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Do you guys already have a system in place to determine how in game sales work? What determine what car sells better where? How this one performs over that one?

Very good question. From all the sources I gathered around on the forum, I understand your car's stats come in here. price, utility, eco, they all count. Main points that will count in the end are the ones like Tameness, Sportiness, Safety, Prestige and (one more? can't remember right now). Combine those stats with over 40 different target groups like soccer moms, young adults, mid-life crisis men and elderly, their financial statuses during certain era's and the country they live in, you already get a TON of different values to take into account making your car sell the way you want it to and get your maximum profit.

I'm probably forgetting a lot still, and a lot still has to be determined when the developers work on the tycoon part. But basically this is going to be it. The car that fufills the needs of a particular group the best way (being cheap, economical, lots of utility and tameness for example) will sell well in that group for you, where it won't sell even over 100 cars in another group.

The short answer is: similarly to Der Bayer's CTC. Take a look at how that works, add complexity and regulations and you would be on the right track.

On one aspect, it's a pretty safe bet that the exterior styling work you do on the car will have no bearing. While that would be very important in the real world market I believe that would be just too complicated and subjective for program code to assess. It would pique my curiosity intensely if the dev team said otherwise, but I'm assuming the challenge of doing that and getting it 'right' would not be within the scope of this project. (And I put 'right' in quotes because there could really be no 'right'.)

True about the exterior, since that is always personal and cannot be tied down to strict rules.
However, I was thinking, is there a way to boost sportiness when you place hood scoops, rear wings/diffuser/lips and that kind of stuff? Or would that just result in a cheating way to increase these stats?

In its basics it can be described like this:

Every buyer group has preferences regarding the 5 main stats Tameness, Sportiness, Comfort, Prestige, Safety and up to three misc stats like Practicality, Top Speed and Economy. In addition to that the buyers have a certain budget to spend up front and through running costs, which (probably) is normally distributed in that group.

Depending on the group all the main and misc stats are weighted in a certain way, with the addition of model image and brand image to get the overall desirability of a car. Then all cars on the market are scanned for which ones have the highest desirability and one of them is chosen in a random fashion, weighted by the desirability.

There are a few more things than this to the system we have in mind, of course, but this should give you a pretty good idea
Cheers!

Sounds good, Killrob Can't wait to see how it turns out, I'm really looking forward to the tycoon part a lot!

Btw, when do you start working on it? As soon as the game is on Steam this month?

They've said the first vestiges of the tycoon mode will be released with the Steam version.

I don't think we said that, or if we did, we didn't mean that

We'll be starting work on the Tycoon stuff after the Steam release