Gearbox rating / car overall rating

[Arakash]

Many thanks for Your quick reply, Arakash!

I know very well that obsolete cars get a massive drop in sales figures (I found out the hard way ), but my car is a brand new design. Engine, chassis and gearbox development started in late 1912, the car itself was released in early 1914, so neither the components nor the car itself are obsolete in any way.

As for the gearboxes I never bothered with single gear designs. During the last years all my gearboxes had 3 gears for smaller engines/cars, 4 gears for the sedans and I even designed a 5 gear gearbox for a 100 hp sports car. Still, for my designs the overall rating isn't affected in any way by the number of gears.

Another question I forgot to ask: What exactly is the purpose of the newly introduced research teams?
Will they decrease development times for components/cars or will they make new technologies such as turbocharger or automatic gearboxes become available earlier, depending on how much money you invest into them?

On the vehicle overall rating:
If it isnt any way an old vehicle(the usual culprit as basically everything decreases over time), which it doesn't seem to be, i cant say im sure why its so low.
If i was to guess, i suspect that the different ratings are given different weights towards the overall rating that produce that result. It still seems strange though, especially as the quality rating is so high, which i thought was quite important.

On research teams:
They are very new, (literally days old) but i think your question has given me motivation to add a Q to the FAQ about it.
As i understand it...
The skills of your R&D department (which i have explained in the FAQ) decrease over time.
These skills define your access to a lot of the equipment in components(like the V layout for example), as well as how well you can design and do various tasks e.g. how good your chassis designs are.
Before research teams, the only way to increase them is to build masses of components endlessly. Building some would make sense in a R&D process, but the quantity required was a bit over the top and extremely tedious.
Now you can throw money into General R&D projects, which are very expensive but also increase these skills over time.
They can also allow you do more creative things with your company like go into hibernation without totally ruining your R&D skills or focus massively on Engine design.

Also their expense adds a lategame money sink(still with a lot of rewards) to very rich players who can ramp it up to max and spend 40+mil a year on it. (max cost goes up over time.)

But ive digressed a bit generally speaking, you can(and might want to) do both types of research at once.

In response to the part on turbochargers.
Each of these things has a release date and a skill requirement. So as long as your past the release date then yes, you can potentially access a ton of new parts. 10-16 cylinders is the best example of this(available at the start if your skill is high enough), but i think the turbochargers release date is 1930ish, so im not sure there is anything you can do to access it before then.