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[WONT]Vehicle aging and ongoing updates
#1
So, this discussion have given me an idea for another way to handle vehicle aging a depreciation of ratings.

In the current system a vehicle ages at a set rate each year and once it's past 5 years old it suffers a penalty to it's sales (no idea exactly how this penalty is applied, I just heard Eric say it a few times).

My idea would be to significantly accelerate this rate of depreciation, so your vehicles would have the same stats after 2 years as they currently have after 5. But then give people the option to spend extra R&D funds on a model to extend this out up to probably 8ish years with enough money spent.

This represents a marque making the choice between spending money on an ongoing basis to keep a model up to date and modern or just releasing it and letting it die out quickly, releasing a new year model before sales hurt too badly.

I would think costs would need to be balanced so that doubling the vehicles lifespan would cost a little more than just designing a new year model. Otherwise there'd be no reward for going the quick model turnaround option where as spending funds to extend a vehicles life has the obvious advantage of reducing new model roll outs and updates to sale/marketing set ups.
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#2
Good idea, I think keeping a vehicle's ratings viable by investing in it should definitely be an option and this is something that's being done in the real world all the time (as in facelifts). Though to be fair, this issue could also be addressed by reducing development costs for new model years and trims, depending on the amount of changes made to the vehicle (I suggested this somewhere a while back). In the end, it IMO comes down to which version would better represent a "facelift". Merely pumping R&D into it should not affect stuff like power output and the like (that would seem odd, wouldn't it?), yet the vast majority of facelifts today feature some form of performance improvement (though these are mostly modest gains, the facelift version of my car gets 345hp up from 325hp - not a noticeable difference anyway).
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