I know that maintenance is already considered and put into monthly ownership costs, but I had a different idea. With Ferraris for example, every 15,000 or so miles they have to go in for a large maintenance. These cars work relatively reliably between these segments in miles, but just need a refresh every so often. I think that making it an expensive option to have more exotic cars requiring a maintenance every so often to raise the general reliability of the car would be nice. While I understand that these exotic cars are no Honda Civics in terms of reliability, when cars into the ‘Supercar’ segment in Automation, it seems like the reliability goes down awfully drastically.
You can already make a very reliable supercar in the game with no problems, but the service costs will probably be higher than your average car, which is kinda what your 15K miles service interval does.
I still think making service intervals it’s own feature would be nice. I used supercars as an example because it was more clear, but even normal cars. For example, if you make a required maintenance every 100k miles then the desirability may go up a bit because people want to service the car less, but the reliability may go down a little.
I just look at the yearly service costs as an estimate of how much it’s going to cost per year for, say, 10 years. Many years, it’ll be cheaper than that (just new tires and oil changes, along with fuel), and some years you get the expensive stuff (“It costs THAT much to replace the half shafts!?”). It’s just averaging it all together, or at least, that’s how I make sense of it.
If you ask me, I still don’t really see what this brings to the table, since like Madrias said, cars that need more maintenance (have tighter service intervals), will have higher service costs.
And it’s not like changing your timing belt that can last 100k miles every 30k miles instead is gonna make much of a difference.