So one of my automobile what-ifs, occasionally acted out in Automation, is “what if you put a supercar engine in a pickup truck?” (In-game, not really that much, all things considered, though I’m not the best at optimizing)
And it turns out that that indeed happened in 2004, when Chrysler put the V10 engine from the Viper in a Dodge Ram to create the Ram SRT-10.
I actually haven’t read any cheap thrillers I can remember that took place in car plants, or even had a scene that was inside a car plant. They’re big, there’s a lot of people there, and there’s a lot of automated heavy equipment that can spice up the more ridiculous set pieces.
What’s not to like? Even better, they can be everything from shiny, new, mechanized car plants to old, rusty, smoky and grimy ones. There’s a lot of possibilities for making the scenes work. I may have to include a significant scene inside a car plant for my next thriller project.
Cars frontman Ric Ocasek has died.
The Cars were my favorite band when I was young. I had every single Cars album on CD, from their debut to the underrated Panorama to the 2011 comeback Move Like This.
There’s a huge new Automation update that, thanks to a collaboration with BeamNG.Drive, allows players who own both games to do something fans have been asking for for a long time-drive their creations.
An Automation dev is demonstrating it with everything from city cars to luxury barges in a series titled “Great Engineer, Terrible Driver.” It’s well worth a watch.
I’ve seen a lot of Lincoln Town Cars around where I live. In fact, although it might just be memory bias, I’ve seen more Town Cars than the related Crown Victoria sedans. Or it might not be, since the lower-budget Crown Vics probably had less effort put into maintaining and preserving them than the luxurious Town Cars.
I’ve never actually ridden in one and probably never will, although I’ve heard they’re the ultimate in squishy American comfort.
In this post, when I refer to stretching a car platform, I mean in the sense of extending its lifespan, not physically stretching it (although I have seen a six door 1995 Cadillac limo used as a daily driver-it was something).
There are very good reasons for cars being updated as frequently as they are, for lesser models will be devoured in the notoriously competitive market. Yet some linger on, with unsurprising results. A purely commercial model like the Chevy Express or a niche one like the Land Cruiser-70 can last longer than a car at the forefront of the market. The exception to this is the Camry, which had/has stayed on a similar platform for around 15 years, but that’s an example of not fixing what isn’t broken.
This got my attention with the announcement of “facelifts” and platform updates in Automation.
I was wondering “how much could you extend a basic car platform’s life, or change it into something else by fiddling/replacing the engine.” It’s an interesting question, and I like the ideas of cars in some out-of-the-way assembly line or plant still being built as part of my love of the weird (an older variant of the Lada was like this)
This is a fictional car company that I’ve done a few sample cars of in Automation.
Ueno Motors, named after its controlling family (surname example), is a car company headquartered in outlying Hokkaido. In broad terms, it’s followed the industry’s path. However, I’ve made it more successful than my previous interpretation/version of it-then, it was in US terms a wheezing bottom-feeder. Here, it’s a more successful niche manufacturer.
Ueno has been defined by paradoxes. Its cars, for the most part, are knowingly sedate, knowingly bland. Yet its actual business exists in an attitude of frenzied pushes, the kind of risky lunges one must make to compensate for structural weaknesses. Ueno has, for the most part, succeeded in this. It went upmarket in a large way, because it needed higher per-car margins to counteract everything from the vagarities of currency and trade to the costs of shipping parts from Honshu-and did so with its own brand name, not creating a sub-brand.
This sort of strange mixture leads it to do varied things-it has rushed plants over into markets where it fears being shut out, yet is hesitant to expand. Its leadership has moved with surprising speed and ruthlessness in ditching its lowest-margin products, yet persists in making (as one example) clunky four-speed transmissions as a cost-saving measure.
Brand image for Ueno is clear and has been so for decades, with its mainline models keeping the same names for very good reasons: This is a relaxing car, a reward for a hard life’s work. Thus squishy comfort is (generally) prioritized over sportiness. When styling is emphasized, it’s done in a retro fashion, because Ueno, unlike many other car companies, does not shy away from having their vehicles be labeled “old people cars”.
Even by the grueling standards of the auto industry, Ueno is notoriously difficult to work for or with. While the family and company’s reputation for “thrift” has played a role in the legitimate accomplishment of keeping it alive and independent for over a century, it manifests itself in obvious and terrible ways. In Hokkaido proper, its already-natural clout is furthered by its status as the area’s largest industrial employer-one does not step on the toes of such a beast lightly.
In automotive terms, Ueno offers a fairly conventional lineup of vehicles, ranging from low-premium to the occasional $60,000+ flagship. Certain niches, especially low-margin ones, are avoided-Ueno has long since stopped its kei car business and relies on badge-engineering deals for some “niche” models (including keis in the JDM). But not others-it was successful by having one of the last personal luxury coupes remaining, grabbing a few big sales off a two-door, brougham-upped version of an otherwise-conventional car.
Ueno achieves decent sales in North America and Eurasia, and is a surprisingly big fish in the shrinking pond of the JDM.
In-game, Ueno represents one of the hardest challenges-making a car that’s just a little bit “premium”, not on the extremes of econobox or supercar. And some of my desires clash with the company ethos (c’mon, you’d think stately luxurious penny-pinchers would greenlight an engine with an exotic five-valves-per-cylinder head?), but it’s still fun to play.
What does a certain car brand “mean?”
This, as much as any material reason, explains the downfall of the Sloan Ladder.
Is it really any wonder why Oldsmobile, arguably the blandest marque, was the first one to be shut down by GM?
So, it’s time to have more motor car companies that have emerged out of my mind.
One is Ueno Motors, a smaller Japanese manufacturer in the country’s north. Named after the family name of its founder, I’ve envisioned it as having to roll uphill thanks to its poor geography and size. The exact state of Ueno, beyond “Seen better days” and “wallowing along with six figure units and mass-market pricing”, depends on my mood. Sometimes they’ve found a niche with weird nostalgic styling that conceals their aging platforms, other times they’re the makers of the blandest blandmobiles of all time.
Another is Mosaic, or whatever the equivalent of “Mosaic” in its native language would be. Mosaic can be applied anywhere, being formed from the merger of a disparate number of car companies into one body (hence the name). Whether it reaches the height of General Motors or the depths of British Leyland also depends on my mood.
Third is a revision of my old Barton Motors. It’s still a New Jersey based manufacturer that drops out of the mass market, but I’ve moved it away a bit. Barton makes a good transmission for the time and keeps it up. They even supply other automakers with their transmissions, which helps as their own cars fall behind in other ways (the drivability image given by this only lasts so long). So, they leave the final-assembly business but remain as a parts supplier, and achieve success that way. It may be ahistorical, but hey, I’ve thought it up.
Sedan sales have been dropping. After helping my family move, and seeing the cargo stuff hatchback and crossover cars bring, I can see why.
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