YMMV / Car Wars

• Audience-Alienating Era:
  • The release of the Tanks supplement, which introduced insanely powerful weapons and armor towards the end of the original (first edition through fourth edition) run, is generally seen as the nadir of the product line. It didn't help that the company tried to push a "Japan Invades the West Coast" storyline in Autoduel Quarterly to support it, which was not well received.
  • 5th Ed. notably did not catch on; it was initially presented as books with pairs of cars at a given division level, and vehicle construction rules were never released. In addition, it was at Hot Wheels-scale, three times larger than earlier editions, so existing maps needed to be either scaled up (requiring significantly more table space) or redesigned to be usable at the larger scale.