Guide to Building a Car Ride in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2

The Car Ride is a Gentle Ride featured in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and all future installments.

(Crazy Critters in Crumbly Woods)

“Riders travel slowly in powered vehicles along a track based route” - In-game description.

Pre-Built Designs

*Ride ratings and statistics are measured using the ride with scenery (if it includes it), its default vehicle, and operating functions. Building the ride without scenery, as well as changing the vehicle type or operating functions will affect the results.

Technical Information

Stats

• Base Excitement Rating: 2.00
• Base Intensity Rating: 0.50
• Base Nausea Rating: 0.00

Stat Requirements

• Length of at least 656ft (200m)

If this is failed, the ride's Excitement Rating will be divided by 8, whilst the other two ratings will be divided by 2.

Stat Contribution Values

• Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 70
• Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 10
• Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 10
• Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 50

Building Information

• Cost of Station Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $18.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$18.70 (OpenRCT2)
• Cost of Straight Track Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $12.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$12.50 (OpenRCT2)
• Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $2.50*
• Support Height Limit (ft/m/height units): 25ft/7.5m/+5

*Vanilla RCT2 does not decimal points in its support costs. Instead it will round down or round up to the next whole dollar amount at certain height intervals to equalize the amount as if it were spending a decimal amount. In OpenRCT2, it will correctly spend the decimal amount every time.

Other Information

• Maximum Guests Per Car: 1 or 2 (depending on vehicle type)
• Maximum Number of Cars: Depends on track length - Upper limit of 12 in RCT1, 31 in Vanilla RCT2, and 255 in OpenRCT2.
• Sheltered?: Depends on vehicle type

Building a Car Ride

The Car Ride is one of the simplest tracked rides in the game, consisting solely of straight track pieces with one incline level and two turn sizes that can only be built flat. This means that the ride is fairly limited in its track design, but its lack of crazy elements and cheap cost also makes it very easy for beginners to learn. For new players who aren't comfortable trying to build their own coasters yet, the Car Ride is a simple way to learn the interface for building tracked rides.

Because it has access to tiny turns, the Car Ride can also be built very compactly if you wish to conserve space. Additionally, it's also simply a very pretty ride to look at. The Crazy Critters in the guide's thumbnail and the pre-built designs demonstrate what you can add to ride with scenery.

In the vanilla games, the ride doesn't have any special track pieces other than the station, but OpenRCT2 adds the Spinning Tunnel piece from the Ghost Train. Adding one of these will give the ride an extra 0.11 Excitement, but any Spinning Tunnels after the first one will have no effect.

The Car Ride and Ghost Train also have a special interaction with scenery pieces, specifically doors. Door scenery pieces can be placed on the track itself, and when the car approaches the door, the door will have an opening animation and sound effect. When the car passes through the door, it will close back up again.

It is important to keep in mind that the vehicles on the Car Ride don't move very fast. Depending on the vehicle type, it has a top speed on flat ground of somewhere between 3 to 5mph (4km/h to 8km/h). It will move slightly faster downhill, but will also slow down slightly when going uphill or on tiny turns. This does mean you should take care to not accidentally overbuild the ride or it might take much longer than expected to complete the track. The difference in speed among the vehicle types may not seem like much, but the difference 2mph will make can add up a lot on longer designs.

Its other drawback is the fact is the fact that it has a very low support limit of only 5 height units. For most practical purposes, this is generally enough, but it means that building over rides (including itself) might become troublesome. If you're building the ride in a hilly park, you may need to rely on terraforming and going underground.

The Car Ride does have one very interesting advantage, which is how readily available it is. Every scenario from base game RCT1 and most scenarios contain a Car Ride in the list of rides available to build right from the very beginning of the scenario. This means that you'll generally be able to build it right away if you want to start with a tracked ride with a high capacity.

Stats

The Car Ride comes with a base Excitement Rating of 2.00 but gains bonuses from several different sources. You can easily reach Excitement Ratings of over 3.00 or even 3.50 without really trying to. Your Car Rides will generally have an average Excitement Rating of somewhere between there if you don't use cheats.

Right away, it can be seen that there are a bunch of very weird quirks in the ride's ratings which generally can't be seen without cheats. The ride has a BonusTrainLength value of 187,245, even though there can normally only be a maximum of one car per "train". If we use OpenRCT2 cheat to run one train of Racing Cars with 253 vehicles (the highest possible since 0 and -1 make up 255 possible options) on the pre-built u(0087), its Excitement Rating jumps up to a massive 10.76. If we ran the ride with only one car, it would have an Excitement Rating of 3.42.

Hilariously, the ride with 253 vehicles has a ride time of 4 minutes 59 seconds, which is one second shy of being long enough for guests to complain about the riding time.

It's unknown why this value exists since it's only possible to place more than one car in a train on the ride with cheat codes. The ride also has a strangely high BonusMaxSpeed and BonusAverageSpeed value for a ride that only has a top speed of about 5mph. The BonusDuration value appears to cancel these bonuses out though since testing the ride with faster vehicles actually decreased the Excitement Rating.

To dive deep into something with a bit more normalcy, the Car Ride has only one stat requirement, which is a length of 656ft or 200m. This is one of the harshest stat requirements of any ride in the game since it divides your Excitement Rating by 8.

This can be seen with the pre-builts Old Timers and Roadworks, which have base Excitement Ratings of 0.38 and 0.40 respectively, whereas all of the other pre-builts have Excitement Ratings of at least 3.00 or higher. You might run into this penalty more often than you want to if you're trying to build compactly since this requirement is not necessarily short and it's difficult to gauge length solely by looking at the track. It takes 1 minute and 30 seconds for the Vintage Cars to travel around Old Timers, and is 3 meters short of passing the stat requirement.

As mentioned before though, your ride will generally have an Excitement Rating of about 3.50 if you pass the stat requirement and the ride gets some of its stat bonuses (which it generally will even if you're not actively trying to achieve them). Its Intensity and Nausea Ratings will always be lower than 1.00 unless you use cheats.

Vehicles

The Car Ride has 12 different vehicle choices. The first four are available in the RCT1 base game, the Vintage Cars was added in Corkscrew Follies. RCT2's Wacky Worlds added the three Carnival cars, Huskie Cars and Black Cabs. Time Twister added the Hover Cars and Pegasus Cars.

1. Sports Cars
2. Racing Cars
3. Pickup Trucks
4. Cheshire Cats
5. Vintage Cars
6. Carnival Butterfly Cars
7. Carnival Frog Cars
8. Carnival Lizard Cars
9. Huskie Cars
10. Black Cabs
11. Hover Cars
12. Pegasus Cars

In stark contrast to other non-coaster tracked rides, the differences in each vehicle are very significant. Some seat only 1 guest per car, whereas others seat 2. Some are inherently sheltered, whereas others are not. Some of them move faster than others.

The Racing Cars are the fastest Car Ride vehicle with a top speed of 5mph on flat track, and is also the only one with a stat modifier (a +3% Excitement bonus, though only for the RCT2 version), though it's hampered by not having a roof and only being able to seat a single guest per car.

The Cheshire Cats, Vintage Cars, Huskie Cars, and Pegasus Cars are the slowest vehicles, with a top speed of only 3 mph on flat track. Neither of them are sheltered, but they can all seat 2 guests per car. What is rather odd is that the Huskie Cars and Pegasus Cars both have a downhill top speed of 18mph (28km/h), whereas all of the other vehicles have a downhill top speed of 5mph (8km/h) regardless of their uphill or flat track speeds. This in turn means that they are strictly better than the Cheshire Cats or Vintage Cars, and large downhill drops may even cause them to catch up to the faster cars.

The Pickup Trucks, Hover Cars, and Black Cabs are the only vehicles that are inherently sheltered (meaning that the ride will count as sheltered even if no part of the track is). Of these, they all have the same top speeds of 4mph (6km/h), but the Black Cabs can hold 2 guests per car instead of just 1. This means that the Black Cabs are arguably the best vehicle for the ride of all of them since it's the only one with no speed penalty, can hold 2 guests, and is inherently sheltered. Every other vehicle has either 1 or 2 of these qualities, but the Black Cabs is the only one with all 3.

You should always pick a car that can seat 2 guests where possible. The higher top speed and Excitement Bonus of the Racing Cars will not be enough to make up for halving your throughput, and the sheltered advantage of the Pickup Trucks and Hover Cars can be achieved on any vehicle by building enough of the track underground.

Because the cars have different average and top speeds, your stats (particularly Excitement) will be affected by your vehicle choice. With their different guest capacities, your profit on the ride will be as well.

Below are a table of all of the information for all 12 car types.

Throughput and Profit

You can charge more for a Car Ride than you might expect. On the Catseyes pre-built for example, with its base stats of 4.09 under its default setup, you can charge $8.00 for the first 5 months in OpenRCT2, and in the vanilla games, you can charge even more. In fact, you'd be able to charge at least $5.00 for it for every single park that ends after a certain year (assuming you don't charge for park entry and there are no other Car Rides in the park) for the entirety of the scenario.

You should always use the maximum amount of vehicles that the ride can allow with the best car available, and always use a vehicle that can support 2 guests per car. On the Catseyes pre-built, its default vehicle is the Cheshire Cats, and it can hold 30 of them.

Interestingly, despite the lower speed of the Cheshire Cats, its throughput stays roughly the same if we run the ride with Sports Cars instead. Catseyes can support 30 Cheshire Cats as opposed to 27 Sports Cars, resulting in more opportunities for the guest to board and pay for the ride. These 3 extra cars appears to be enough to cancel out the downside of the Cheshire Cat's lower top speed (although the "Customers" statistic will also fluctuate more). This means that as long as you're always using the maximum number of cars that the track can support, your choice of vehicle has very little impact on the ride as long as it's one with 2 seats. The exception to this are the Black Cabs because they're inherently sheltered.

Multiplying the ride's 5-13 month old ticket price of $6.40 by its throughput of 1100 guests per hour and then subtracting the ride's operating cost of of $307.20 per hour results in a net profit of about $6,700.00 per hour. This of course could be even higher if the ride's 0-5 month old price was used for the first 5 months, but using the 5-13 month price to measure a year's profit makes the calculations easier and the profits easier to visualize.

Below, you can see that despite the difference in car performance, the average throughput of the ride does not change when using the Sports Cars versus the Cheshire Cats. The "Queue time" statistics are different because the way calculates this is determined by the current queue length and the time the last guests waited to board the ride.

Do still keep in mind how some cars are direct upgrades over others. The Vintage Cars are identical in performance to the Cheshire Cats, but the Catseyes pre-built can hold 28 Vintage Cars as opposed to 30 Cheshire Cats. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't really matter too much since the profit you lose out on is quite minor. If your track is themed around using the Vintage Cars, feel free to use that vehicle instead. For those of you wishing to hyper-optimize the ride, the Cheshire Cats are strictly better than the Vintage Cars, and the Black Cabs are strictly better than the Sports Cars.

Additionally, you should always be weary of the ride's minimum waiting time which defaults at 10 seconds (as does every other ride).

Leaving it at 10 seconds will often cause a bunch of cars to wait at the station, not doing anything. Reducing the minimum waiting time is by far the best way to combat this as it increases the ride's throughput and allows the ride to run at its maximum vehicle count without any stoppings. Keeping it as 0 seconds means that the vehicle will depart immediately as soon as guests get on it and if no one is around to board it, it'll leave and give room for other cars to move forward.

As long as there's no traffic jam in the back, the specific amount of time probably doesn't matter. Just make sure this (below) doesn't happen.

Verdict

The Car Ride is a useful Gentle Ride for guest storage and it can make a larger amount of money than you probably expected. It can be a very good ride for your guests that prefer a milder experience. Decorated with scenery, it can also be a very pretty ride that makes a good set piece (i.e Crazy Critters). It doesn't move very fast though, so take care to avoid making the track too long.

Other Gentle Rides

[to come soon]