for a car that i made in just about a day and having relatively little experience making diesels in Automation, i’m more than happy with 3rd, thanks to @Happyhungryhippo for hosting a fun challenge to build in
The way I interpreted the sportiness and performance priority in the rules post, I felt that I needed only to be as performant as the vehicles listed in the inspirations. While sportiness is hard to quantify, the acceleration numbers and top speed of my car were well beyond those of the inspirations, so I gambled a bit that making the car any faster or sportier would be of dubious value and instead turned my priorities towards the other priorities, primarily reliability, consumption, comfort, and drivability.
One rule that jumped out at me that I believe should be changed is the rotating mass being capped at 50. I think, since diesels tend to have very heavy rotating assemblies, would should have maybe instead been required to set these to 100, which would have produced more more appropriate slow-revving behavior that would in turn penalize the drivability of RWD cars less. This would make engines that are smoother and capable of higher RPMs, however, likely the reasons this was capped.
Power potential definitely would need to be reeled in, in some form or another. I did not attempt to build a very powerful engine so I would be the wrong person to ask about how to block that sort of thing.
Overall this was a really novel challenge idea and something I enjoyed building for, thank you @Happyhungryhippo for hosting.
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TBH revviness can be limited by fuel map too, which IMO would be a better solution due to that additional smoothness with heavier rotating assembly. As for power - I didn’t try to build a too powerful engine, and I ended up with a 2.3 making 160 hp and ~350 Nm IIRC… which, I realised afterwards, would be very powerful for the era anyway, and even more so very torquey. And that is without “CR” (DFI). There wasn’t really a reason to make the engine weaker other than “I want the engine weaker”.
Interesting, I didn’t really notice that but that might be a good direction indeed.
PS Just checked - probably the fastest diesel sedan in 1994 was the Audi A6 2.5 TDI, with 140 hp, 290 Nm and 0-100 km/h in 9,9s. Volvo matched it a year later, others I’ve checked were a bit slower (BMW, MB, Lancia, AR, Citroen).
Uh oh, here comes some rambling from the fairly new guy... (hidden for posterity)
I will admit, I was thinking more on the side of sport-luxury how Mercedes and BMW did it… at least, with the way it was worded, I thought this was about “comfortable but performative cruiser.” Maybe it’s my USDM-oriented view, but what’s a manual doing in a “sporty” (but not sport, per se) sedan like that? Hence the more cozy adv. automatic I chose… sure, my drivetrain and suspension probably drained my reliability, but I kinda figured we were going for the “make diesel cool” approach rather than “make diesel sporty and cheap.” If you’re after a bargain, not a flagship cruiser, just say it… and at that point you might as well buy a Golf or Jetta TDI, right?
Maybe the priorities should’ve been distributed better, but maybe that’s just me, too. No offense intended, of course! Just seemed like mixed messages. It’s hard to satisfy comfort, consumption, and performance simultaneously without compromise, as my build showed, yet it seemed a bit like that’s what was asked… only for some rather compromising results to prevail. (Also… comfort was listed as a higher priority to drivability and sportiness… in a sport sedan challenge. In the '90s. Does that strike anybody else as odd…? Especially after the final results…)
Trust me, in no way am I upset. I was ambitious and probably should’ve scaled things back as far as maintaining reliability goes — that feels like a no-brainer in retrospect. (Though if the posts really were in order of leaderboard placement, that feels a bit harsh…)
Just thought I’d give my two cents. If they’re even worth that much… 
Still a fun challenge, though! Almost makes me want to see what a diesel utility challenge would reel in…
I do have finally some time to answer to the opinions and think about what was written after the challenge, and as this is a new one I am definitely dumb if I let this discussion die, since we could finally make a blueprint for further diesel experiments.
Thats definitely good to know!
Well, definitely. I just haven´t found a solution that doesn´t have unwanted side effects.
The problem is that the emission equipment will alter the consumption a lot, but, I think this is a price we need to pay if we want to get rid of unneccecarily high performance figures.
And that wasn´t wrong. In fact, the real performance figures were judged far less than I planned to, because that would have penalized those that kept it realistic. Not that I want to penalize the rocket cars here either. It was impressive what @moroza managed to build.
You got it. This is why I walked away from mandatory heavy rotating mass. On the other hand, you could limit the revving by the cam profile, but how to get that rougher smoothness of a diesel then?
It was. In fact, the cars getting far up were those that also managed to deliver good comfort. The reason is that the range of sportiness was between 5 and 25 (more or less, cant remember the exact numbers) and comfort between 20 and 55. So you can get more points in the comfort department just because of the way how the game rolls the dices for the stats. When equally prioritized, comfort was the way to go, but regarding the automatic: The reliability penalty is already waving from the other side of the road, which was a high priority.
No offense taken.
In fact, you got the exact challenge of my ruleset. The jack of all trades. And that´s maybe why my own car would have scored well, because that´s what I was trying to figure out when building the lore car. Nevertheless, I got beaten by some as I expected.
The intent is that people buying a Diesel sedan are those that spend 30.000 + kilometers in their car, and they would walk away from any uncomfortable car. Trust me, I did almost 120k annually in my best (or worst?) years as sales representative.
They were.
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Some fair points raised for certain. Hope I wasn’t too harsh with it, and thanks again for the cool challenge! Any plans for follow-ups as of now?