This car isn’t the quickest. However, it sure has a presence. With a low-slung body and decadent interior, the Margina looks classy and refined, without breaking the bank. Designed for the North American market, it features a 2.8 L inline 6, engineered for a smooth ride and the peace of mind that this car will always get you to your destination without fail. It also earns a respectable 26 mpg. All yours for just $19,999!
(no offense but) oh my god the 5 mph bumpers are battering rams on this one 
1983 Wells 500 (C-Package)
Only available for the po-po…
Mileage sucks ass..
But it’s gonna catch you fast.
This is the Base version of the sporty Marlin. It has all the necessities and just a tad bit more. This Model especially was ordered with the optional High Output 3L V6, making around 150 hp and the Speedmaster 5-Speed Manual Transmission. With a weight of only 1.2 Tonnes it is in no way slow, so you will be able to catch up to those around you, while not needing to buy a large V8.
Frükt & Nøtt AS presenterer:
1983 F&N Fedora
Paint job: Two-tone Blue-Jeans Blue
Engine: 242ci V8 SOHC EFI | 160 bhp, 206 lb/ft
0-60 mph: 8.9 seconds | Top speed: 125 mph
Gear selector: 5 speed manual overdrive
Alloy Wheels | Power Steering
Seats: Padded leather trim, 3-way adjustable
Electric windows | Stereo Soundsystem, 8-track player
MSRP: $15,000
It’s 1983! V8s are slow AND inefficient. People are still paying money for brown-on-brown-on-brown color schemes for some reason. Synth music is flooding the airwaves.
Enter the Durendal LeGrand. Mediocrity never had such a noble name. It’s 4.0 liter V8 also makes 160 hp, this time fed through a slushbox for easier driving. Fuel economy is squarely meh. Price is pretty cheap.
Apparently my computer also thinks it’s 1983. These are the only two pictures I could take of my car before the game crashed. Enjoy! lol
The following people have submitted full entries:
@breadtheloaf
@Capri78
@missionsystem
@bdub1
@l0jli
@Ananas
@DuceTheTruth100
@GassTiresandOil
@Knugcab
@mcoupe
@moroza
@shibusu
@Tragedy
@VeryCoolGuy
The following user has submitted a .car but needs an ad:
The Hoffman 250 is a respectable midsized sedan from West Germany. It offers solid performance, seats five passengers in relative comfort and comes with two engine options. This example is fitted with the optional 2.7L 5 cylinder engine with 142 horsepower, the 4 speed automatic transmission and full time four wheel drive system. It offers a unique driving experience and engine performance, as well as versatility in inclement weather. As an upmarket imported vehicle, it costs $27,700. It is unique yet inconspicuous, the car for an owner who wants something that blends in from afar, but feels different up close.
Huh
The following additional people have submitted full entries:
@TheYugo45GV
@vero94773 & @yurimacs
@sambatt
whereas @supersaturn77 has 12 hours to post an ad.
MADE JUST FOR YOU
Delray presents Aventura for one more year of its midsize marvel. Made with budget-conscious buyers in mind who refuse to give up the finer things in life. Like its Audax sibling, it rides on high-quality suspension components and features improved anti-rust treatments over previous iterations. A powerful engine and smooth automatic transmission make driving effortless, no matter what trim you opt for. Plenty of stylish customization options exist to make the Aventura you want truly yours.
What are you waiting for? Visit your local ADX brand dealership to learn more about Aventura and other Delray, Audax, and Xeta models. There’s bound to be one just for you.
This is a car known for confusing marketing tactics.
As a Delray, it’s a midsize.
As an Audax, it’s an “intermediate” or “urban midsize.” And also only ever had two doors.
Under its brief stint as a Xeta, it was an “executive compact.”
In export markets, it was once again just a midsize.
The Audax BC platform was weird, man.
This is the most bare-bones basic spec available for the USDM short of a radio delete, since you couldn’t do A/C deletes by this point. No tapes, no power steering. Just two benches, a column shift automatic, and a fat V6 making decent power and decent enough economy.
At least it moves pretty good.
BIN ROUND
Lots of effort goes into making a show - can’t have some asshole piss all over it with an unnecessary controversy or generally shitty props. That’s why the prop department’s potential choices, as with most beats of the show, were overseen by a panel of ethical, perception and quality experts who screened all the choices for known issues.
One of the prop guys is a (supposedly) happy Sinatra GXL owner and offered that up as the show car for a modest price. Turns out he was just trying to get rid of it - it’s a nightmare to drive, with poor, unsmooth low-RPM running, oversteery suspension (despite a 185-205 stagger); not very comfortable, not very reliable, not all that economical even with the 24 valves it has…And the screening guys immediately flagged it for a run-in with the EPA.
*Honestly, even without the WES 5 bin, this car just kinda blows. The only quality is on the engine and the only extra techpool is on the carburetor and exhaust - so the car just painfully leaves lots of money on the table. No other car is less drivable - the poor suspension tuning (FFS people, use front toe in) and hard compound kill it despite the staggered wheels, and no other stat is that good except the price.
BINNED FOR FAILING WES 6
The Delray Aventura can be stripped down to basically no equipment at all - and that is how it’s pitched to the prop guys. It’s sadly not impressive to them. The 4.3-liter V6, in spite of being advertised as having balance shafts, is still hopelessly rattly - likely as a result of a badly balanced or overweight rotating assembly. Its perimeter frame is an affront to God stiffness-wise, in spite of the frantic safety enhancements made to modernize it, and the tires simply do not hold blacktop - giving up shy of .58g. Honestly, whoever forced that rattly mess of an engine in this wobbly mess of a car to still put out enough power to take it over 120 mph should proceed to the nearest church service and repent before the Lord of whatever it is they were smoking.
After all that, the final nail in the coffin is the contracted prescreeners notifying the prop department that this Aventura’s V6s occasionally leave the factory trimmed too rich to meet efficiency. Is it fixed with just a twist of a screwdriver? Yes. Is it enough of a potential scandal tgo give this show bad publicity? Also yes. Begone from me, I never knew you.
Honestly, I was interested in seeing how well or how poorly this thing would do as this round’s cheapest car. While this is binned for being WES 5, its real issue is prioritizing raw cost over… Well, being a good car. You take this submission as is, remove all the penalties for being “worst in X category”, make it legal - it’s still below midpack. However, make some cheap changes - like trading the ludicrous amount of safety quality and advancement with just a unibody or giving it tires that work - and it’s suddenly a viable finalist, literally around P2 to P4. As it stands,the Aventura is like the Perodua city cars you would have seen on Top Gear - if not for being the aaaaaabsolute cheapest, nobody would look at them twice.
BINNED FOR FAILING WES 6
This “Fruit and Nut” car is definitely more nutty than fruity, but it still looks pretty good - sporty-looking despite being easily in the top 3 largest cars. Unfortunately, it suffers from old bones-itis, with its ladder frame chassis having insufficient crash protection - and its reliability, while acceptable, still leaves something to be desired, courtesy of subpar quality more than anything else. Now, on their own, these things do not disqualify this competent old-style front-driver - but the prescreen team flagged the Fedora as having poor tire availability due to the fronts being a special 215/65R16 tire - likely for traction’s sake.
I don’t adore this car but I like it fine; in the end, had it not been binned for too low tire profile, it would have landed solidly in the midpack. Aside from the tires (made necessary, from my review of the engineering, by a high-speed oversteer tendency easily fixable by an underbody) this car’s cardinal engineering sins to me are bad techpool distribution (+8 engine family techpool for a -1 quality iron engine?) and a copious amount of both balancing mass and cast heavy internal dead weight in the engine. All that being said, this car is the only one I am sad about binning of this lot.
BINNED FOR UNACCEPTABLE TIRE PROFILE
The prop department took one look at this vehicle and decided not to go for it - but the prescreening report flagged it anyway. The prop guys just didn’t like the way the Stanton looked - but the contracted industry researchers had to drive it. What they found is a tiny ladder-frame car (in other words, an unspacious deathtrap) with a so-called “big block” engine where all of the size is in the stroke, leading to a crankshaft that has shattered on many a customer car when pushed hard. Even when this engine works, though, it is sluggish in throttle response, expensive to service, and has an underdeveloped digital injection system, and eats a lot.
This vehicle is, sadly, a lacking effort on almost all fronts. Setting aside the design and body choice - where a short wheelbase, no overhangs and a blown-out cabin morph together provide positively atrocious proportions - the main culprit for its failing scores on multiple high-roller metrics is the entrant’s allergy to using quality sliders. The Cobra 325LX is a sub-$14,000 car that squeezes in an autobox, ABS, multipoint EFI, premium exterior, a V8 with all forged internals (but made out of all cast iron with literally like 80lbs heaps of balancing mass)… You get the point, it’s monstrously overwrought. Add to that the particularly egregious choice of giving it less cooling than 50 in a reliability-focused challenge.
BINNED FOR VERY LOW EVERYTHING
The prescreening report also notes that the Novara Marlin was not recommended due to its poor dependability - stemming, again, from a novel injection system that was not sufficiently developed. The Marlin’s problems don’t run as deep as those of the Stanton, but the production team doesn’t see enough of an appeal to the wonky little runabout to object to its inclusion - especially not after seeing its ridiculous quad exhausts (all fed by one pipe).
The Marlin has the second-lowest reliability in the challenge, with almost 3 points less than the “next worst” car. Aside from that, it barely even feels like it’s made for this challenge: it’s small, it’s difficult to service… It’s like it’s trying to lose.
BINNED FOR LOW RELIABILITY
Finally, the prop guys reject the Hoffman 250 out of hand for being fucking expensive. At AM$27,500, it’s flat out the most expensive car in its class and then some. Everything inside the car is aggressively nice, all the clicks are right - but for this kind of money, a car with lesser Feng Shui appeal could have bought massively, aggressively more functional reliability, size, safety, comfort(!) or power. That and the fact the production can afford 2(two) of these suckers basically puts it out of contention.
I had debated for a while whether to bin this car for high (but technically legal) cost, or to let it through and then place it last because the excessive price puts it under the bottom of the barrel. It is beaten ignoring price by seven cars, four of them at or well under the AM$20,000 mark. I decided to process this as a bin because as a four-star priority, failing here should hurt you as much as failing at reliability does.
I know why this entrant built this car so expensively - it’s because of the devs’ communication that +5 is the baseline quality of the games as well as the baseline techpool, which the game’s identifying numbers simply refuse to reflect - showing the disconnect between challenges, where your ET and at times PU/MatCost is amortized by previously built tooling and familiarity, and challenges - where none of those things currently exist.
BINNED FOR EXCESSIVE PRICE
This initial culling is not daunting - merely a usual step for the experienced showrunners, separating the (maybe) wheat from the (deeefinitely) chaff. These cars didn’t even have to be vetted by the actual screenwriter or lead actor - but later on, things will get a whole lot more… Involved.
TO BE CONTINUED
Ah. I even remember specifically noticing the tire profile rule before starting the build. Evidently I forgot about it somewhere along the way. Oh well, GG. And with this quality of reviews for the bins I’m certainly looking forward to the rest!
I liked the Hoffman…
But yeah, that price is WAY too much for a car that will do stunts and will get destroyed in the process.
