Introduction

Hi all! You've probably seen the feature that allows you to buy used cars from eBay - and heard the voiceover say that cars lose races for a reason. This guide will try to clear up what that means, at least partially.

First thing's first: this is really only useful for ILs and not so much for full-game runs. That's because used cars are RNG in the truest sense of the term, and there's simply no chance of not losing time on them in menus. Stick with buying new for long runs.

New vs used cars

So, what exactly is the difference between new and used cars? In a word, performance. The specific aspects are presently unknown, but two key attributes that differ are power and grip. Used cars can be better or worse than new ones, with worse being much more common, but fortunately for us, there's an easy way to tell which ones are better: the win rate.

Finding the best cars

Let's have a look at some eBay listings:

Despite all the information listed, the only two fields that matter are the Event Wins and Events Entered. These will tell you how the car performs, with higher win rates being higher performing. The first car in the list has won 23/97 events, the second has won 43/89, and the third has won 5/27. That means they have a 24%, 48%, and 19% win rate, respectively. This may sound mediocre at first, but there's one hidden detail - cars never win more than half the events, a limit that appears hardcoded into the game. That means the 48% win rate is a high figure that's rarely seen. Additionally, the car is listed at a higher price than a new car would be - when that happens, take note. It could just be that it hasn't been totaled, or it could be that it's special.

The actual difference

After all these numbers, you're probably wondering what these eBay cars really bring to the table. To find out, I spent a few hours testing different versions of the Plymouth 'Cuda, ranging from 0 wins to 27/59 wins (46% win rate), on the Nürburgring GP Circuit.

• New car: 1:46.82
• 0 wins: 1:50.11
• 17/91 wins (19%): 1:47.20
• 26/85 wins (31%): 1:46.42
• 25/66 wins (38%): 1:45.76
• 27/59 wins (46%): 1:45.54

The scaling is overall as expected, though the advantages appear to taper off at the highest win rates. New cars land smack in the middle.

On a lower level, the win rate directly correlates to the improvement. When a car is purchased from eBay, the win rate is converted and stored in a single value in the savegame, the performance bonus. This bonus is limited to -10% for cars with 0 wins and +2.95% for cars with 49/99 wins. Cars with between 20% and 30% win rates are identical to new cars, while cars with above 30% automatically have a 1% performance bonus, plus an additional 0.1% per 1% win rate. In practice, this translates to the following examples:

• 0% win rate: -10% performance bonus
• 13% win rate: -4.3% performance bonus
• 25% win rate: 0% performance bonus
• 31% win rate: 1.1% performance bonus
• 45% win rate: 2.5% performance bonus

I don't know the exact scaling for negative bonuses, but it doesn't appear to be linear like positive scaling. Suffice to say you shouldn't buy cars with win rates below 20%.

Mileage and crashes

Neither mileage nor crashes have any effect on performance; however they have an effect on a second value, damageability. This does exactly what it says and makes the car more likely to be damaged after collisions. Unlike with performance, this is always equal to or higher than the value on a new car, where higher values make it more susceptible to damage. The win rate and number of wrecks seem to affect damageability, but there are other seemingly hidden aspects which affect it as well - the "minor crash" and "major crash" values mentioned in the eBay settings, at a guess.

Vehicles that have never been totaled will always have a damageability value of 0.

Changing listed cars

The only way I've found to change the listed used cars is to buy and resell them repeatedly until one with a good win rate appears. This takes a lot of money, especially with the higher-end vehicles, so it may be best to money hack if you know how. Otherwise, there are savegames on the internet with lots of money, and the pinned one in #weekly-ta on the Discord has enough to get by with most cars.

Alternatively, I've posted a savegame based on the pinned save in #weekly-ta which has all vehicles at a 2.95% performance bonus and 0% damageability bonus, i.e., the best possible values. You can find that on the resources page.