Purchasing AI

[AT]

My question here is the somewhat broad "what determines how many vehicles are sold", particularly in cities where there is a very large amount of competition. I just bought the game a few days ago (running Test Branch 1.23.1 new main map), and my expectation would be that the main drivers of sales (1900 start) would be price and overall rating, specifically the overall rating that fits the vehicle type. But I consistently notice that cars with higher ratings and lower prices are not outselling their rivals, and particularly even wild outliers in price can often get really decent sales. Going into a sandbox game, I developed cars which cost me over 2k and sold them for the cheapest in the big market. Somehow sales were nominal. I proceed to max out my branch spending and try again. Sales increase but not by too much. I figure the key is marketing, dump max into 3 categories of marketing... sales double and I do become the market leader but not by a terribly big margin. I figure the problem is therefore my brand image, so I create a new sandbox game and start with higher (though accidentally not higher than the AI just close 40 vs. 50) in luxury, and higher into the regions of image that the AI seems to have none of as well. I quickly develop a reasonably balanced car, sell it for approximately the same as the AI and sales are again pretty mediocre. Now I wonder if there are thresholds where if, say, my Cargo is not at least X certain customers just disregard my cars completely? I'm not entirely sure. And as a final test I "observed" an AI game and let it run about 7 years from 1900. The best seller (~100) is a 1903 car with a super low HP engine and pretty mediocre everything. A new 1907 model priced the same with higher values in almost every category sells about 20. Perhaps it's unfair to compare these since I don't know what the AI was really doing, but it seems to me that customers are picking cars off of some weird factors that are not obvious to me (and overall rating alone seems to have no bearing on anything).

So I wonder if I'm missing something fundamental about how the game works and why these supposedly mediocre cars are selling so well, or if the AI is actually being too generous in its purchasing decisions. I tried adjusting for many possible "X Factors" and found none. If my car (or another's car) is vastly superior to the field, why does it have such low market share? Is it actually a distribution problem related to dealerships, or what else could be happening here? I'd like to play with 300 AI because it makes the game feel more alive, but I can't actually figure out how to get the lion's share of a city's profits when a city has any competition. Any help on the topic would be appreciated.