I have to agree with Car Bastard completely with this. Although some of you are saying "this isn't a racing game it's a driving simulator" it's the same bloody thing, the core and majority of the games content is based around racing so it IS a racing game
(I personally wouldn't refer to a console game as a simulator, but anyway).
Therefore because the game is based around racing/motorsport it makes no sense what so ever to have a vast wealth of premium cars which are more or less domestic/eco/pointless and have no potential or reasonable application towards motorsport/racing/tuning (and dont you dare use KERS in F1 as a means of justifying the eco-cars! LOL).
Cars like the aforementioned 207, the Prius, the Kubbelwagen, the Copen... these are cars that history will forget (nobody remembered the Kubbelwagen anyway), 20 years time you will look back and you won't remember these cars and nor will you want to. I mean take the 207 range of models, it is from the same bloodline as the 205 which makes it the descendant filling the shoes, but the 205 range still is and will be remembered because it has a story that excited people, it was genuinely part of history.
The basic stock 205s handled very well and the gti's just took that a step further and became a very sought after car, then you had the biggest reason why people would rather remember this then the 207, the Group B era of rallying, a time where rally cars where effectively road going F1 cars (Henri Toivonen famously did a lap of Estoril at the test which would have been good enough to qualify 6th in the 1986 Portuguese GP) and was so popular that rally stages were so full of spectators that there was barely any room for the rally cars themselves, it was at the height of this era that the 205 t16 rally cars knocked the Audi Quattro of the top spot and won the drivers and constructors title two years in a row.
^^^
THIS is an example of the kind of car that should be a premium car, the premium cars should be the ones which have an
exciting story, I mean nobody wants to hear, remember or care what Daihatsu were doing when they cursed the world with the Copen.
Premium cars should be the cars that have
character, like the original TVR Speed 12, (code named the 7/12 :
http://www.pistonheads.com/tvr/tvr/images/speed12-18.jpg ), it had character because it was an immensely powerful car that would literally bite your head off with it's 812bhp, a car that was so powerful that the racing version had to be de-tuned to 700bhp, a car so mad that Keith Flint from Prodigy decided he wanted one. Compare that to something as dry and as mundane as a Suzuki Cappucino, something which is about as characterless as a blank page, I think it's pretty clear which kind of car you would rather have.
Then we move on to the fastest cars in the game, the cars people want to get their hands on, cars like LMPs, Group C, DTM, GT, etc. (I personally discount the F1 cars as you can't use them in A-Spec and the X1 is plainly ridiculous) ... we do have the 908, a car which was impressively quick compared to the Audi R15+ and yes we do have the Audi R10TDI, the first diesel to win Le Mans... we also have the Mazda 787b, a car that created it's own legend, a true underdog defeating Peugeot, the dominant Sauber-Mercedes and the feared TWR Jaguars... but what else do we have? Two F1 cars and a fantasy car with comical performance? What about the Jaguar XJR9, the car which toppled Porsche's dominance at Le Mans? What about the Sauber C9, the first Silver Arrow since 1955, a car that only lost one race in an entire season? What about the Audi R8 LMP1 the most dominant LMP car ever? The Pescarolo C60, the privateer car which was quicker than the R8 at one point? The Alfa 155 DTM car, a car in which a man with one arm won two races (Alessandro Nannini) and in which Alfa-Romeo and Nicola Larini won the title in their debut year? Thats what you call historical, thats what you call bloody good cars, but sadly the Toyota 88CV should not count as the performance is inaccurate by a mile in the game, as it was in reality a mid-field/tail-end car which was unreliable and never in top 15 when it came to the Sportscar World Championship.
Polyphony really need to look at which cars are the fastest in the game and which cars the people playing and racing within the game actually want and desire, before they decide to effectively waste resource on dull, uninspiring shopping trolleys and so called 'historical' cars which no one cares about... because we really want to vault the wall at Grand Valley East (2nd sector after the crest) and drive our 1930's VW on water that badly.
I think the best way to sum it up is this:
The Volkswagen Schwimwagen, a car your more likely to have never even heard about and nor would you want to drive it... built for the Nazis = this is a premium car.
The 1969 Ford GT40 #6 driven by Jackie Ickx and Jackie Oliver, a car which makes grown men feel 6 years old again, a car which fought off the Porsche 917 and a livery which makes us all think of Steve McQueen = this is a standard car.
Now alot of you will
know that this should not be the case.
