King Cars - hard difficulty (with small tutorial steps at the start)

[Curse]

Year 1904 ended without anything special. Some of our cars won GCM-Awards, however, as this is a common occurance I will now only mention them if there is something special, like a totally obscure car winning an award or the "best car of the whole world"-Award is lifted.

According to the competition report there is, out of an extreme number of manufacturers, just one other manufacturer that is able to make a noticable profit. Of course it is "King", skyrocking their share costs to levels we will not be able to get into for a longer time. Bummer.

I also gave the order to build a new factory in December, the Detroit plan is our first factory with a 100/100 rating. Complete construction costs can and will be financed by ourselves, no loans!


At last we refitted all of our branches. The disadvantage of having so many of them are the high costs to keep them in shape:


1905:
As the new parts get researched I designed several new cars. I also decided not to licence out those parts as the income is very small and we would give away one of our biggest advantages - high rated parts for the time.
Some of the cars will not be completed in research as again I decided rush is not worth it as we are rather limited production wise anyway.

There are two car types that will, most likely, not hit the dealership market, a Sedan and a PickUp. They are specifically designed to meet fleet contract requirements, mostly in fuel, and therefor lack other stats to keep them affordable and/or to be able to put a fuel efficient engine and gearbox in.
Sedan Fleet:


Pickup Fleet:



An abysmal Compact Car:


A Full-Size Sedan (FS Sedan):


And a Coupe 2+2 (Coupe 2p2). Somehow they are extremely requested by fleet contracts and I hope this will be the same in a year or so as it takes a while to develop it:


Next and last big step in December 1905 will be a new 100/100 factory in Europe. As the London plant was upgraded for $1.5 Millions, what seems like a mistake now, I'm probably going for Birmingham first.
This is how the factory will approximately look like:



Payment for two 100/100 factories in construction for about 2.5 years may get us in the loss some months, however, cash reserves should be able to balance that. Cash on hand is: $5.247.109, increasing.


Edit:

1906
Nothing interesting happened in 1906. We're burning through our cash reserves with a good $300k-450k per month as the two new gigantic factories are under construction. I get a feeling they are massively too big for the moment but we can utilize them later then.

As competition increases I put the two fleet types on the market with a way higher price. They sell in small numbers and add to our sales. What doesn't sell is the Coupe 2+2. I think neither the car itself nor the price ($2000) is the problem, it's the extreme competition and the very low total numbers sold. We won some fleet contracts for the car, development was cheap, and at the end of the day I think we're not going to make a loss on it while it helps us to keep competition honest.

If the construction expenses are ignored King Cars was the only (!) auto manufacturer in the world 1906 that made a profit. I guess that's one of the things that will be balanaced later during game development as right now it's not survival of the fittest, it's armageddon. Still fun for me as I have to compete against hundreds of (real named!) AIs.

A small funny note at the end before 1907 starts: The Coupe 2+2 won the GCM award for best car in Europe. Sales per month are about 0-2 cars. Just for the testing purposes I'm lowering the price near the unit cost, changing the profit margin for learning.