The Car Shopping Round (Round 9)

[AirJordan]

Hey Strop are you planing on only telling us "ok my money goes to SpecialSomeone..." or can we expect more like little reviews of each car of test drives...maybe a (good night) story of how you chose a new ride What's the plan?

[Dragawn]

I'll throw my hat into the ring.

...

Would be a lot quicker if I put some 245 tyres on it, but wanted to stick to 50 profiles.
The Ad's a bit rough and ready so apologies, I was running out of time. I'll set up some templates in illustrator when I get round to it. Haven't had time to do a logo yet either.

Anyway first post so hi everyone, your cars all look great.

Wohohow, where did you come from so suddenly?
Liking the car and nice ad! Where did you take the interior from?

[rapidbacon]

Well I've got 370 hours on the game, and have been playing along with challenges for a while. Thought it might be a good idea to finally take off the lurker hat and contribute.

Glad you like the car and the ad. I'd like to do a proper brochure at some point in the future.

The interior is from a civic, it's the first image to come up if you google 'honda civic front'. Here's a quick cut-out.

[Dragawn]

Well I've got 370 hours on the game, and have been playing along with challenges for a while. Thought it might be a good idea to finally take off the lurker hat and contribute.

Glad you like the car and the ad. I'd like to do a proper brochure at some point in the future.

The interior is from a civic, it's the first image to come up if you google 'honda civic front'. Here's a quick cut-out.

Yeah, figured you had to be experienced
Anyways, welcome to the forums! And thanks for the pic

[Racer13]

@carskick From the sounds of what you have explained, it sounds a bit gimmicky. I'm not saying it wouldn't require a lot of work, but I personally can't see the advantage. If you have a double clutch system it will be infinitely faster than a stick, and can be programmed to do any number of things that you could do with a stick, and it will do it better and faster every time. My fathers TTS with a double clutch box auto-blipped the throttle on down and up shifts. If a stick is simulated electronically and I know it it doesn't seem much better than just being a sequential. It's a lot of stuff to be calculated, so it will probably slow it down even more. The point of stick anymore these days is to be more involved and at one with the car, and if it's all electronically simulated what's the point?

[carskick]

@carskick From the sounds of what you have explained, it sounds a bit gimmicky. I'm not saying it wouldn't require a lot of work, but I personally can't see the advantage. If you have a double clutch system it will be infinitely faster than a stick, and can be programmed to do any number of things that you could do with a stick, and it will do it better and faster every time. My fathers TTS with a double clutch box auto-blipped the throttle on down and up shifts. If a stick is simulated electronically and I know it it doesn't seem much better than just being a sequential. It's a lot of stuff to be calculated, so it will probably slow it down even more. The point of stick anymore these days is to be more involved and at one with the car, and if it's all electronically simulated what's the point?

Thanks for your interest and feedback. A couple of things

This transmission wouldn't necessarily shift any faster than a DC sequential. Probably not necessarily worse either in full or semi-auto mode. However, many people prefer a traditional manual transmission with a controllable clutch. This would allow one to have a true manual transmission with a real clutch and shift action, while able to switch to a sequential style transmission on demand. Furthermore, because it's a manual, gears could be skipped. If you are in 6th and punch it, the transmission could go right to 6th instead of having to go through 4 other gears as with a sequential.

The two big issues would be:
- Could it shift as fast as a sequential
- Could the shifter provide good feedback in manual mode

If the answer were yes to both of these, then this transmission could easily be better than sequential because of it's versatility. If not, then it would be an option for some, but not an end all. However, if it shift faster than a torque converter auto, but slower than DC sequential.

At any rate, it's a theoretical transmission with a lot of ifs, but that's the concept of it. It could potential allow the best of all worlds in one transmission in best case scenario, and a fun look what my car can do at a worse case. But it's a fictional care in a fictional game, and if I want it to, it can!

Edit: As a side note, sequential transmissions already have limited use in production models due to various reason, ie smoothness, reliability, weight, cost, etc. The technology I'm proposing may remedy some other non-sporty applications as well.

[strop]

Wow OK things for interesting on the final day. If I remember correctly, entries shut at the end of the Automation day.

It'll take me a day or so to finish processing the entries. To answer AirJordan's question, there will indeed be a story. Given how many entries I have, it's going to get pretty long.

Carskick, does this mean your shifter is not H pattern, but more of an up/down stick? I feel you've touched upon an idea that lurks around in some minds but is not frequently discussed due to just how polarising the manual thing can be. Some GG builds require the use of an additional clutch input despite the sequential transmission too, but for somewhat different reasons than the ones you provide, so you can be sure to see comment on this.

I've got rapidbacon, DoctorNarfy and UMgaming's pms sitting in my inbox, so will process them shortly.

[nerd]

One last entry to finish things off!

In 1997, Rado introduced the Rado Hatch-7, their first economy car with more than 3 doors in 42 years.
It was as dull as an unsharpened pencil, until things were spiced up when the GTS version was released in 2000.

Anyway, this is the 2015 GTS version. In April 2015 the Rado Hatch-7 finally went out of production.
In that time, it went through a few refreshes, most notably dropping the horrible 1.8L 14 in 2008.
This one has AWD and a 1.7L Turbo I4, with 255 hp and 198 ft-lb (268 Nm) of torque.
The cranky old used car guy imported it from the US, so as a result the interior is smelly.
0-60 is done in 6.3 seconds, 50-75 in four seconds. Sale price is $22995.

Rado Hatch-7 - GTS-1.png (1.18 MiB) Viewed 13277 times

[Racer13]

Strop, I feel it's worth asking. Is there going to be any sort of "cool down" period after each round. What I mean is are the winners of each round going to have to wait a round or two after their challenge before they can enter again so we don't have the same two winners every two weeks. It was never brought up, but I feel it's worth addressing.

[koolkei]

um...they can't?
like. the winner becomes the one that decides the next theme and rules and such.....
how are they suppose to win if they are the rulemaster again?

unless you mean, he wins, he did his version, someone else won, and he won the next one again....

[Racer13]

What I mean is once the winners do their challenge are they going to have to wait another round before they can enter again.

[Dragawn]

I wouldn't think so, any if you win again that round after you held yours, you can have the gentlemen courtesy of passing the organisator role down to the second highest ranked person

Edit: as to the dct manual idea: it'd be far slower than full sequential anyhow, just by the clutch - shift - clutch release motion alone, so efficiently wise it'll be worse anyhow, itd be more of a purist thing to still be in full control, I believe that situations where you have to suddenly change 3+ gears are too scarce to objectively justify it.

[strop]

This round is now closed!

Thanks everybody for entering. I'm in the progress of writing, my girlfriend's opinion has been provided, and results will come out within the next 24 hours!

I still haven't decided which three cars to put in the top three... very difficult choice.

To answer your question @Racer13: I realised quite quickly in this round that 1) a week may be too long 2) having a single thread of challenges with 18 entries means that yes, some people will never ever get a chance to make a challenge of their own, and that's kind of the point of the challenge right? But I've seen what happens when a cool-off period is enforced: people complain, get discouraged from entering because they have to 'burn' a round, and end up quitting the challenge out of principle. I don't want that to happen, I'm kind of an all inclusive kind of guy.

What I suggest then, is that I'm going to offer all three of the winners the chance to set up their own challenge, so instead of just a single thread, we have three of these running at the same time. The main problem I then have with that is policing three threads and deciding whether a user can only enter one or all three, etc. because that could get very messy if one user does end up winning more than one of the challenges.

Thoughts on that suggestion while we wait?

[thecarlover]

I think the original plan seems better than potentially having 3 different threads. I figure that the organiser of one round might take into account the winner of the round before them and factor that into their decision, or as Dragawn mentioned, if someone wins twice in a short time they might pass it down to the next person. It might be worth looking at changing the rules if one or a few people are always the winners to allow more opportunities for others to win, but until a problem like that comes up, I don't see a reason to change anything.

[Dragawn]

How about we put the gentlemen's courtesy in a rule then? You can still participate and win in all rounds (but the ones you held yourself ofcourse), but without being the one to set up the next challenge. More conclusive: Best participant who hasn't held a challenge in x rounds is the host for the next.

Edit: And I agree that 3 threads would get...hectic.

Edit2: Choose with your heart Strop! Also, 2 threads might be something to speed up how fast someone's "turn" is, while not being too much work for everyone to properly participate in all rounds if they so desire.