How many cars does Gran Turismo 6 REALLY have?

This article was originally published in November 2013 and has been republished on Medium.

Gran Turismo 6 proudly boasts a list of 1197 cars that will be included in the game, and Eurogamer (amongst others) have even listed them for us. But for a while now, I’ve been a bit sceptical. That’s not to say I’m not looking forward to Gran Turismo 6. I am, indeed. So I set out to analyse this list of cars and come to some reasonable conclusions on my own.

For the tl;dr, all you need to know is that Gran Turismo will have 434 cars, not 1197. That is, 434 distinct individual cars that are not just re-skins of the same car, or the same car with a slight difference (1.5-litre instead of 1.3-litre).

Now let’s analyse that a bit further… How about a list of the 20 cars that are repeated the most in this list?

35 of the cars in the game are Mazda MX-5s, and 34 are Mazda RX-7s. Note that I’m actually counting Nissan Skylines separately, dividing them into each distinct Skyline “platform” in an attempt to be generous with my analysis, but we’ll cover Skylines more further down.

The question is this: once you have driven one MX-5, haven’t you driven them all? If you have an MX-5 J-Limited (NA, J) from 1991 in your garage, would you be tempted to purchase an MX-5 J-Limited II (NA, J) from 1993? Put it another way: if those 35 MX-5s were the only cars in the game, would the developers be justified in saying “this game has 35 cars”?

Add the fact that the NASCAR offerings are essentially exactly the same car, but with different skins. The Chevrolet Impala NASCARs are all identical to one another except the paint job, yet they’re listed as completely different cars. And there’s a boatload of NASCARs. This doesn’t seem right, at all. Let’s demonstrate the problem a little further, with Skylines. The Skyline brand has been around for a very long time, way back into the 1960s, and each major release (called a “platform”) revises the basic recipe, updates the chassis and body shape, and updates almost everything on the car. But, you could say that a Skyline R33 looks a lot like a Skyline R34, to the layman. You might even say they drive pretty similarly too. Both four wheel drive turbocharged machines with a similar weight, wheelbase and weight distribution, with similar torque curves and similar levels of grip. But now compare an 80s Skyline (R30, for example) with one from the modern era, a GT-R (I’ve chosen not to use the R35 designation here because the car was completely renamed by Nissan). Although it’s basically an evolution of the Skyline platform, the cars are miles apart as the technology and materials used to create them have diverged significantly.

So, with that in mind, I decided to split Skylines into their respective platforms. However, had I not done that, there would be eighty-one Nissan Skylines in Gran Turismo 6. That’s 6.8% of all cars. About one in every fifteen cars is a Nissan Skyline. We’re not even talking about a specific manufacturer here; the number of Nissans is much higher than one in fifteen. This is just one single model of car.

The chart shows that the majority of Skylines are actually the newest (GT-R) or relatively new R34 type. Some purists might argue that some of these aren’t Skylines (the V platform, perhaps, or the really old ones), but I had to draw the line somewhere, so I chose the chart above.

Again, we’re left with 26 Nissan Skyline R34s. That’s 26 cars that are pretty much identical to one another, except for minor variations in year, engine size, and insignificant other details. You have to ask whether you would ever need to have 26 of the same manufacturer, model and platform in your garage at once, and what pleasure you might derive from driving them all individually.

Another concern is that only just over 100 new cars will feature in the game. In any normal game, 100 cars would seem like a lot, but this represents under 10% of the total offering in this game. Combine that with the fact that all of the other cars in the game are recycled from previous versions, and you have to wonder what effect this might have.

There’s something wrong here. More than two thirds of all the cars in this brand new game aren’t new at all. They first appeared in Gran Turismo 4 (or possibly earlier, because I stopped counting there), which was a PlayStation 2 title, and haven’t been updated for this new release. This means a much, much lower polygon count and lower texture resolution on these cars. It was a huge problem to include GT4 cars when GT5 was released, and it appears Polyphony haven’t done anything about this. The problem shouldn’t be as bad with GT5 cars that are recycled into GT6, because both of these games are on the PlayStation 3.

Let’s throw in some more charts, just for the hell of it.

I’ve taken a stab at interpreting, for each car, what ‘formula’ of racing it might be in. Some are obvious, such as the NASCARs, and some less obvious, such as some of the tuned cars. Anything that is designed to be a road car (as in you could go to a showroom, purchase it, and drive it away on the road) has been excluded from the above. The lines get a bit blurry when you consider Le Mans classes. LMP-1 and LMP-2 is all well and good for modern vehicles, but these divisions didn’t always exist, and there’s GT-1, GT-2 and even further down, so I just grouped everything a bit more broadly. What this shows is that if Polyphony were to put in events like the Japanese Super GT series or the FIA GT series, there would certainly be enough car choice to make them work. Hopefully it won’t be a case of defaulting to the obvious “let’s do Le Mans” option, because enough games already cover this well enough. One final point here: do we really need 5 different types of go kart? Bear in mind that with Gran Turismo 5 Polyphony made it so difficult to start a multiplayer kart race that no player could join the server unless he or she had unlocked (yes, you had to unlock the kart) it and put it in his or her favourites list. Perhaps with a whole multiplayer mode focused on karting, and special tracks (who wants to drive karts around the entire Nurburgring?) I might be convinced, but as it stands, 5 karts is a waste and serves only to up the vehicle total. More charts, you say?

Here’s a chart of cars split by manufacturer. It’s no surprise that it’s dominated by the Japanese marques. The top 5 are all Japanese, and account for 561 cars, which is nearly half (47%) of all the cars in the game. Of course, since the game is developed by a Japanese company, you’d expect a bias toward Japan. I’d argue more diversity would be a good thing here. Polyphony’s general approach over the years has been admirable, but fallen way short, in my opinion, and here’s why. From the 1950s onwards, racing has evolved many times and provided us with lots of iconic cars. Polyphony have done a good job of picking these out, but they failed to realise, and continue to fail to realise, that it amounts to little more than car porn at this stage, because there’s no context in which to enjoy them.

Take the Ferrari 330 P4. Only three of these were ever produced. It’s a beautiful car, and Polyphony recreated it beautifully. Or the Jaguar XJ13. It was designed, built and never raced, and again, Polyphony have brought it to life in the game. But what they fail to understand is that they need to provide an event in the game in which it’s possible to enjoy these fine recreations of classic racing cars. Pick an event from 1967, like the BOAC 500, and recreate all the cars from this event. Let your players experience this, instead of just putting the 330 P4 on the track with other loosely related cars just because that’s all the game has to offer.

In short, you can have as many cars (or versions of the same car) as you like, and still fail to produce a great game. It’s probably worth pointing out that if you gave people the option of having a game with 1000 cars, poor driver AI, poorly designed events, and an ability to win any race simply by buying upgrades that make your car far better than all the others, they might not be too impressed. Give people the option of a game with a handful of cars that produces gripping, entertaining racing between cars of equal performance, in well-designed events constructed to challenge the player, and you’re onto a winner. That said, there’s no reason why Polyphony can’t do both in Gran Turismo 6, so it’s worth reserving judgement for now, ahead of release. But bear in mind that games like iRacing, rFactor, Project C.A.R.S. and the like are all providing levels of driving realism, and levels of competition on the race track, far in excess of what Gran Turismo (or Forza for that matter) have ever been able to provide. Graphically, those titles tend to be a lot weaker, but the most important part of any game is how it feels to play, not what it looks like.

So forget about 1197 cars. It’s not exactly an outright lie, but it’s a misleading statistic that should in no way influence your decision to purchase (or not purchase) this game. There are 434 different cars in Gran Turismo 6. And if Polyphony can pull off sensible, challenging AI and fun, well-constructed events and challenges for the player, then it doesn’t matter if there are 434 cars or 4 cars: it’ll be a killer game regardless.

A note on sources: I compiled my own list of data for this article, which I have made available to everyone as a Google Spreadsheet. Please feel free to use these data for your own purposes (but give me credit!), and point out any errors you might find, which would be most appreciated.