Before there was…
Did you know that there was
?
Soon after I joined the forums in 2014, I began to realize that my main company at the time - Rennen Automotive - was pushing itself upmarket with each competition it entered. With supercars like the Kusanagi and luxury sedans such as the Staccato, it didn’t take long to realize that I’d dug myself into a dead-end when wanting to create lore-friendly vehicles that were both fun to drive and reasonably priced, as I’d take too much care in the engineering of Rennen vehicles.
Thus, I set out to create a new mainstream brand - Although it did not begin nor finish at Kron, I thought it would be interesting to show what my take on a German design would be, as it’s a little more out of my comfort zone than the grandeur of Rigore or the boldness of Kimura.
My mainstream brand began life as Aurora Motors before receiving a name change to Auclair - either way, it was designed as a French company. These quickly fell off the table for whatever reason my 14 year old brain was thinking, and it was substituted for Atarashi Motors. Again, for whatever reason, this fell off too, and by May of 2016 I renamed the Atarashi Motors thread into Kron GmbH.
Here’s a quick history snippet from the old thread, which currently resides as the Retired Kimura thread.
The only time Kron made a public appearance was in the CSR17, hosted by strop back in July of 2016. This was back in a time where CSR results were presented like mini essays and Discourse threads read like chat rooms, so it took quite a bit of sifting through in order to find. The I entered was this orange blob!
The 2014 Kron K3 was a compact hatchback that was very ill-fitting for the CSR round (it’s strop, for crying out loud). Shown here in the SL model, I’m pretty sure it utilized an oversquare 2 liter turbocharged inline-4 with a FWD layout (although I can’t remember). The model I sent in wasn’t the original design, too, as shown by the photos I still have on my imgur account.
Here’s a fun little gif I made of it, too!
I removed the hood bulge and reworked the taillights before handing it over to the powerman himself. Regardless, I was pretty proud of the design, even if it were a somewhat coma-inducing. How would I interpret this design as a more experienced designer?
I tried to keep the engineering as faithful to the original as I could remember, but the design itself I have myself slightly more liberty to play around with. You might be able to tell that it’s still quite close to the OG 3-door hatch I submitted 5 years ago. We unfortunately don’t have the old Megane mod anymore, so I resorted to using the Focus 3-door instead, which is considerably less bulbous in shape. This is beneficial to the Teutonic design, but made it more difficult to translate the rear end, which uses more simple fixtures to create the lights (actually, my method for making lights now is far more simplistic than it used to be back in the day). Overall, I’m pretty happy with the execution. I’m excited to see what everyone else has to offer!
Upon Closer Inspection
Kron_K3_-_K3_SL.car (61.8 KB)
Will be fun to completely recreate some of my… more iffy old ones, even if they are only 2 years old
