I started restoring cars in the game’s Normal mode. The initial one was actually an order, an older vehicle with nearly every single part at 50% life, give or take. I had to completely gut the car, repair the body panels, body, and replace all the parts. After 2 hours of working on the car, I finally finished. Yeah, I’m still learning that part. The result is posted over on my earlier CMS article, the teal car.

Car value before the restoration was even 100% finished was nearly $150k! Not to mention that nice restoration bonus of $29k! I bought the car, a Bolt Reptilia R2 Supercharged, at a barn last night, shortly before logging off for the day. I purchased the car for almost $32k in terrible condition, which blew my mind. Little did I know, post-restoration the value would be ludicrous.

I noticed at the last second that the Interior Condition was at 14%, which was hurting my value. I hopped over to the detailing cart, brought it to the car, and let the cart do its magic. Once I finished, I checked the value. The car value had increased almost a full $5k, which wasn’t that shabby. I’ll take it! I actually have another car almost identical to this one that I need to restore. Made me realize that I should watch out for certain finds in the junkyard and barns, as I can make some serious bank restoring these.

Here are a few pictures of the car, I had to get some because I enjoyed restoring this particular car.

I’ve restored a few other vehicles, from cheapo’s that had been gutted at the junkyard, to auction-bought vehicles that had decent cosmetics but the suspension and engine were in horrible shape. That said, this has been my most profitable car to date, though I did restore a Dodge Challenger (purchased for under $10k) and sold it for right at $160k. I don’t have any pictures, because I was playing with my impatient, 6 year old son, but I bought the Dodge and Jeep DLC content, which paired nicely with the free Tuning DLC. The Tuning DLC added the ability to place custom gearboxes in your restoration projects, which gives you access to custom tuning your ride. I messed with it once, but it didn’t make any difference in the price.

There’s roughly $60 in DLC available, some of which adds extremely high-end cars, like Pagani, to the manifest. However, these DLCs, while they do add real cars to the game, don’t do much other than add a handful of cars. For example, the Jeep DLC only added the Jeep Willy (Civilian and Military versions), Jeep Wranger, and the Jeep SUV to the game. That’s pretty much it, and you can look through the Showroom on the main title menu to view all the cars added by the various DLCs. In my opinion, it’s a lot of money for just a few cars.