Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game

Automation is the rare tycoon game where the engineering side is as deep as the business side. You design cars from the chassis up using comprehensive in-game tools — shaping, cutting and adorning thousands of car bodies with a wide variety of lights, mouldings and parts to achieve the style you want — and design engines with similar specificity, from large V12s to small efficient inline-3s, covering nearly all common engine layouts.

The Campaign Mode starts in 1946 and runs through 2020. You build factories, equip them with facilities, research cutting-edge technologies for each era, and turn a fledgling company into a titan of the industry by catering to dynamically simulated market demographics. The economic simulation is genuinely deep — research decisions, factory placement, marketing, and design choices all interact in ways that determine whether your company succeeds or becomes a footnote.

The killer feature is BeamNG.drive integration. Export any car you design with a one-click tool and drive it in BeamNG (sold separately), where the physical simulation lets you race, crash and test your designs on actual roads. Compare lap times against the developer's AI and your friends on the co-developed Automation Test Track, which appears in both games. The BeamNG mod repository hosts a constant stream of community-shared Automation cars.

The community is one of the strongest aspects of the platform. Hundreds of free mods are available on the Steam Workshop, with new content added constantly. Community-designed competitions evaluate cars on styling, performance and other traits across leaderboards. For anyone who has ever wanted to design cars from the engine block out and then actually drive them, Automation is the rare game that delivers on the full fantasy.