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What's a good rule of thumb for engine and vehicle pricing based on material and production unit cost? Also, is there a way to find material cost without having to go back to the engine and vehicle menus showing completed designs?

Obviously, as a tycoon game, there are no hard rules, but I believe the general rule is 2-3 times material cost for mass production models and more for limited production and/or high-end models. It was discussed in the following thread:

Cost of Platform vs MSRP of car

Check out this post, it may help.

edit: ...and to answer your 2nd question:

Yeah the general idea was about 3x the cost for a medium-production car.

However another formula I came up with was, total production cost + $30 - $50 (depending on how well-paid your theoretical assembly-line workers are.) per Prod. Unit to determine the TRUE production cost of your vehicle.

Then you determine suitable prices for different classes of car. For example, if you check my Willow Automotive, my T-Series and V-Series prices were determined with the assumption that whoever works the assembly lines are paid about $50 per hour/prod unit. I find this to actually be fairly accurate because then I was able to add around 10,000 on top of the price this gave me, and come out with a profit while still being competitively priced with a Opel Vivaro.



But a high-end manufacturer, the big guys, like Bentley or Rolls Royce probably comparatively pay in the hundreds per hour/prod unit.