Car Industry Tycoon Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Build a Car Manufacturing Empire

Developed by Polish indie game studio RGB Dev, creators of iOS title Idle Tower Tycoon and the Yeah Bunny series of mobile games, Car Industry Tycoon is a lighthearted but exciting mobile game where you manage a car manufacturing plant to make money. The premise is simple, and the goals are well-defined: make money, upgrade machines, make better cars, make even more money. As a game that relies heavily on how much time you spend on it, Car Industry Tycoon is all about efficiency, optimizing your factory and checking in on the workplace often.

Unlike real businesses where the risk is real and livelihoods are on the line, there is absolutely no way you can lose in Car Industry Tycoon; you’re really only piling on more money on top of your already considerable heaps of cash. It’s an easy game to play, but there are ways to speed up your progress through the game.

And conversely, like a real business, Car Industry Tycoon lets you choose how to spend your resources. It may be for expanding your factory, improving existing machines, or hiring new personnel. Car Industry Tycoon gives you room to decide how to manage your burgeoning car manufacturing empire the way you want.

This is a great game for children that teaches them the basics of how to manage a business. It’s a safe space with zero risks. Meanwhile, it also introduces business concepts for a young entrepreneur to experiment with. The game’s elements are also family-friendly, with safe visuals and audio effects.

Overall, Car Industry Tycoon is a fun playground for hopeful entrepreneurs. Some real-life car manufacturing principles can be learned from the game, so even young engineers will find it helpful. As the game doesn’t really give you a step-by-step guide on how to play, we’re here to share with you our best tips, tricks and strategies for Car Industry Tycoon. Follow these steps and you’ll be building a car manufacturing empire in no time!

1. Coins And Cash: Your Two Currencies For Success

There are two resources in Car Industry Tycoon: coins and cash. We’ll talk about both of them and teach you what they’re used for.

Cash: you get cash automatically as workers enter your factory and finish parts of a car. That means whatever you do, you’ll be able to earn cash. Most upgrades to your machines are bought using cash.

Meanwhile, coins are collected when you complete Quests. You only get a handful of coins as compared to cash. Coins allow you to buy permanent upgrades called Boosters that carry over between different factories you own.

Coins in Car Industry Tycoon are also used to buy Elite Upgrades in the shop, which give your car factory empire permanent boosts. Production Managers are also bought using coins. And of course, you can use your coins to buy cash. We don’t recommend doing this, though, as the upgrades will let you rake in more cash in the long run as opposed to just buying the cash directly.

The secret to success in Car Industry Tycoon is knowing how to spend your coins and cash. Although you will never go bankrupt in the game, there are worse ways and better ways to spend them.
With the resources out of the way, let’s talk about the different parts of your factory.

2. The Parking Lot And The Solar Panels

What’s a car factory without a parking lot, right? Your workers will arrive at the factory riding cars, and you will have to manage the parking lot space to accommodate all of your employees’ cars. While this may seem like a mundane thing to have to manage, an overly crowded parking lot will stop your employees from coming to work. It seems then that this game mirrors real life in yet another way: parking space can be a huge pain.

You can upgrade the parking lot two ways: by increasing the number of parking spaces or by improving the parking booth. Having more parking spaces is always nice, while improving the parking booth will make it faster for arriving workers to get through the parking booth.

Between the two upgrades, it’s more effective to prioritize parking space, as this means your factory will be able to handle more workers at any given time. More workers will accelerate your income generation, which is always a good thing.

Meanwhile, beside the parking lot there are six solar panels. They start covered in moss and dirt. You could tap on each one of them to clean them up and earn cash. You can do this every two minutes, which is roughly the time it takes for the solar panels to get dirty again. Although you can’t upgrade the solar panels in any way, the amount of cash you get from them increases as your factory’s income increases.

3. Entry And Exit Turnstiles

Going in and out of your factory isn’t just a simple as waltzing through the door and heading straight to work. Once a worker parks their car, they enter the building and fall in line at one of the entrance turnstiles. Once they finish working, they exit the building through the exit turnstiles.

Moving past the turnstiles take time. You are bound to have very long lines, especially when there’s an influx of people entering or leaving the building.

Upgrading the turnstile or adding more lanes will help eliminate long lines. You don’t really have to give the turnstiles much thought until you notice these long lines. Until then, focus on upgrading the other parts of your factory.

4. Getting To Know The Conveyor Belt

The conveyor belt is the heart and soul of assembly lines, both in this game and in real life; it’s where all the work happens. It is a long moving belt that carries car parts from one end of the factory to the other. Machines are found along the conveyor belt, where various improvements to the car parts are made. Workers operate the machines. Once the car parts reach the end of the conveyor belt, you get cash. The amount of cash you make is directly proportional to the number of improvements made onto the vehicle.

There are a total of nine machines that you can install in your factory. Each machine will add another car part, starting with the chassis. As you add more machines to your conveyor belt, the better your income will be.

Each machine of the conveyor belt can be improved in three ways: increasing quality, adding a new assembly, and updating its software. Increasing the quality will add more value to the car parts that the machine produces, making it sell for a higher a value. The other two upgrades increase your machine’s productivity, allowing you to churn out more parts in a shorter amount of time.

Each factory worker can operate the machine two times before they get tired. The first time they get tired, they will head to the Rest Area and grab a beverage from one of the vending machines there. If they’re able to rest, they’d be happy to work two more times before calling it a day and heading home.

Bonus tip: For the Rest Area, it’s best to invest in the number of vending machines first, followed by increasing the max queue. Neglecting to do this will eventually result in workers entering the Rest Area, then getting disappointed that all the vending machines have long lines. They’ll decide to leave, and you’ll have a significant drop in manpower for that shift.

Each Rest Area will accommodate workers for two machines. Every third machine, a new Rest Area will open for the workers assigned to those new machines. It’s easy to miss, so don’t forget this detail.

5. Better Cars, Better Rewards

It will take a lot of time and money before you can add all nine machines to your factory, but before you get there, you’ll have saved enough money to move on from building one type of car to many others.

There are 12 different cars you can make in the game. You go through each one of them sequentially. Every new type of car you build gives you exponentially more cash than the previous one.

For example, the first upgrade is from Compact to Sedan. The Sedan sells for 50 times more cash than Compact! This is why it’s always a great idea to move on from one type of car to another whenever you can.

It takes a lot of money to upgrade, though. Upgrading from Compact to Sedan will cost you 50 Million cash. The end goal is to reach the 12th car, the Future Car, which sells for 3.281 SEPTILLION times more than a Compact. Think of all the cash you’ll be making! What’s a septillion, even?

Upgrading from one car to another will allow you to move into a new factory, effectively resetting your progress. You start again with 0 cash, with just the Chassis machine, and yet another problematic parking lot.

6. Boosters And Elite Upgrades

Thankfully, not all upgrades are lost when you move on from one type of car to another. The upgrades that don’t carry over are the ones you buy with cash, but the upgrades you make using coins are permanent.

As mentioned in the first section, coins are used to either buy Boosters or to buy Elite Upgrades. Boosters are upgrades that are specific to a particular area of your factory. The Parking Lot and each machine on your conveyor belt has its own set of Boosters.

Early in the game, you’ll want to focus on getting the Discount Boosters for all of your machines. This will let you upgrade machines for a lower price. It maxes at 100%, virtually making upgrades for that machine completely free.

The next upgrades you’ll want to get are the Higher Income Boosters. With free upgrades, you’ll be able to max out the stats of your machines, and focus on squeezing out as much cash as you can get from them.

Finally, Instant Action Boosters will allow your workers to finish their jobs instantaneously. Your machines with fully-upgraded Instant Action Boosters will no longer need the Software Update upgrade. It’s a great addition to your factory in the late game, as it will erase queues and maximize efficiency.

Elite Upgrades are more expensive than Boosters, but they have their long-term benefits. Think of them as Boosters but for the whole factory, not just for specific machines. They’re nice to have, but upgrading them shouldn’t be a priority until later on in the game.

Lastly, coins allow you to hire production managers. Production managers are workers who can work all the time, and they don’t need to rest like the other workers. Save this for last, as the other coin upgrades are much more useful than the managers.

7. What To Upgrade First?

When in doubt, do Quests. Quests reward you with Coins, and Coin Upgrades are the best. If you feel like you’re stuck in the game and that your cash isn’t going up fast enough, then here’s a solution you can try.

First off, you should always strive to finish your Quests. Quests reward you with coins, and Boosters significantly make your factories better. You complete Quests by upgrading different aspects of your factory, so use them as a sort of unofficial guidebook in determining upgrades that can be useful for later builds.

Which machine should you invest in first? As a rule of thumb, the earlier the machine appears on the conveyor the belt, the higher on your Boosters priority list it should go. This means upgrading Chassis first before Suspension, and so on. This also applies for the turnstiles – upgrade your first lane first, then the second, and so on.

When upgrading, it’s always better to have more than one line. For the machines: invest in new assembly lines. For parking slots: more parking spaces. For the turnstiles: multiple entry and exit queues.

8. Green Thumb For Car Manufacturing

Those are all the general tips and tricks we can give you for Car Industry Tycoon. Don’t stress on it too much if you can’t remember all of them right now, as the game is very forgiving and there really isn’t a wrong way to play the game. Optimization is the name of the game in Car Industry Tycoon, and just like with any business, there will be trials and errors. These tips were designed to give you general ideas on exactly that; and these are ideas you can build on for maximum efficiency.

Figuring out how to optimize is the challenge of the game, but winging it is also another great way to go! Building your car manufacturing empire is your destiny in the game. It’s not a question of whether or not you’ll be able to make it – it’s a question of how fast you get there.