You can research the car with red science, but you can't craft it immediately because it requires an antenna you can only make in purple science. (Quite early, but still...)

The simplest solution would be to just remove the antenna from the car.

Another way would be to move the tech nullius-signal-processing tech up, but that would require changing the recipes, and they're used later on as intermediates so that'd impact existing factories. I did really miss not having those two items during the ME era, though. Maybe add an alternative recipe for red wire and antenna, crafted with iron wire and rubber? Rubber is basically useless right when you unlock it and being able to craft at least a small amount of both items would help out with automation and factory monitoring a little earlier.

The antenna is added by the optional GIzmo's car keys mod. It's not the default Nullius recipe.

Ok. I got that mod via the Nullius Momenti modpack. Is it possible for that modpack to patch/fix the recipe? (I don't know much about how Factorio modpacks work, sorry)

Or there could be a small supply of antennas salvageable from the crash site. In combination with the circuit wire from the crash site, someone could use them to rig up a crude alarm for when stuff gets backed up before you have proper systems to deal with it. The car recipe already uses rubber, as do a couple of other things in mechanical engineering, so adding a new antenna recipe wouldn't help much with that. I'd prefer not to add a second recipe so close to the real recipe, and it doesn't make much logical sense to have a recipe for just an antenna before basic electronics or other things that you need to use the antenna like circuit wire.

Just noticed this thread. I could also remove the antenna from the recipe on my end if Nullius is active. The next version of GCKI is almost ready, just waiting with the release until I'm also done Autodrive …

Thanks Pi-C, though it's not needed anymore. An update last week to the mod added a couple of antennas to the starting items, so removing the antenna is no longer required. This was a better fix than my suggestion to change the recipe because it lets you use the antennas for alerting as well.

Hi, bonesbro! Thanks for the info, I've reverted my change. Fortunately, it wasn't much of a change, just a check for Nullius at the start of the file adding the antenna. :-)