions are convertibles and coupes, where you can have 4 full sized seats )
Techpool: Default (5 in all categories)
Tires: Radials ending with 5, no racing or slick tires
Safety: Minimum 2010s Standard

Fuel: Unleaded 95 RON
Engine Restrictions: No racing parts
Emissions: WES 11
Max Loudness: 38

Interiors: NOT judged
SOFT CAP leasing monthly cost: 500


THIS CHALLENGE IS BEING HELD ON THE STABLE VERSION OF THE GAME


CALCULATOR

It should say that the calculator version is 1.4


SUBMISSIONS

Car Model and Engine Family Name: QFC56 - (your discourse name)
Car Trim and Engine Variant Name: Free

For submission to be complete you must send me .car file via DMs on discourse or if you are a new user and are not able to send a DM of forums you can contact me on discord @vouge in addition to car file you must post an AD under this thread. Your ad MUST CONTAIN THE EXACT LEASE PRICE AS CALCULATED BY THE CALCULATOR.

submissions are open until: 12th of April 23:59 (GMT+2)

2025-04-02T22:00:00Z→2025-04-11T22:00:00Z



CHANGELOG
  • allowed 4 seats in coupe body styles
  • given more information about Tatiana’s children
  • rewrote some of the priority descriptions
  • rephrased the wording of realism priority paragraph
  • added safety as a 2 star priority
  • CALCULATOR UPDATED → v1.2
  • added leasing cost as a priority
  • CALCULATOR UPDATED → v1.3
  • defined the size of the seats in the second row
  • added a range for engine and model years
  • CALCULATOR UPDATED → v1.4



INSPIRATIONS

18 Likes
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Ooh, interesting premise - cheap prestige. Of course the poster child is a leased BMW. I’m pretty sure 19" rims were available on some of the inspirations, tho; why the prohibition? Why not allow 2 or 4 seats for coupes as well?

2 Likes
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For the 2 seats, it is stated It should be able carry her children (plural), so more than 2 seats is probably reasonable

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4

I imagined her with twins, age 8, which I see that I failed to mention (it will be corrected soon). So as Ritz said 2 seat cars are not what Tatiana is looking for, but I can allow 4 seats in a coupe.

As for the 19" I meant in as a figure of speach not as a stand alone rule.

4 Likes
5

And what do we think of luxury or handmade interiors? Apart from the looks, would something like an Aston Martin Cygnet work?

6

I would suggest just setting a price limit. The lease calculator seems unnecessarily complex for a QFC and seems to just be asking for multiple people to mess it up.

I would also throw out there whether performance or sportiness should be considered as a scoring category. I know prestige includes top speed and engine power, so perhaps it’s cumulative to some degree, but I feel like part of the marketing and appeal of a premium car usually includes some degree of driving dynamics.

3 Likes
7

Even if you manage to fit luxury and handmade interiors within the budget, they will ultimately be unrealistic for this type of car. The Aston Martin Cygnet is the wrong approach for this brief. I suggest revisiting the brief to better understand the kind of car Tatiana is looking for.

Your are right, however sportiness just isn’t a priority for her, she is not a car person and she doesn’t care about the G’s you pull in the corners as long as it can take a corner without critical over/understeer. Its a similar story with the performances, these cars don’t really have any nor does Tatiana care. Yes she will complain if it takes 17s to get to 100kph, but in the real world having a car do a 9s or 11s 0-100 kph doesn’t make a big difference. A more important parameter is braking distance, which ties in with safety.

What I am trying to get across here is that she isn’t a car person.

I will pick up the discussion about the calculator tomorrow and I would be more than happy if other people chimed in.

1 Like
8

Is this after rounding to the nearest 0.1m or does it refer to exactly 2.70m?

9

Personally I think the “lease cost” is an interesting concept that fits the brief quite well. I think it would be fun to keep it, but add some leniency for mistakes. I’m still quite new to challenges and don’t really know how the other rounds of QFC has worked but to me it seems fine.

But also like I said, there should definitely be some leniency for mistakes. Like Oldmanbuick said, it does add some complexity which some people might not be used to. So maybe don’t be to hard on the enforcing. Give people a buffer time to be able to fix it if they make mistakes and like don’t insta bin someone because the accidently typed the wrong numbers in the calc, maybe just give them a heads up to fix it.

This will of course require more dedication and time from you as a host but If your ok with that I think the “lease cost” can stay.

2 Likes
10

Safety is not listed as a priority, not sure if that was intended?

2 Likes
11

Dumb question for clarification — we’re not going to be penalized for having five seats in a two/three door, correct?

Also if you can work in the time for the lease calculator as the host I’ve got half a vote for it to stay. I do think it’s getting kinda complex for a QFC, but it’s a neat mechanic and it’s something new. If you keep it I do agree you should be a little bit more lenient with cost judging to account for “PICNIC/PEBKAC” errors.

12

I’ll chime in and say I like the idea of the lease calculator too, so I would personally vote for it to stay.

Also on performance I took the level of cars to be something akin to the mercedes a160 and BMW 116, perhaps with the badges removed so no one knows you only got the base spec.

13

I agree with the lease calculator being against the spirit of QFC. It’s a fun idea, don’t get me wrong, but this isn’t the place for it.

2 Likes
14

and the winner for the most pointless and unnecessary use of AI goes to…

this community needs to do better man…

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15

And this is coming from the most pointless commenter, is this all you do? Just sniff out AI?

If you don’t have anything to comment on the actual challenge or useful input, just don’t say anything

13 Likes
16

you mean the same community that’s all but forced you out, but that you still make the conscious decision to come back to? the same community you shake your finger at every time someone does something you don’t like because you have a pathological need to prove how righteous and correct you are with every breath?

yeah ok we’ll get right on “doing better”

3 Likes
17

The wording here is slightly confusing: It kinda flows as a sentence to imply none of those are allowed. I’d probably clarify “must include” after the wheels bit to clear it up, as I’m assuming the latter two are required hence the year of this challenge manditory third brake light is by law in most places :+1:

4 Likes
18

rounded the the nearest 0.1m

Yes safety was intended to be a 2 star priority, It must have slipped my mind when I was writing the post. I will correct that ASAP

No, you are not going to be penalized.

Thanks for point that out, now that I read it I see what you mean, it will be fixed soon.

As for the calculator, here’s a poll for you to vote on.

My preference is for it to stay since it is easy to use and it makes the playing field a bit different than usual.

CALCULATOR
  • Calculator stays
  • Calculator is replaced by a fixed price
0 voters

I’ll give you 24h to vote

3 Likes
19

A few more thoughts on the lease calculator:

If it is going to stay, should stats be entered to the first decimal place, or rounded as in the examples in the sheet?

And when you say the exact lease price must be put in the ad, is that to be to two decimal places?

This is why I say I’m just waiting for folks (probably myself included) to mess this up left and right. I just know I’m going to make some last-minute minor tuning tweak that’s going to change my service costs by $1 and then forget to update the lease calculations, ending up with an insta-bin for having service costs that are $1 off from what they’re supposed to be.

I also don’t agree with the way that the actual quality of the car is factored into the lease price, both on realism and gameplay grounds. On realism grounds, it seems to me that while dealers/manufacturers might offer certain discounts on slow-moving merchandise, the lease price is going to be overwhelmingly determined by the actual price of the car.

On gameplay grounds, I feel like this essentially penalizes you for making better use of your money. Someone builds a $25,000 car that’s just not very good? Well, their car can end up being within the price cap. Someone builds a $25,000 car that scores well? That car’s not within the price cap, so that player has to extensively re-engineer, cost-cut, etc., to end up getting to a $21,000 car that’s in the cap. And since price isn’t a factor at all aside from fitting within the lease cap, the player who’s managed to whittle the car down to $21,000 doesn’t even get an advantage from that. It’s probably still a better car than the $25,000 badly built car and will probably finish higher, but now you’ve compressed the gap between the two cars and effectively penalized the player who has actually done a better job building the car.

One other note: sportiness is not a scoring factor, but it is a factor that drives up price in the lease calculator. This is going to incentive folks to absolutely nerf the sportiness of their vehicles on purpose to lower the lease price. Given how you have been emphasizing that the buyer is not supposed to be a car person and that this is not supposed to be a very sporty car, maybe that’s a feature rather than a bug, but I wanted to make sure that it’s not just an oversight.

Maybe I’m overthinking all of this, and I don’t mean to be too harsh on your proposal to incorporate a new concept. I appreciate your opening this up to discussion and polling.

4 Likes
20

Hey, it is valid feedback; Generating 2 stock images of common items, that’d be easier to find photos of on a Google search, is a pretty redundant use of the tech. Sure, in a small-scale community challenge it isn’t defrauding an artist or anything. But AI is a fairly environmentally costly technology, and there are better ways to spend that cost.

I do love the premise of the challenge though. I agree the lease calculator is a bit to complicated for a challenge oriented around newcomers and people with limited time, but otherwise this is a design challenge I’d love to try and work out.

3 Likes