Sorry, I forgot to reply to this! It's definitely a lot easier than making a Beam car mod from scratch would be. There are some quirks of the export process that require a bit of trial-and-error to work with (a car that understeers somewhat in Automaton is generally a lot nicer to drive in Beam), but you don't need to be an expert to get something decent. Aesthetically, it depends on how close your starting point is in Automation; the little bright green coupe only took me a couple of hours, including making the engine and getting a rough tune of the suspension, but the Morgan-like one took significantly longer because I basically had to hide the entire front end of the car in Automation and built it up from scratch. I personally find the process of making the cars quite enjoyable in its own right, though, so that helps a lot