Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 274: Reflections of Redemption

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 274: Reflections of Redemption

I will be off to Shanghai tomorrow, and spend a few days there before heading to Beijing for a few more days after that, before finally returning home, so I won't be able to continue this series while I'm away. Until then, enjoy this four-wheeled story of redemption, courtesy of a fellow Automationeer:

Above: A fellow Automationeer provided me with a link to one of his cars, but after I downloaded it, I found it to be such a mess that I cloned the car and its engine at once to ensure that it would undergo a total transformation for the sake of realism - and performance.

Long story short: In this post on one of the countless threads in the Discourse car design subforums, I found a download link to a car (which in this case was the 2007 GCX Reflection) that looked unassuming on the outside, but according to my assumption, had a lot of hidden potential on the inside. Unfortunately, whoever created it had disregarded realism to such an extent that there was too much wrong with it for me to simply clone the trim and variant, revise the new trim/variant combination and call it a day; instead, I did a full clone (which involved creating a new model alongside a new engine family) and, after some tinkering on the exterior and mechanicals, ended up with the Redemption trim shown above. You can find out more about it by clicking on the following link to this post.

In short, the Reflection was a textbook case of "caveat emptor" in that the product I got didn't look too bad initially, but neeeded so much work on the inside that a near total reimagining of its running gear and powertrain was virtually a necessity to make it viable. To be fair, I didn't need to create a high-performance variant of it, but my heart preferred that I make one, so I took the plunge and wound up being more satisfied by the resulting tale of... erm, redemption, than I had ever expected.