Great effort Conan. I’m sure we all appreciate the wall of text and the speedy delivery of results.
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Congrats to winner! Big thanks to @conan for a swift fun and very enjoyable story. I think it was right and proper that a sedan won over a liftback as that’s the true old person way. 
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Couldn’t agree more with you on that one, and the client’s conservative tastes meant that he preferred cars which used older, more angular bodies (made out of steel) and had an emphasis on comfort.
And about that Progress: if it looks like a premium cruiser and drives like a premium cruiser, then it is certainly a premium cruiser.
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I had plenty of emphasis on comfort and drivability, but had my usual plain design and rounded design lost right off on looks alone. Maybe one day Ill get to where I can make pretty designs as well as functional designs.
I designed the car as a executive car…maybe should have gone for a reps car. And it should have been partial alu! 
The Car Shopping Round 59: Ricing-san
Paintjobs even a blind man would hesitate to show himself in, camber angles that make the Tower of Pisa look straight, wings you could comfortably dine on and exhaust notes resembling a frenzied blender trying to shred nickels and dimes - that was the world of Kenji Haruzake. At least, it used to be.
Over the course of some 20 years, Haruzake-san had garnered recognition and respect, becoming a bit of a hero in the scene. But as he was approaching 40 and starting to appreciate the historical significance of vintage cars, a tender bud of doubt started to sprout inside him, slowly eating away at his enthusiasm for garish color schemes and boisterous bodykits, growing ever larger in the process.
One day, he saw a heavily modified car drive past. It was a model he hadn’t seen in years. It was then that the lingering doubt finally got the better of him. The realization struck him like lightning: All these years, he had been sinning! Fighting the tears, he headed home, sunk into his thinking chair, and pondered: How could he atone for his wrongdoings? How could he placate the ancient car gods?
It didn’t take him long. He knew what he had to do. For every car he maimed into what he has been convinced was a piece of art, he would acquire one ruined gem and restore it to its former glory. He lunged to his feet energetically and checked for the next bosozoku cars meet. What would his first rescue candidate be?
How this round works
(Still using the KEE engine)
This will be a somewhat unusual round with an element of uncertainty added in, where you’ll have to guesstimate how old, and therefore collectible, your submitted car needs to be to meet the pricing target. Scores will be determined using two seperate styling scores, one based around how much of an icon the original car is, the other around how badly it is modified. The final score will be modified according to how close the car’s calculated value comes to meeting the target.
The year is 2010 and Ricing-san is looking for ruined JDM classics he can restore. Entries must consist of 2 trims: A stock one and a modified one.
The stock trim must be an icon from at least 20 years ago (trim year 1990 or earlier; preferably a good deal older)
The modified trim can be any year from the stock trim to 2010 (year has no effect on scoring), and should be as wild and garish as possible. Any type of car can be entered - a timeless station wagon can work just as well as an exotic sports coupe or even an ancient, near-extinct kei car. The style scoring system is as follows:
- The stock trim will be scored up to 12 points, comprised of up to 6 points for how much Kenji likes the styling of the car and another 6 points for the car’s historical significance. The scoring is subjective, albeit with a bias towards expensive/posh cars for styling and towards age for historical significance (Sexy and expensive cars can potentially score better in the first part, cheaper ‘everyday hero’ cars can be older and therefore score higher on historical significance)
- The modified trim will get a score of up to 8 points. This is also based on subjective criteria with a bias towards extreme designs - the wilder, the better.
The overall styling score is (stock trim score)*(modified score), i.e. a car with a stock score of 9 and a modified score of 6 will get 54 points in total.
There are no restrictions regarding Price/PU/ET. Rather, I will calculate the value of the car based on attrition (technical value) vs collectability (heritage value). The asking price of the car is the sum of the technical and heritage value.
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Technical value is calculated based on this Excel sheet:
Techvalue.xlsx.zip (4.1 KB)
Simply fill in the stats of your stock trim in a2, b2, c2 to get the technical value of your car. The result may well turn negative, in which case it will be considered zero - from a purely technical point of view, the car is basically worthless - however: -
Heritage value is added to the tech value and increases progressively (slowly at first, then increasingly sharper) and is influenced by Prestige and Reliability. The posher the car, the steeper its price will rise due to collectability. As a rule of thumb: If you submit a pricey exotic, make it rather young, plain everyday heroes should be older to make up in historical value for what they lack in status.
Ricing-san is planning to spend somewhere around 8,000$ on the project. If the calculated price falls within the range of 7,500 - 8,500$, the pricing modifier will be an ideal -0% - the car retains its full styling score.
If it falls below or above that, a penalty is calculated as (1/5 of the deviation in %)². This is the percentage that will be subtracted from the styling score. Example: A 10,000$ car is 1,500$ over the 8,500$ upper bracket (~17,6%). (17,6/5)²=12.46, meaning that the score will be reduced by 12,5%.
Please advertise the stock trim only - I will reveal the modified trims in the course of the evaluation.
Hints
- Stats are not important, apart from prestige and reliability of the stock trim, as these affect the way the car’s value develops. Stats of the riced trim have no relevance whatsoever
- This round is mainly about styling, which goes two ways: The more iconic the stock trim and the more miserable the riced trim, the better
- Recommended age for normal cars is about 30-40 years, slightly less for very expensive cars/slightly more for very cheap ones. Note that very old cars (40+) can become really expensive as they are becoming antiques.
- Kenji is looking for JDM-like cars, so f.ex. American muscle or hypercars aren’t likely to pique his interest. Apart from that, the scoring system is made such that pretty much any kind of car can score well.
- You can use the Techvalue-spreadsheet for reference, but it may actually be better not to calculate anything and just estimate an appropriate age for your car: the cheaper the car, the older it should be to be valuable, the more expensive it is, the younger it should be (any car entered should be at least ~25 years old, though)
Deadline: Friday, 29.12. 21:00 GMT
EDIT: Rule set overhaul
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Ok so read this and realized I may need to to read it 3 or 10 more times to get it. 
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I’ve got a few comments/recommendations:
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You mention a maximum price and price for modifications, but don’t give us any formulas to calculate price or modifications. As it stands, we can’t make a car for a budget since we don’t know what makes for an $8,000 car.
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CSR is usually a one trim only thing. I don’t see anything in the general rule saying that isn’t allowed (just that only one car is to be submitted), so not sure if there’s an unwritten rule or if this would be setting a precendent.
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Best to not limit to JDM. People have lore companies from all over, even Lite Campaign and made up countries. By stating you want something specifically JDM you’ll be making it impossible for most to submit a car within their company lore.
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A deadline 10 days from now is a little long, CSR is usually a week-long thing at the most.
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You need to make it clear in the rules of what you’re looking for in a car in terms of stats. If it’s only price and looks, that works fine, but if there’s anything more to it you should add it to the ruleset, either as an explicit rule or part of the story brief.
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Thanks for the feedback - as to your points:
This is more or less the point of this round - you’re basically supposed to ballpark estimate the constituents of the asking price, with tech value and mod costs relatively easy to get right and heritage value more mysterious. That said, I think I will make it so that overshooting the budget will just incur a penalty rather than leading to an instabin, so you can’t screw up completely. I’ll also add a bit of info to make it a bit less vague.
I see your point. I’ll alter that to “JDM-like”, as in: american muscle cars are not what Kenji is looking after.
Yeah, I know, I chose that because of questions and christmas (don’t know how the latter will affect you guys). I can shorten that if it’s deemed necessary.
OK, should’ve mentioned that - stats are largely irrelevant, they should just be reasonable for the type of the car (as in: V12 in a hatchback - bad; 2-speed auto in a sportscar - bad). Stats of the riced car have no impact on the scoring whatsoever. So basically yes, it’s price and looks.
I’m aware that this round is not your typical CSR-round. I think I’ll leave it to @strop (as the initiator of the thread) to decide whether I’m stretching things too far here?
EDIT: Adjustments have been edited into my OP.
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This is one of the most complicated CSR rounds I’ve ever seen… Its premise would be much more suitable for another challenge, in another thread. In fact, this feels a lot more like a tuning contest than an actual CSR round.
So this is a cheap as chips beauty pageant?
Not at all - keep in mind that the asking price for a 20 year old car with a 25,000$ market tab price will be well under 5,000$, so even for an expensive car you’ll have a good deal of headroom towards the 8,000$ target.
Some real-world examples:
A 1988 Honda Civic won’t be a good candidate since it’s not old enough to be significant. A 1967 Toyota Corolla, on the other hand, is ancient, and hence, collectible.
A 1983 Nissan 300ZX is not terribly old, but sure to become a classic, and therefore a good candidate. A 1968 Toyota 2000GT will be checking all the boxes, but be way out of reach for Kenji.
It’s about building a cassic, balancing prestige vs age, then ricing up the result.
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Well, I dunno about the rest of the peeps here, but I’m willing to give it a whirl. This smells like a round for the first-gen Kaminari.
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I still think the issue of the budget is not in the spirit of the CSR. Unless we get a clear indication of the cost of changes to a car, we’re getting a penalty over something we have no idea about. The CSR has been about tailoring cars to the buyer, but in this case it sounds like it’ll go to whoever is lucky enough to make something you deem to be worth $8,000 by some arbitrary measure.
CSR isn’t the place for a crapshoot where you submit something and hope it falls within a certain criteria that is witheld from the entrants.
Sheeeet…I’ve been playing this all wrong! 
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I thought that was the whole point of CSR? lol
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Maybye first entry here i come 
So, is the modified trim supposed to be created in 2010, or are both to be created when the car is new?