This is just a thing i’ve been wondering about.
I was thinking the same thing. You can produce a reliable car that every man could buy while won’t hurting your luxury brand.
“Sub-Brands”
Yes
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Yes, this is still planned and the infrastructure for this feature is already in place. 
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ok, thanks!
I’m new here, bought the game yesterday. I guess brand image will affect sales results and thats a nice thing to have.
A nice feature would be that a car above the brand bread and butter can help increase brand image, but the cost is decreased attractiveness for that car. Like if FCA made a sports/super car under Fiat brand, that would increase Fiat brand image to regular customers, but the AAA customers will probably not care too much about it.
It would be nice to also have a “Model prestige” spec, so we can sim something like the Mustang (a model with a unique model prestige and heritage of its own). This way a playthrough from 1950 onwards can have very different outcomes than one you may begin in 1995.
Both brand and model image can also be a multidimensional. I mean, they have different values for each stat. If a brand make cheap econoboxes for decades, people will percieve them as “economic” and “value”, that come at a cost decreasing other stats like prestige. And to change brand image it needs to be a grind, if you spend 15 years making unreliable cars, a new model-year or new car will be percieved by the costuomers as unreliable even if it is reliablity is excelent - making reliable cars can change the brand image, but it would take time and some actions can decrease the time it takes, like giving a multi-year warranty, doing marketing campaigns and so on.
So, for each car attribute you can have actions that increase or decrease the “brand percieved value” for that attribute, besides just making new cars that are good in that spec.
And the percieved values may vary in each country. Here in Brazil people just think Toyota’s pickups are better, even if they have the most expensive offering and lose in ALL specs to the Ford Ranger and GM S-10 offerings, due to american brands problems with reliablity in the past. In the USA its the opposite: the F-150 outsell all japan brands pickups togheter.
And, of course, it will be nice to be able to rebadge cars at a very low engineering cost, just material and marketing costs (like the Fords under Mercury and Lincoln brands).
Thanks for making this game, I hope we can see it finished. I work in the auto industry and just love car simulation games that are not driving-related (right now playing this one and Motorsport Manager - and here is an idea: make a way to “export” your car and brand to MM, that would be just awesome).
Good ideas, most of them are in our plans to some degree. The Lite Campaign V2 already had brand prestige and brand reputation (reliability), and we think eventually a model series will have its own modifiers, too.
Cheers!
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Thanks for reading what I had to say. I’m playing the lite campaign V2, I’ll do some playtroughts and come back here with my toughts. I liked that you guys used “familiarity” as an experience score for designs, does it affect production as well?
Familiarity does not affect production, but with V3 there is some potential interplay between production and familiarity. Familiarity lowers engineering times, and in V3 you’ll get a new engineering slider that is production units vs. engineering time. So you could say that yeah, now you can choose to use the time familiarity saves you to speed up production by optimizing that.
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Nice!
Do you guys plan to make an “fabrication experience” stat?
I mean, the first cars out of the line usually are more expensive and will have more quality and reliablity issues. After a factory makes a hundred thousand cars of the same model and trim, it usually gets better at that, delivering lower costs, better quality and reliability.
Production quality will increase over time as the staff becomes more used to the model being produced, other than that there is no experience effect.
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