Legal issues?

[Ferrari_Guy]

I've been wondering why none of the cars can be called what they are, like a Honda being called an XS instead of "Honda S2000." In other games like Racer, all the cars are called what they are, and it doesn't seem like they are having problems.

Besides, why would the manufacturer of the car freak out over the car being used in a free video game?

[joevenzon]

It's due to trademark law. We can't legally use a 3d likeness of the car AND the name together. We CAN do one or the other, so we chose the 3d likeness but with different names. In racer, almost every car is a download-able add-on, so they don't care so much about the legal status, but if we want to be part of a distribution then we have to be more careful. However, very soon we'll start doing the racer-type distribution of 1 original car with 1 original track, and then we'll have other cars and tracks download-able through a separate utility. By doing this we can probably be more lax and start calling cars what they are (thoughts?).