I’ve been doing some testing, and also reading, and decided to change some of the costs and feature values, and also introduce a new researchable tech, and thought I’d la out the data here for comment before the next update in case anybody thinks I’m getting this completely wrong. Here are the changes:
1) Battery Costs.
Some googling shows my production costs for a large (or even small) electric car battery are woefully low. A source suggested that the Tesla model 3 car battery is about $13,000 to produce, and thats pretty much the cutting edge. For a normal company that would start off higher.
In build 1.60 of the game, the import costs of car batteries were as follows:
- Hybrid: $2,050
- Small: $4,100
- Large: $6,900
To make the prices more realistic AND to allow for some higher priced cars (making the luxury car segment more achievable) I’ve updated these prices to be as follows:
- Hybrid: $4,100 (+100%)
- Small: $8,100 (+97%)
- Large: $13,800 (+100%)
Because the player can manufacture their own batteries from scratch in the game that also involved changing the cost of battery components. Here are the changes:
- Battery Cell: $1,008 (+100%)
- Battery Module: $2,600 (+100%)
- Lithium: $400 (+100%)
- Cobalt: $210 (+100%)
- Nickel: $56 (+100%)
To keep things no more difficult than before, the customer expectations of what the feature of an electric powertrain, and a large battery pack is worth, have also been increased. Because the standard (small) battery is included within an electric car, these don’t change exactly the same, but here they are; (These are base, not market-adjusted values)
- Electric power-train feature: $12,353 (+16%)
- Large Battery-pack feature $9,500 (+10%)
- Hybrid Engine feature: $9,500 (+7.5%)
So without any competition, switching a normal car to an electric one will command an extra $12k on the price. Make it a large battery pack one and it will cost an extra $21k. Make it a super high performance motor one and it will add $29,000 to the cost of the vehicle. I think that sounds ok for now. This is without the future possibility of dual motors which could boost things further…
2) Parking Sensors
These are a completely new researchable upgrade for the fit rear bumper slot, which require extra sensors. Installing them adds time to the processing of this slot, plus the cost two sensors. The upgrade adds 25 seconds processing and 2 sensors (costing $70 each). This gives you a feature that is initially rated at being worth $800.
My magic spreadsheet crunches this as having a slim profit margin with everything at default, obviously locally producing the sensors or keeping the upgrade in place for a long time (to reduce depreciation per sale) helps pay it off and make a better profit.
Over time, parking sensors can be AI researched to be COMMON on budget cars and eventually universal on all other price points.
If you think any of this sounds totally out of balance please let me know 