We don't really know that their modeling method truly is slower, and, even if it is, we don't know precisely
why it's slower. 6 months is most likely a sort of maximum time, and most cars probably fall in under this time. However, with 60+ modelers, that's still 10 cars per month, whereas if you take the 5 years between GT4 and GT5 and the 200 Premiums, it's only about 3 cars per month.
That probably means they weren't modeling at the Premium level for all 5 years (and indicates a change of plan at some point) and there were almost certainly fewer modelers back then, too. So extrapolation from GT5's car count isn't best helpful, except when you consider the number of staff currently on hand. At 10 cars per month, that's another 360 unique cars by November 2013 (which is my expected arrival date for GT6).
Combine that with the ability to only have to "modify" a few cars and to build several similar cars (e.g. the early and later S14 Silvias) from the same starting point, and only changing the bumpers etc. (by branching the process at the appropriate point); similarly for regional variations and trim level differences (i.e. drivetrain choices). So, just going by GT4's list of extra cars that could use
existing Premium cars (which probably does have too many duplicates at 300, so we'll take the arbitrarily conservative action of halving it), we could have upwards of 200 + 360 + 150 = 710 cars.
That's with the conservatively high figure of 6 months per car, and the conservatively low (certainly for the last year or so) figure of 60 modelers.
Promising.
@ avens: thanks for actually
reading my posts...
