Designing Brass Era Vehicles.

The early years of the car industry differed greatly from today. This tutorial aims to guide you with creating Brass Era vehicles. We will break this tutorial down into two parts.

The early Brass Era, starting in 1900 and ending in 1908, is a time of infant technology and rapid advancement. Vehicles are luxury items reserved for the wealthy, but technology-wise they’re very bare.
With that in mind, the vehicle material costs should be around $500 to $1500. Reserve a fourth of that for each component and the vehicle. So your budget for Chassis, Engines, and Gearboxes are around $125 to $375.

The first half of the Early Brass Era (1900-1904) typically have between 1 to 10 horsepower engines. The latter half (1904-1908) reached into the 10-20 horsepower range. If you have less than 3 horsepower, be sure to have a lightweight vehicle, and meet the minimum top speed requirements.

The advanced designer will warn you if your vehicle is too slow.

Try to avoid single-cylinder engines and 2-stroke configurations for anything but phaetons. The smoothness penalty for these sub-components can hurt sales for most vehicle types.

You should not concern yourself with fuel consumption in this era. Instead, focus on price, horsepower, and the torque of your design. By increasing torque, you are likely to improve the fuel consumption of weaker engine designs.

In respect to the chassis, when you unlock the ladder frame, you should not use the carriage frame anymore.

Designs of this era normally have 1-3 gear transmissions, use more gears for more powerful engines. With limited horsepower, you’ll get more fuel economy benefits by gearing the gearbox toward torque rather than fuel economy. A weak engine will have to work hard to move the vehicle, so it loses the benefits of economical gearing, whereas additional torque means less work for the engine.

Good real world vehicles to base your early designs on, are the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, and Benz Velo. After you’ve grown some, look toward the Ford Model N, and Fiat Brevetti for inspiration.



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The late Brass Era ranges from 1908 to 1917. It is in this time period where vehicles became cheap enough that many North Americans and Europeans can afford them. Material costs will decline in this period every year, but in general, try to target material costs at around 2-3 times your target nations per capita. With more expensive vehicle types being more expensive, and cheaper types being less expensive. Remember to divide your target price by four to give you a budget for your components.

Horsepower values in this era increase, the typical range is 15 to 40 horsepower. Although economy vehicles may have fewer, and performance and luxury vehicles could have more. In this period, you can disregard fuel consumption, as it is not very important to consumers.

You'll also want to avoid single-cylinder and 2-stroke engines for anything but phaetons.

With gearboxes, use at least 2 gears in your design, and more for larger horsepower engines. If you have unlocked it, use a manual transmission instead of a non-synchronous manual. You may now gear the gearbox toward fuel economy if you desire, although you still may gain more fuel economy through torque focused gearing in this era.

Good real world vehicles to base your designs on are the Ford Model T, the Austin 15/20, Austin 10, and the Chevrolet Series C.