Trims

Manufacturers often fit vehicles with multiple combinations of engines and gearboxes. We call this Trims. In GearCity, you can do this, and it’s encouraged.

The main benefit of creating vehicle trims is to increase the number of vehicles you sell and take away sales from your competition. For Example:

Let’s say there are two vehicles for sale with equal buyer ratings and equal prices. One is yours, and the other is your competition. There are 120 people in the city buying vehicles of this type, 60 buy your vehicle, and 60 buys your competitor’s. If you produce a trim with the same buyer rating and price, the number of customers would remain the same at 120 people, but the sales would split 40 apiece. That means you’ll get 80 sales, a 20 unit sales increase, and your competition would lose 20 sales. Your market share would jump from 50% to 67%.

Let's design a trim. You access the trim system from RnD. Next click Modify, and then Vehicle.

You can create a trim of existing vehicle designs or in-development designs. If you use the later, the game will sync the finished development time.

The Trim design also shares the base vehicle’s image and will improve the base vehicle’s image. It’s a wise idea to have all your trims of a model come from the same base model.

When designing vehicles using the trim system, you get development costs discounts based on the amount of change you make to the parent design. This perk makes the trim system a great way to cover multiple wealth demographics at a low cost, for example, you can use a powerful V6 to upsell to wealthier people and a smaller, cheaper, Inline 4 to sell to less off demographics for a fraction of the development costs.

You can see your discount bonus here. A chassis change is a complete redesign of the vehicle. In this case, you’re better off designing a model from scratch.

The quick trim button allows you to quickly make this trim with the base design’s sliders. Use this button if all you’re doing is changing sub-components.

When designing a trim, if you plan to adjust sliders, keep in mind that you will lose your discount bonus if you increase the sliders too much. This feature is to prevent several game exploits.

After you produced your trim, several filter options in the Branch Distribution window can help speed up the management of trim pricing. The Merge Trim button will merge all your trims with the base model. When you adjust prices with merge trim enabled, the margins of the base model will distribute to all the trims using their material price. For example, if you set the sales price 10% above the material costs for the base model, the merge trim system will automatically apply a sales price of 10% above material costs for each trim.

In summation, trims are a cheap way to increase your sales and take sales away from your competitors.