ETK I-Series
It’s as comfortable carving up winding back roads as it is taking a beating in a demo derby. – Gabester
Originating from the videogame BeamNG.Drive, ETK (Abbreviated as Einfluss Technik Kraften) was a West German automobile manufacturer when they released the I-Series, an executive mid-sized sedan, to high praise. The design process of the fairly inconspicuous vehicle had some of the best engineers Germany had to offer when working on it, and the result was nothing short of staggering on what they managed to achieve on such a fairly standard unibody chassis.
Oddly enough, the car had actually sold better in North America than it did in its home continent, something that ETK themselves especially wasn’t expecting. Its overseas exports were in fact so overlooked, the large majority of their marketing was left completelay untranslated for some bizzare reason, but it seemed to add to the vehicle’s inherently peculiar, but fascinating appeal for the majority of middle-class Americans to have on their front driveways, almost like a fashion statement for the time.
Unlike many other car models of the time, ETK took a more regulated, borderline bureaucratic approach to designating their fleet of vehicles. While it may seem completely random at times, the principles that they used for governing each model was actually quite intuitive.
Number Prefix:
2400: Features the standard 2.4L Inline-6 engine, a great all-rounder for whatever you really need out of an ETK. On its own, this acts as the vehicle’s base model trim, being relatively nothing special apart from being a European import to show off to your neighbours.
3000: Unlike the 2400, this prefix indicates that the engine underneath has been upgraded to a 3.0L equivalent, intended for a much smoother, luxurious ride for the consumer. This engine type was only offered with either the ‘i’ or ‘ix’ coefficients, but not the TTSport treatment, as the added turbo would actually produce so much raw torque that there wasn’t any transmission that could sustain the strain for any prolonged periods of time, especially for those equipped with the AWD platform.
Letter Coefficients:
i: ETK’s signature trim upgrade to the I-Series, so much so that this upgrade is quite literally what gave the car its idiosyncratic name in the first place. This enhancement namely focused on the exterior of the car, featuring such things as fog lights, headlight-mounted windshield wipers, an extended front lip, and on pre-facelift models, a stretched around chrome trim. This upgrade was not just the definitive ETK package to have, but it also acted as the baseplate to all the other upgrades that follow after.
x: ETK’s all-terrain package, indicated by the four ends of the letter ‘x’ to signify the car’s greatest selling point; it’s full-time All-Wheel-Drive system. This sort of platform was completely unheard of at the time to be installed into a traditional mid-sized sedan, yet ETK still went ahead with it to mass success. This upgrade gave the vehicle unrivalled performance on rough surfaces compared to any of its competitor models in the same price bracket, and on pre-facelift models even gave it anti-lock braking, giving it even more control around tight bends and otherwise hazardous circumstances. This upgrade sold especially well in the northern U.S. states upwards into Canada for its excellent winter driving performance, something that ETK focused namely on when creating the innovative drivetrain in the first place.
t: ETK’s performance upgrade; the ‘t’ quite literally just being abbreviated from ‘turbogeladen’ or turbocharged. This particular model was primarily handled by the company’s performance division; ‘TTSport’, giving the car some much needed suspension and chassis tweaks for more intensive driving, topped off with a modest spoiler on the tail end of it to act as the cherry on top for this rowdy machine. The TTSport lineup was offered either with RWD or AWD, so you could either do some sick burnouts with it, or send it around the local track to beat out the competitors with little to no trouble depending on your heart’s desire.
Evolution: A limited-production homologation model offered hand-in-hand in a joint effort by ETK and Brigsby, a third-party German tuning company to create the ultimate machine for use in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft, an annual touring car championship, in which one of the baseline rules was that all participating track cars had to have a street-legal, civilian production model. The end result was this absolute monster, featuring some of the most exorbitant, if not ridiculous body panels the late 1980s really had to offer. On the track however, it was an utter beast that basically just destroyed the competition without even breaking much as a sweat. For its mandatory road legal models however, it was generally unknown how many of these toned-down racecars were even sold to the general public. But if there was one thing that was known, it was the fact that this thing was powerful. Real damn powerful.
Workshop ID: 3004300621
Mod ID: ETKI
