Update Speculation thread

Please just stop. How many times do I have to remind you (and it's not just you) that this is not a thread for arguing about what kind of car is best, nor is it a gatekeeping, self-congratulatory "car culture" thread. There are other threads for that. This thread is for talking about features you'd like to see in-game and speculating what could be coming next, not for complaining about any person's opinion that doesn't match your own.

In addition, saying "no one wants" a specific type of car is incorrect, because there is always going to be evidence against that claim. For example, I love to drive the LeGran, a car this thread seems to hate with a passion. Why do I like it? I shouldn't have to answer that question. I just like it. Hell, I bet there's a group of people on this forum that love the K-Series, a car that in my eyes has no character and nothing that interests me. But they have the freedom to enjoy it, and they don't need people like Shotgun Chuck telling them that their opinion is bad and they should feel bad.

If you want to start a flame war, don't do it here.

 

You sound like a sour, cynical boomer who hates everyone. That’s beside the point though. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to convince me to drastically change all of my personal opinions to conform to your idea of a perfect car culture?
I simply don’t like hot rods or similar postwar vehicles. Period. I just don’t like them.
I don’t like the culture surrounding them, I don’t like the design, I don’t like anything about those types of vehicles. It’s that simple.
Also, do you realize how stupid saying “car culture is dying” sounds? The only reason you said that is because you don’t like opinions that conflict your own...

Plus, my idea of what’s boring or exciting isn’t yours to control either. My thinking doesn’t need to be changed by you.

Hate to keep being off topic but people still think that they need to change my opinions.

if we’re going to be on topic, I hope to see some sort of modern Ibishu Minivan of sorts. Fun to smash up, plasticky, and overloaded with “features” literally no one will ever use.

 

yeah... Im kinda in the same boat.
wasnt raised around them, dont understand them
much more of an old Audi and Japanese car person myself.
anyway

a cool feature i would like to see in the realm of 'plasticy' i would love to see some sot of partical effect that appears when you break plastic parts of a car. it would actually look like the parts are breaking apart into much more fine pieces then they actually are.

 

How does your personal dislike of them translate to there being no reason for them to exist in game? Even I can admit that the eSBR has a purpose in game, as much as I loathe EVs for every reason imaginable.

What don't you like about it?

No, I just don't like opinions that contribute to the death of car culture. Stuff like wanting bicycles to have permanent VIP status on every road in the universe, supporting onerous and heavy-handed regulations, worshiping the "Powers that Be" in all their manifestations, or, in this case, being too willing to forget the past in favor of whatever the AAAs are hyping (which, right now, happens to be JDM classics and super/hypercars).

As for said death of car culture, the signs are all around and I have written at length about them, only to be told that everything I was complaining about was actually a good thing somehow. By the time the numbers start to decline, it will be far too late to fix anything.

What don't you understand?

This would actually be pretty cool, not gonna lie.

 

I love the K-Series... That being said, the configs it gets are definetly boring, it needs some love from the devs.

 

Wasn't it supposed to get a hotter engine at some point?

 

I know it was supposed to get new bits but never did beyond the police light bar, I don't know of any official comments that went into detail about it though. People have been speculating about a larger engine for ages.

Personally I really wish it took more inspiration from the Mercades SL cars. Keep the reasonable price factory cars sensible (and add active aero) and work up to some bonkers configs for ridiculous prices. Just look at what happened when the engineers were let off the leash with the SLR: They cut off everything higher elevation than the wing mirrors, put the exhaust through the front fenders, and dropped a 650hp supercharged V8 in which pushed it to nearly 220mph back in 2009. Now look at the top spec K-Series. It has AWD. Whoopie.

Also add a GT race car with a wide body kit and many vents. That too.

 

You just don't listen, do you?

Let me put it into words you might be able to understand.

People have different opinions.
No one opinion is more valid than another.
Just because you say it doesn't mean it's fact.
Like any industry, the automobile industry must grow and change to adapt to the needs of the majority of its consumers.
What you seem to think "car culture" is does not make up the majority of consumers and therefore is not the target market of said industry.
Just because something is new doesn't mean it's bad.

 

So that means we should actively jump on every anti-driving bandwagon that comes along?

Besides, consumer demand has very little to do with why modern cars are garbage. Crossover proliferation is the one possible exception, but even that's a combination of regulation-dodging and marketing "magic".

I don't hate new things just because they're new. EVs, for example. They aren't actually a new concept; they've been around for almost as long as the automobile itself. And guess what, they had the same positives and negatives then as now. The only difference is, back then they weren't being top-down forced, so they died out instead of becoming a massive tax suck hole.

 

The passion and culture behind that scene, frankly. Never been my forte.
I guess i understand the passion, I dont know why i wouldnt, but It's almost stale, i guess (this may be my ignorance showing)
but it's all V8, supercharged or turbocharged, big burly american muscle, body on frame, steel glory. I get that, but after a certain point, I dont see the interest. I have always drifted more towards high tech bits and bobs, and i dont like the simplicity of carburetors, etc. It shows in WBIMP very obviously. I love the diversity of the modern car world, muscle and pre-war included. but it's just never been for me.

 

Spoiler: Rebuttal because my response is off-topic

This is so stupid that I don't even know where to begin. By "anti-driving bandwagons," I'm assuming you're referring to three things: cyclists, public transportation, and self-driving cars.

You seem to think that driving is the best way to get around and any other way is stupid, dumb, and a conspiracy (by who, I couldn't even fathom). Riding your bike or taking the bus is good for the environment (a phrase you seem to hate even more than "EVs are good"), saves money, and for some people is the only viable option (for a variety of reasons). Don't forget, if more people did one of these two things, than the roads would be less congested so you could drive around and angrily honk at buses and cyclists for having the audacity to set tire on your precious roads more easily.

Now with self-driving cars, there is an important distinction to make: The gimmick kind, and the service kind. The gimmick kind is just that, a gimmick. Think Tesla Autopilot or whatever Ford and Volvo have. They aren't even fully autonomous. They're just driver aids, like cruise control or ABS. Their primary function is to keep you in your lane if you fall asleep at the wheel and to get you to buy the car because it sounds cool. The service kind, like Waymo, is designed to one day be a form of public transportation; basically just an Uber without someone to strike up an awkward conversation or offer you a bottle of water. Neither pose a threat to what you call "car culture," and neither are a bandwagon of any sort.

They don't have the same positives and negatives. Guess why? Oh yeah, because technological advancements are a thing.
Range, for example, used to be the biggest problem. But now, electric cars can go as far as 375 miles on a single charge. When, barring the twice-a-year family road trip, have you ever needed to go that far without stopping?
Then people complained that they weren't any better for the enviroment because the energy would come from a coal-based power plant. And while that may still be true in some areas (which you can thank corporations and the government doing nothing to stop them for), renewable energy is far easier to acquire, with solar panels and wind turbines becoming prolific. It makes sense to buy an EV in a state like California, where the majority of its energy comes from renewable sources.

This is even dumber than your hatred towards buses. No one is forcing you to buy an EV. The government attempted to give you an inventive to buy one by means of a tax break, but they didn't pass a law saying you had to buy one. And now, those tax breaks are going away because they didn't even work. As for the manufacturers (the big ones, not smaller startups like Tesla) they don't and never have wanted to make them. They're only making them now to look good in the eye of the consumer ("We sell one tiny city car retrofitted with an electric toothbrush motor and a 9-volt battery amongst our line of SUVs with the MPG ratings of a pickup truck! We care about the enviroment!").

At the risk of sounding cliche, you talk like (and probably are) a washed-up baby boomer who hates new things because he doesn't understand them, and as such repeats the same arguments that are no longer true or were never even true to begin with in a futile attempt to make things the way he liked them again.

TL;DR:
Public transportation is not an "anti-driving bandwagon," as you call it.
Electric vehicles, like anything, change over time, and they are an option in the same way choosing between a V6 and a V8 is an option.

 

brown vs yellow
return of the rhubarb privates

oh what a feeling, toyota

Anyways back on topic it’s interesting how we haven’t seen or heard anything about the bendy bus at all even though it was found in the files a while back and it seems like a decent portion of it is already done. I’m assuming that the devs are just waiting for a way to make a stable jbeam for it. Unless we get dev confirmation stating otherwise though I doubt we’ll see it for a while.

 

Spoiler: Still off-topic and also highly inflammatory

That's the thing, though. Thanks to the aftermarket, you can pick and choose what to modernize. There's a company called MegaSquirt which makes aftermarket EFI systems, and their top offering is probably more sophisticated than some factory setups. It is an expensive system which will be incomprehensible to anyone other than a professional engine builder, but at least it is designed from the outset to be tuned by someone, somewhere, in pursuit of maximum speed, rather than being a deliberately impenetrable black-box mess of proprietary code and "everything integration". They also offer lower-end systems which are probably more user-accessible and definitely sufficient for anyone not chasing thousandths at the strip.

Four things, actually: Nonmotorized road use, self-driving cars, environmentalism, and safety advocacy.

True, and proud of it.

Establishment politicians and unelected bureaucrats, plus the interests who underwrite them (foundations etc.).

You seem to be coming from the perspective that politicians, bureaucrats, etc. are smarter/better than the rest of us and have our best interests at heart. Nothing could be further from the truth. Improving quality of life for individual people is never a primary concern in the system.

For bureaucrats, the priority list runs as follows:

1. Keep your cushy government job at all costs
2. Increase the cushiness of your government job

For politicians, it looks a little more like:

1. Get reelected by any means necessary
2. Live the high life

For those in the "inner circle", it looks like:

1. Get as much power as possible because you think you're specially qualified to handle it somehow

The most charitable thing I can say about the government and the "system" in general is that the people who run it are just like you and me, but dumber and more insulated. Capitals at every level are just Hollywood for the homely.

Because I've seen enough to know that the truth is far less dire than we are being told. Several people involved with modern climatology have admitted, on record, that they flatly don't care whether "catastrophic anthropogenic climate change" is true or not and are only using it to advance some other agenda. The computer models pretty much all run hot when compared with observed data, and the historical data set has been corrupted by constant "revisions" and plain old sloppy science.

On top of which, a few people ditching their cars for bikes isn't going to make much difference when gross polluters like China are allowed to continue wreaking havoc unhindered, without anyone important so much as calling attention to their sins against Mother Earth. That, also, makes me suspicious of the whole package. You'd think, if "The Powers that Be" really cared about the environment, they'd be taking these countries to task about their pollution spewage rather than trying to cheat the laws of physics in the developed world.

I won't argue with this one, though I will say it saves a lot more than it should, for various reasons. This is not, however, the reason most people do it.

True and unfortunate, but usually those people are not the ones angrily defending cycling on the internet and saying they'd gladly ride a bike around the Nurburgring if the tolls were lower. That's more likely to be someone who already owns two or three cars but still prefers getting in everyone's way on a bicycle - maybe even drives to what would once have been considered a great driving road, unloads their bicycle, and starts riding.

The thing about bicycling is, all the benefits tend to fall on low-speed urban surface streets which are well-lit and not much fun anyway. All the detriments, meanwhile, tend to fall on low-traffic, low-visibility, high-speed suburban and rural roads (freeways too, when they're the only convenient way to reach a given destination... and sometimes also when they're not) where night driving becomes an exercise in fear and paranoia thanks to the dark-dressed, unlit bicyclists and hitchhikers wandering around. Which, in fact, is precisely my complaint. I would happily accept heavier traffic during the day in exchange for not having to worry about non-drivers after dark. But most "car-guy bicyclists" will either evaluate any complaint against non-drivers through the lens of responsible urban cycling, or outright defend the "I can walk/ride wherever I want whenever I want and y'all can just take it!" style of nonmotorized road use.

As for public transportation, I never said a dang thing about it nor had a problem with it.

The gimmick kind is an untested and genuinely dangerous technology which gets a free pass from our current safety-obsessed culture because of an unshakeable belief that computers are completely superior to humans under any and all conditions. Its capabilities are overestimated, it has about a million different ways to fail, it overreacts to non-dangers (full-panic stop because of a loose mylar balloon blowing across the road, anyone?), and it underreacts to actual dangers (Tesla trailer crash). The service kind is also in the very early testing stages and displays many of the same problems as the gimmick kind. Even if you ignore those things, though, it's basically a taxi with many unpredictable failure points and no one to help you load your luggage or whatever else you're carrying into the trunk. On the surface, they don't pose threats to car culture in the abstract, especially the service kind which is currently hated even by the kind of SuperNormie who thinks it's better to go 5 MPH under the speed limit than 1 over. I do, however, believe that the gimmick kind, as it advances toward full self-driving capability, will turn out to be quite insidious in terms of getting people used to being driven rather than driving themselves, and may eventually reduce the number of manually-driveable choices in what might be considered "mainstream" market segments.

The real problem, however, is the politicians, regulators, and other technocrats, who are champing at the bit to attack manual driving as soon as robocar technology looks even vaguely ready for prime time (or possibly sooner), either "for our own good" or just because they want more direct control over the little people. Sadly, if what I've seen on this forum is any indication, many car enthusiasts will enthusiastically support this while attacking anyone who doesn't.

The very most expensive electric cars can go that far on a single charge; more pedestrian models still suffer. But in either case, I don't see that as being a good thing. I see it as a harbinger of a time fast approaching when I will look back on the days of samey 1.4/1.6/2.0L eco-turbos everywhere as positively glorious by comparison. Then there's the recharge time to worry about, and so on.

I've never needed to go that far period and you know what? I don't frickin' care. Even beyond the fact that I consider EVs abhorrent in the abstract, regardless of whatever merits they may or may not have, they are still objectively inferior to ICE in this way. If you are going on a trip that starts to stretch the maximum range of the car, then you start to seriously cramp your options in terms of what you can do with the car once you get there. If you're taking a trip that goes beyond the maximum range, you have to plan the entire trip around fast-charger locations. No major detours, certainly not unplanned.

And that's under ideal circumstances. In the real world, power outages, natural disasters, and other unanticipated circumstances could easily reveal the weaknesses of EV technology at times and in ways you will wish they wouldn't.

To put it simply, barring an outright miraculous breakthrough in battery chemistry, EVs just cannot match the peace of mind and split-second flexibility provided by even the most basic ICE car.

And of course, this isn't even getting into how even a basic EV is still ruinously expensive to buy compared to a liquid-fuel equivalent.

California? Isn't that the place where they cut the juice at the slightest hint of wind because the utility company has been backed into a corner by hair-trigger protestors and nitwit regulators who won't let them do what's necessary to prevent their lines from starting fires?

Yeah, sounds like a perfect place to own an EV.

As for wind and solar... I honestly can't believe anyone takes them seriously. They give spotty output, are dangerous to multiple kinds of wildlife and sometimes in quite painful ways (so much for caring about the environment right?), and the infrasound emitted by turbines is also damaging to the human heart.

I never said anything about buses.

True (for now), but you didn't mention subsidies. When and where subsidies are given to producers or consumers of EVs, that means everyone is paying for them whether they buy one or not.

Good. A little late though.

Or because of fleet-average emissions/economy requirements and Califailia ZEV mandates.

24, so right on the borderline between the millennials and Gen Z - and quite ashamed of both. Frankly I consider "zoomer" to be a bigger insult than "boomer".

For now, they're an option. If they start becoming "good enough", however, they may start to reduce the number of ICE options in mainstream and, eventually, sporting market segments, and that's what I'm worried about. (Once again, that is, of course, assuming that the Powers that Be don't decide to take a more direct approach, which they very likely will at some point). EVs are inherently boring on a level that can't be matched even by the 3000lb eco-turbo "compact" cars I love to hate so much.

It's also not correct to say I hate all technology. I'm fine with technology and "new" things, as long as they make sense. When all it does is suck all the joy out of life, and as far as I'm concerned diminishing the driving experience is a form of sucking the joy out of life, then I'm sorry but I'm under no obligation to like it. My point is, just because the future seems to be headed in a certain direction, does not mean you have to be happy about that, let alone promote it. Furthermore, just because someone does neither, does not mean they're an out-of-touch "boomer" who just needs to stop complaining and learn to love less freedom, less variety, and less of anything else that might make life worth living.

Now, to relate this discussion back to update speculation: just because I don't like a certain type of vehicle, does not mean I'm against having it in BeamNG. I repeat my original example: I abohor EVs as the (pen)ultimate form of automotive commoditization, I flatly do not understand what could motivate anyone to want them to succeed, but I still admit that the eSBR does have a place in the game. I don't care all that much for the modern ETKs either, but they too fill a valuable niche. Having a BeamNG equivalent of a '32 Ford woud:

-Add a unique vehicle archetype
-Fill one of the largest timeline gaps in the vehicle roster
-Provide a base for nearly unlimited customization, especially once modders get involved
-Reinforce representation of a large and historically-significant part of car culture

I don't see how the "don't need it" argument applies to any of that. The only cars BeamNG "doesn't need" right now are slightly different takes on things we already have: another 1990s small-midsize sedan, another 1990s land boat, another 1970s post-muscle car, etc. Relatively low-effort "alternative" cars like that should be saved for later, when the release date looms and the car list still needs to be bulked up.

As to what set this whole thing off in the first place, one of my major pet peeves when it comes to cars is seeing a place's (in this case America's) genuine, grassroots car culture getting overwritten by the JDMroller and trick-of-the-month super/hypercars. So when someone says "We don't need a hot rod, we need some JDMs and hypercars!", that's gonna set me off something fierce. On one hand, "1990s JDM" and "2010s hypercar" are valid vehicle archetypes, but on the other, they are extremely basic archetypes which already infest every racing game in huge quantities. Part of the reason I like BeamNG so much is because its car list looks nothing like Forza's or Need for Speed's. It represents many different types of vehicles that would never find their way into a AAA racing game, or would be horribly mis/underrepresented if they did. But I'm sorry I caused a blowup over it; I guess I let my disgust with the current state of racing games (well, and car culture in general) get the better of me.

 

I'm just gonna share my opinion even though no one asked.

I love hot rods, I love the classic car scene and I would absolutely love to see one in game.
The levels of customisability will be huge - as outlined in YellowRusty's post. Not to mention the amount modders would be able to add too.
Modern cars just don't have personality like classic cars do

I'm gonna have to say I agree with @YellowRusty and @Shotgun Chuck on this one.

And it's kinda sad and surprising to see how many people don't like pre-war cars, or even have an appreciation of them

 

About that, i am kind of worried about the rocks. Because you know how beamng tire physics fear against them. Also the Dirt hairpin teaser with the picolina makes me sceptical how Ai gets trough that nasty bit of road without getting stuck or damaged.

 

This guy... is...on...the...DAMN...MONEY!

On topic(ish):
Anyone up for one of these as a base for a new car

A '32 Desoto

 

I would Like A Car From 30s

 

I was thinking more along the lines of a '32 Ford, probably one of the most iconic cars used as hot-rods

 

well I was thinking there would be different body styles available such a tudor, fordor and open top something like that, say for a hot-rod config they (the devs) they choose the tudor and for basic transportation and mild doing up they would choose the fordor, and for the convertible they would make an armoured VIP vehicle made for presidents and dictators alike