AUTOMATION: THE CAR COMPANY TYCOON GAME REVIEW

I was forty minutes into my first session with Automation when I realized I hadn't actually played a tycoon game yet. I'd been staring at a dyno chart, sliding cam timing back and forth, watching the torque curve change shape, and feeling vaguely guilty that I wasn't, you know, running my company. Then I shipped that engine into a sedan body, took it for a virtual lap on the test track, watched it post a respectable time, and felt the kind of satisfaction that I usually associate with finishing a long programming problem. Not "the AI told me I won." Real satisfaction. The numbers had moved because I'd moved them, on purpose, with intent.

That moment is Automation in a sentence. It's a tycoon game in shape, but underneath it's an engineering simulator wearing a tycoon costume. And that disguise has confused a lot of people over the last decade, because most folks who pick up a game called "The Car Company Tycoon Game" expect Game Dev Tycoon with cars. What they get instead is something closer to a gentle, friendly version of the actual software that real automotive engineers use to model engines and chassis. The fact that a market simulation gets bolted onto the front of that is almost incidental.

I want to talk about whether this game is worth your time in 2026, because the answer is more complicated than "yes" or "no." It depends entirely on what kind of car nerd you are. Let me walk through what's actually in here.

The engine designer is the whole game

If you only get one thing about Automation, get this. The engine designer is not an abstraction. You are not picking "small engine, medium engine, large engine" from a menu. You are choosing a block configuration first. Inline-three, inline-four, inline-five, inline-six. V6, V8, V10, V12. Boxer four, boxer six. Each one has different inherent characteristics around balance, packaging, and cost. Once you pick a configuration, you set the bore and stroke, which determines displacement and changes the engine's character. Long stroke for low-end torque. Short stroke for high-revving power.

Then it gets serious. You pick the head type. Pushrod for old-school American simplicity. SOHC for cheap and reliable. DOHC4 for the modern performance standard. Then valve count, valvetrain materials, intake manifold style, fuel system, ignition timing, compression ratio. Naturally aspirated or forced induction. If you go forced, you pick turbo size, intercooler type, boost pressure. Every single one of these choices interacts with every other one. Crank up the compression on a turbo engine and your reliability nosedives. Run a long-stroke pushrod engine and you cap your redline at like 5,500 RPM. Choose an exotic alloy block in 1955 and your manufacturing costs go through the roof.

The dyno is your judge. It runs your engine through the rev range and shows you the torque curve, the power curve, the brake specific fuel consumption, the reliability index, the production cost, the engineering time spent, the emissions in compliance with whatever year you're designing for. If you've ever read a buff book test of a real engine and wondered what those numbers mean, this game will teach you. By osmosis, just from playing, you'll start to understand why a 4.0L V6 makes different power than a 4.0L V8, why long-stroke engines have a different feel than short-stroke ones, why turbo lag is a real thing that costs lap time. I've learned more about internal combustion engines from Automation than from any car magazine I've ever read.

The chassis side is almost as deep

Once you have an engine, you build a car around it. The body library has dozens of pre-made shells from different decades, ranging from 1950s coupes to modern crossovers, with new bodies added regularly through updates. You pick one that fits your engine's intended purpose and your target market, then start engineering. Chassis material. Aluminum is light but expensive. Galvanized steel is cheap but heavy. Carbon fiber is the dream and the nightmare. Suspension geometry, front and rear independently. Double wishbone, MacPherson, multilink, solid axle. Brake size and material. Tire compound and width. Interior trim quality. Safety equipment. Infotainment.

Each choice affects the car's stats, which feed into how the simulated market will receive it. A luxury sedan with cheap interior and basic safety scores poorly. A budget commuter with carbon brakes and adaptive suspension is wildly overengineered for the price point and will lose you money on every unit. The game forces you to actually think about what kind of car you're building and who you're building it for, which is an exercise that turns out to be way more interesting than I expected. Designing a car for an audience that doesn't include yourself is a creative constraint that produces good design work.

The aesthetic side of body design is where I personally check out a little bit. Automation gives you tools to attach grilles, headlights, taillights, fender flares, vents, badges, wheels. You can spend hours making your car look exactly right. I've seen community builds that look like real production cars from any era you want, perfectly recreated. I am not that guy. I attach a grille that fits, slap on some round headlights, pick a wheel I like, and ship it. The aesthetic depth is there if you want it. You can also ignore it and the game won't punish you much.

The market sim is the weakest link

Here's where I have to be honest. The actual tycoon part of "The Car Company Tycoon Game" is the least developed system in here. You design cars, you set prices, you pick markets to sell into, and the game tells you how many units sold. There's some depth around marketing budgets, dealership networks, and competing against AI manufacturers. There's a campaign mode that runs you through automotive history from the 1940s onward, asking you to design appropriate cars for each era and survive economic downturns and trend shifts.

It works. It's not bad. But compared to the engineering depth, the business side feels skeletal. You won't get the kind of granular logistics, supply chain, or financial modeling that you'd find in a dedicated business sim. The competing AI manufacturers feel more like benchmarks than real opponents. The market reactions are sometimes opaque in a way that makes it hard to know if your car bombed because of a real design flaw or because of a sim quirk.

I've made peace with this by treating the campaign mode as a series of design challenges with light context, rather than as a real management game. "Design a midsize sedan for the 1985 American market under this budget" is a great prompt. The fact that I then have to set a price and watch sales numbers go up is just the framing. If you want a real car company sim with deep business mechanics, that game doesn't really exist yet. Automation is the closest thing, but business depth is not why you're here. You're here for the engines.

If you want a broader recommendation list across the genre, I put together a roundup of the best business simulation games that includes Automation alongside the more traditional management-heavy options.

The BeamNG integration is the killer feature

Now we get to the thing that pushed Automation from "interesting curiosity" to "essential" for a lot of people. The BeamNG.drive integration. This has existed for years and it's still the best implementation of cross-game export I've seen anywhere.

Here's how it works. You design a car in Automation. Engine, chassis, body, all the engineering decisions. You hit export. That car appears in BeamNG.drive as a fully functional vehicle, with all the engineering specs you set in Automation translated into BeamNG's soft-body physics simulation. The engine you designed makes the power you designed it to make. The suspension geometry you chose handles the way you set it up. The chassis flex behaves according to the materials you specified. You can then drive your car around BeamNG's maps, crash it into things, take it to a virtual dragstrip, run it on a circuit. The BeamNG community has built tracks specifically for testing Automation exports.

This is genuinely incredible. There's no other workflow like it in gaming. You design a vehicle from first principles in one game and drive that exact vehicle in another game with realistic physics. When my Automation builds underperform on the BeamNG strip versus what my dyno predicted, that's real engineering feedback. Maybe I underestimated drivetrain losses. Maybe my gearing is wrong for the power band. The two games together form a feedback loop that neither one provides alone.

For me, the BeamNG integration is the actual point of Automation now. The campaign is fine. The market sim is fine. But the ability to build a car and then drive it in a serious physics sim is something no other game offers, and it's worth the price of admission by itself. If you want to see what other car physics setups are doing it well, I have thoughts on the most realistic car games that gets into the weeds on simulation accuracy.

The early access situation

Automation has been in early access for over a decade. Let me say that again so it sinks in. This game went into early access in 2015. As of when I'm writing this, it's still in early access. There's a 1.0 release on the roadmap but the timeline for actually hitting it has slipped multiple times.

This is the thing you have to know going in. If you have a hard rule against buying early access games, this isn't the game that's going to make you break that rule. The development is slow because the team is small and the scope is enormous. Every major update brings significant new features, but the gaps between updates can be long. Bodies get added. Engine families get expanded. The campaign gets refined. The UI gets minor improvements. Then nothing for six months. Then a big patch. Then more nothing.

The good news is that the game has been entirely playable for years. This isn't a case of buying early access and getting a broken shell. The game works. You can sink hundreds of hours into it right now and have a great time. The early access tag, at this point, mostly means that the developers reserve the right to keep adding stuff before they call it finished. Whether that bothers you is personal. I bought it years ago, played it in waves, and feel like I've gotten my money's worth many times over.

The bad news, and I want to be straight about this, is that early access fatigue is real. Some longtime fans have checked out because the pace of development has been frustrating. The communication from the devs is generally good, with regular blog posts and dev streams, but "regular communication about a game that's been in development for 10+ years" eventually wears on people. If you're new to Automation, you can ignore all of this and just enjoy it as it exists today. If you've been waiting for 1.0 since 2018, I have nothing to tell you that you don't already know.

The UI is dated and the learning curve is brutal

Two more honest knocks. First, the interface. Automation's UI was built around the engine and chassis designers, which are dense, technical screens with a lot of values to display. The interface gets the job done but it doesn't feel modern. Some menus are buried. Some workflows require more clicks than they should. The campaign management screens in particular feel like they belong to an older generation of game design. None of this is dealbreaking, but the polish that you'd expect from a commercial release is not all the way there.

Second, the learning curve. Automation does not hold your hand. There's an in-game tutorial that covers the basics, and there's a strong community on YouTube and the official forums that has produced excellent guides, but the game itself assumes you're willing to read tooltips, experiment, and accept that your first ten engines will be terrible. If you don't know what compression ratio does, you'll figure it out by overdoing it and watching your reliability tank. If you don't understand cam timing, you'll learn by sliding values around and watching the dyno react. This is the kind of game that rewards patience and curiosity over expertise. Beginners can absolutely learn it. They just need to want to learn it.

I've read complaints from players who bounced off in the first hour because they expected a more guided experience. Those complaints are fair. Automation is not for everyone. It's for people who get excited about the words "valvetrain configuration" instead of confused. If you're already nodding along to engine specs in this review, you're going to love it. If your eyes are glazing over, it's not the game for you.

Where Hot Rod Shop fits

People sometimes ask how my own game, Hot Rod Shop, relates to Automation, since both involve cars and building. The honest answer is that they're aimed at completely different parts of the car enthusiast brain. Automation is engineering from first principles. You're designing the powertrain at the component level, picking specs that match physics, and shipping new vehicles as a manufacturer. It's the OEM experience. Hot Rod Shop is the garage experience. You're working on existing cars, swapping parts, tuning them, and learning how they fit together. One is about creating cars from scratch with engineering math. The other is about modifying real-world hot rods with hands-on assembly. They scratch different itches and I think both are valuable.

If anything, playing Automation made me appreciate why the garage side of car culture exists as its own thing. Not everyone wants to design an engine from a blank sheet. Most car people want to take what's already out there and make it their own. Both approaches are legit. Both are worth simulating.

Should you buy it

Yes, with caveats. If you have any interest in how engines actually work, in how engineering trade-offs play out, in seeing your design decisions reflected in real performance numbers, Automation is essential. The BeamNG integration alone justifies the price. The engineering depth is unmatched anywhere in the genre, and probably anywhere outside of professional CAE software that costs five figures.

You should not buy it if you're looking for a polished, finished, business-focused tycoon game. The market sim is light. The UI is dated. The learning curve is real. And early access fatigue is a thing you'll want to know about before you commit.

For me, after spending more time with this game than I'd care to admit, I keep coming back. There's a specific dopamine hit that Automation provides when you build an engine that hits exactly the power curve you targeted, drop it into a body that fits the era, and watch it perform on the BeamNG strip the way your dyno predicted. No other game gives me that feeling. That's worth a lot, even with everything else this game asks you to put up with.

Buy it. Read some guides. Build a terrible first engine. Build a slightly less terrible second engine. Then export your tenth attempt to BeamNG and drive it down a virtual quarter mile. That's the loop. That's what you came here for. Welcome to the rabbit hole.