Vehicle Class Selection

As things stand, you start building your cars and find out which category it falls into after you’re done with it (after-tweaking not withstanding).

How about we choose the category before (or anytime) we build/are building the car instead.

That would stop unrealistic and frankly annoying instances of building a slow-*ss luxury car/cheap family car and have it best suited for Supercar/Hypercar/Track Car etc. class.

I find myself severely limited by the current system, in which suitable classes are “greenlit” according to the vehicle’s drivability/sportiness etc. stats.

Cheapest cars score very low on the stats and so the car doesn’t fit any class or have any desirability for example.

A manual selection would guarantee that the car falls into the class you want to sell it in and the stats system would calculate it’s desirability within it’s class so that it doesn’t compare apples and oranges, and instead provides a fairer, more realistic outcome.

Another option is to bind classes to chassis types, but I think the manual version would be easier implement and more foolproof/versatile.

No. These are not “classes” these are how competitive your car is in in each of these markets.
These are defined like if your car has a V12 it’s auto very competitive in the hypercar market early on for example (say 1974 and earlier).

That is to say, think of each section of that board being a customer that says ‘well, I am interested in buying a ________’. The percentages therefore are how likely somebody who was looking for ‘that kind of car’ (or thereabouts) would buy your car (either because of its strengths, or despite the competition.) That kind of model better encapsulates the fluidity of the market, after all, it is groups of people who determine how the car sells. The auto makers may try to build it to attract certain kinds of customers but the car cannot, really, define itself unless the customers deem it so.