What do you mean “unreliable expensive nightmare” 
That would never happen to an early 80s car with lots of tech crammed into it! 
Less sour review than I expected TBH 
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Considering I forgot door handles that was a good review.
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So for those of you who got nailed on service costs, how much were your service costs actually? I’m surprised it came up so much. I wonder if I would have got knocked for that too (if I wasn’t late) since I’m sitting at 1471 with my mid-engine staggered sport tire nonsense.
I question some of this stuff as well, but what was told to me before was that there is a median number. So no matter how good you feel your particular numbers are, it’s based off the group.
I’ll check my numbers and report back later.
So does the driveability, Sportiness, and cornering rating in the middle not mean anything? The driveability rating in the middle says 85.1 but yet on the right says 35.4
All those green boxes dont mean anything for the whole car to be “bad”? Im just asking because when I see all green I think I’m doing good…
The car has 222hp from a 90 degree 350, that seems pretty macho to me. Peak power at redline yea, but the torque curve is broad peaking @3500rpm. Thats bad too? Just asking.
I kinda feel like its on par for American pony car standards in 1982. I might be wrong though.
Its definitely ugly, Ill give you that…it was a pain designing, although I did have a lot of fun doing the C-pillar.
Terminal oversteer: Im glad you brought that up. I tried for a good half hour trying to get rid of that warning. The best I could get was BOTH terminal oversteer warning telling me to ADD rear grip, yet at the SAME TIME I got the rear tire too wide warning saying to DECREASE rear grip.
Damned if you do, Damned if you dont I guess.
There’s a good reason why the power peak sits on the redline - the cheap hypereutectic cast pistons can’t take any more than that! You should have gone with forged pistons, tuned the engine for 95 RON, and extended the redline by a reasonable amount (but not to the point that the pistons become overstressed) to fully unlock the engine’s potential.
And to combat unwanted oversteer, remember this tip I gave when I hosted CSR 137:
Also note that the suggestion to increase or decrease front or rear tire width (due to it being either too wide or narrow for their load) is just that - a suggestion - and does not need to be followed all the time (it shows up as a blue marker in the list of warnings). However, oversteer warnings (which show up as yellow) definitely should be fixed in order to make your design workable.
And regarding brake fade: Although it can be caused by undersized brake rotors or the use of less advanced types, as well as overly comfort-biased pads, more often it’s a result of using too little brake cooling. For high-performance cars in particular, it’s not a good idea to deprive the brakes of cooling airflow. Last but not least, a quick look at the suspension tab also reveals that you used standard springs, not progressive-rate springs - most cars use the latter because they confer a gain in drivability, comfort and load capacity that more than outweighs the loss in sportiness compared to standard springs.
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About the peak power, you can also decrease top end quality by a few step to give you a 2-300rpm cushion.
To be honest I don’t get why terminal oversteer is banned since every real life car before ESC came tended to oversteer for Moose test for example but that’s how it’s dealt with by the community.
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So does the driveability, Sportiness, and cornering rating in the middle not mean anything? The driveability rating in the middle says 85.1 but yet on the right says 35.4
When I judged the cars I look at the drivability and sportiness on the right menu, since the stats there take into account the steering graph in the middle, assists, etc. In that respect, you car was below average but nothing too bad.
All those green boxes dont mean anything for the whole car to be “bad”? Im just asking because when I see all green I think I’m doing good…
The green boxes represents the market. Green boxes with high numbers in it don’t necessarily mean a good car because they’re very easy to cheese. Hence, CSR and other competitions such as this generally don’t use markets as a scoring metric.
The car has 222hp from a 90 degree 350, that seems pretty macho to me. Peak power at redline yea, but the torque curve is broad peaking @3500rpm. Thats bad too? Just asking.
There’s no problem with the peak torque being at 3500rpm. However, peak power at redline is bad and you could use forged pistons next time as abg suggested, especially since you were already using forged conrods. And again as abg said, tune the engine to 95 RON since running 91 RON in this competition would give you no benefits.
Its definitely ugly, Ill give you that…it was a pain designing, although I did have a lot of fun doing the C-pillar.
Even if most of the car was meh at best, I did like what you did with the C-pillar. Maybe I should’ve mentioned that in the review.
And as for the terminal oversteer and brake fade, follow abg’s advice. Older cars do tend to experience “terminal oversteer” more than newer cars since they have less assists, but the other submissions don’t have any issue with terminal oversteer so that puts your car on a disadvantage in that regard.
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Thank you guys for that info as I will definitely implement that into the current car and see what results I get.
Much appreciated FRFR!!!
May the best car win!!
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Also, since I rarely ever use staggered wheel sizes, oversteer usually means the wheels are too wide in general (in my case at least). Just a to for more pedestrian cars.
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Those numbers you see on the steering graph are percentage multipliers. 85% drivability is pretty bad, it means that 35.4 number on the left is after a penalty. If you had 100% drivability on the steering graph it would be 41.6 instead! For a sports car you usually want to aim for 100% sportiness and at least over 90% drivability.
Those are your scores compared to computer-generated/NPC cars, where 100 means you’re equal and say, 200 means you’re twice as good. But remember, those cars are crap! Any human-designed car tends to be much better than those cars right now. The market numbers don’t matter unless you’re playing campaign, and even then they’re going away in the next update. These numbers can tell if you’re moving in the right direction, but it’s possible to make some awful decisions which any person would balk at, and still have a high score.
For a sports car (or any car in Automation) peak power at redline means your redline is too low! In this case part of the reason is you used hypereutectic cast pistons, which hurt your redline in exchange for improved emissions… but nobody in Japan in the 80’s is even thinking about emissions for a sports car, so that’s a bad choice.
Imagine if you were driving this car: As soon as you hit maximum power, the engine bounces off the limiter and you have to shift. You’ll spend most of your time making less power.
This is true. You can usually do better in Automation but it’s reasonable. However if this is all the power you are making you should aim to get more than 11 miles per gallon.
The in-game warnings do a poor job of explaining the tradeoffs you are making here. First, a terminal oversteer graph like this is bad, it means the car likes to go into an UN-RECOVERABLE spin, not just that it tends towards oversteer.
There are a lot of things you can do to move the car more towards understeer, and I usually try them in this order:
Make the front camber more positive, and the rear camber more negative. This is easy and costs nothing! You have -0.5 in the front and 0.0 in the rear, which is a setup that increases oversteer! Something like 0 in the front and -1 in the rear could be reasonable for this car.
Decrease the rear roll bar, increase the front rollbar. Just keep an eye on your body roll angle, it depends on the total of both. You want body roll around 3-5 degrees for a sports car.
Increase front springs, decrease rear springs. Try not to get them too far apart though.This has a small effect only.
Make the front and rear tires both narrower. This reduces cornering G, but it’s often a reasonable choice. Don’t do this if you’re making lots of wheelspin though.
Make the rear tires wider than the front tires. This is usually only a good choice for rear engine cars, but it’s the most extreme option you have. It comes with a 1.5x tire cost penalty because of the different sizes.
In short, there’s a lot of easy fixes here. The fastest way to learn about some good car design tips is to watch videos, IMO. Killrob (lead game dev for automation!) has some let’s play videos of older versions campaign, if that sounds interesting.
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IIRC, I think that the game takes the increased tyre wear into account with increased camber angles, so your tradeoff there is service costs.
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All I wanna know is what an ITB is.
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I need this info while Im designing lol. Im sure most know this info but to me right now this is invaluable.
With every new car comes something new that I’ve learned from playing this game or just in general.
I’m soakin in this information like a sponge and will be back for the next challenge READY!!
Thankyou @SenseiB12
Individual throttle bodies. This is typically something only seen on dedicated track cars, not production vehicles.
Individual Throttle Bodies… in the Fuel tab screen for the engine designer, it’s an option under “Configuration” and it’s labeled “Per Cylinder”. It’s a moderately expensive choice which improves intake airflow a little.
I know some modern cars have or can be modified with an ITB setup as well as a turbo charger, based on some googling, but I’ll just have to take Succulent’s word that it’s an unrealistic choice for the 80’s. I know some attainable 90’s sports cars with small NA engines had ITBs.
Is it? Really? If “driveability” is the opposite of crash likelihood, then, not crashing 85% of the time is pretty good. Have you been on the road lately?
The way I look at the Drivability and Sportiness numbers is like this; if both numbers are the same, then the suspension is balanced between being sporty and being safe. If the sportiness number is too much higher than drivability, the car becomes dangerous. If the drivability number is too much higher than sportiness, the car isn’t any fun to drive. The lateral g’s the car can pull is useful information, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the balance of the suspension. If you want, PM me your car and I could give you some pointers… not that I’m an engineering king or anything, but I’d like to help if I can.
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85% drivability doesn’t mean anything concrete like this. It’s more an indication of how well optimized your handling balance is for drivability. My car, below, I was willing to sacrifice drivability to reach high sportiness.
And i’ll add as well… the inverse of what you’re saying is that you are crashing 15% of the time you drive, which is not pretty good. I would say that’s terrifying.
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You jest, but for the record, just think of that as a 15% penalty to the drivability stat, which is itself abstract and only means anything when compared to other cars. There’s no need to have that penalty from the steering balance, because 100% sportiness can be achieved with more than 85% drivability. In his case, he had 96% sportiness not because of a compromise with drivability, but because the car was too oversteery even for an optimal sporty setup, hurting both stats.