Video Game / BeamNG

BeamNG.drive^note NG standing for "Next Generation" as it is the Spiritual Successor to Rigs of Rods is a car game that makes use of "advanced softbody physics", which means a use of so-called beams and nodes to make up a vehicle (which can bend, deform and break from collisions). It is meant to be as realistic as possible when it comes to vehicle behaviour. BeamNG.drive is also very moddable and edit-friendly due to being built in the Torque 3D engine.

The first public alpha was version 0.3, which debuted in August 2013. It was greenlit on Steam on February 20, 2014 and released to Early Access on May 29, 2015.

The game's website can be found here.

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Tropes in BeamNG.drive:

• The Alleged Car: The base Ibishu Pigeon is a 3-wheeler with a tiny 27-horsepower engine and crippling instability in sharp turns (even with stabilizers attached).
  • The stanced Ibishu Pessima has virtually no ride height and crappy handling.
  • One scenario has you driving a cement mixer that not only likes to tip over in corners, but also loses parts as you drive it. The parts actually fall off so quickly that it is hard to complete the challenge (which takes about 4 minutes) without everything falling off before the truck reaches the finish.
  • Many cars are available in what can be called "derby" variants, which have missing body panels, stripped out interiors and are coated in disgusting looking rust.
• Amphibious Automobile: More like Submarine Automobile—in the earliest versions, cars were able to work underwater. This has, however, been fixed, as engines will flood and hydrolock when running, but you can save a car's engine by shutting it off if it starts to flood.
  • Most of the vehicles with dedicated off-road variants, like the Gavril Roamer, Gavril D-Series and Ibishu Hopper, can have a snorkel attached to the intake, allowing them to cross through deeper rivers like in Utah or traverse muddy and boggy areas. In-fact, it helps cool down your brakes and coolant by submerging the brake discs and radiator, respectively.
  • Electric cars such as the Hirochi eSBR can drive underwater, as electric cars do not have intakes to flood.
  • The Wydra is a truly amphibious six wheeled ATV with a pontoon-like body that lets it float on water and propel itself by spinning its tires.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Version 0.21 adds a "smart spawn" system that prevents cars from (re)spawning inside of objects or other cars.
• Artificial Brilliance: Zig-Zagged with this and Artificial Stupidity. If AI-driven cars don't crash, they're actually very adept with turning speeds and the cornering ability of their vehicles (provided the map's routes are laid out correctly). Part of their tendency to crash is not knowing about the presence of obstacles, so while it might be okay to slide off the road a little bit, it's not as okay when there are big trees lining the side of the road. It also averts Lemming Cops to some degree; cars chasing you at higher speeds tend to brake and back off to try and nudge you off the road rather than ramming you in full force.
  • 0.17's traffic cars are relatively competent at following between the lines, signaling, and—as of the latest update—stopping at stoplights in East Coast USA, but they're not perfect, which winds up adding a bit of realism.
• Artistic License – Cars: Averted. Being an out-and-out simulator, the developers do nearly everything to prevent this trope from going into play.
  • Well, nearly everything, since pretty much every vanilla vehicle with a fuel tank (bar the T-Series) lacks a fuel filler cap for some reason.
• Automated Automobile: Due to the game never showing driver or human operating the vehicle, the cars are basically this.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The drag cars have more than 900 HP and do 0-60 in about 2 seconds, but cornering is kind of an issue. Even launching can be an issue with torque forces in play—the whole car twists to the right from torque steer if you floor it from a standing start, which can result in the front left tire leaving the ground and your car crashing if you can't control the launch. They also overheat alarmingly fast, even when you have the best possible radiator and you're starting with a cold engine rather than a pre-heated one.
• Badass Normal: Many of these exist in the form of factory sports/off-road variants with a few tricks up their sleeves, or outright "sleeper" cars.
• Big Badass Rig: The Gavril T75 does look rather pedestrian, but it has a massive 10.6-litre (647 cubic inch) engine and an optional ram plow.
• Bilingual Bonus: The game contains a few brand and car names that mean something in different languages:
  • The Italian "Autobello Piccolina" can be translated as "beautiful little car".
  • Likewise, "Civetta Bolide" literally translates to "owl fireball" in Italian. It also has a tuned variant named the Notte ("night").
  • Gavril, the name of an automaker, is a variant of the name Gabriel (the lead vehicle designer's first name).
  • "Miramar", the name of a Japanese 60s sedan, is Spanish for "sea view", and is a possible reference to the rust problems of early Japanese cars (like Datsuns).
  • The piano prop's model name is the "MusicaFicta". "Musica ficta" means "fake music" in Latin, and is also a term for any pitches added during a live musical performance.
  • "Pessima", a line of 80s and 90s Japanese midsize sedans, is Italian for "bad".
  • "Vivace" is French for "perennial" or "lively", the latter of which is particularly fitting for a hot hatch.
• Boring Yet Practical: A few cars:
  • The Gavril D10 pickup is the default vehicle that a player will spawn as. It's slow, ugly and has poor handling compared to most of the other cars. Despite its average performance, the D10's suspension travel, four wheel drive and torquey V8 let it handle rough terrain pretty well, making it great for exploring.
  • The Ibishu Covet is an 80/90s subcompact, but even the base models have decent handling (except the derby versions).
  • The base versions of most of the cars count, with less power, but also gentler driving characteristics. For example, the inline 6 Gavril Barstow is slower than the big block V8 Barstow Kingsnake, but is much easier to control.
• Character Customization: The parts editor allows you to freely modify a car, swapping out or adding parts from other variants, tuning the parts, giving the car a paint job, and changing the lettering and design of the Vanity License Plate, before saving them as the default vehicle that the game starts you in when loading a level and/or as a custom variant.
• City of Everywhere: Being what is essentially a condensed version of California, the West Coast USA map has a multi-lane highway system, a suspension bridge, San Francisco-esque hilly streets, a concrete canal, and an urban financial district all within a kilometre of each other.
• Checkpoint Starvation: While checkpoints are present in all scenarios and time trials, they merely serve as waypoints, not areas you can restart from if something goes awry. This can be especially frustrating in longer rally courses.
• Chronically Crashed Car: Anything the player drives (usually), thanks to the on-the-spot respawning mechanic (see Death Is a Slap on the Wrist below).
• Clown Car: Practically every vehicle. Walking Mode has an interesting mechanic where if you exit a vehicle and switch back to the vehicle, you can exit it again to spawn another doppelganger. Rinse and repeat to have as many characters as possible. Because this can be done on any vehicle, one might wonder how so many people fit inside, say, an Autobello Piccolina...
  • It was later revealed that this mechanic is not a bug, but rather intended behavior.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The eSBR. Like many other electric cars, it produces high amounts of consistent torque without the need to shift gears at all, but said torque can be difficult to control—especially in the 800 model, where so much as tapping the accelerator causes the car to lurch when starting off. The battery life is also quite limiting, especially on the track.
• Cool Car: The mid-engined Civetta Bolide supercar, the rear-engined Hirochi SBR4 sports car, the Gavril Barstow muscle car, and any of the competition or performance versions of cars.
• Crossover: With Automation, in which you can export car designs from that game to drive it yourself, along with this game getting the Automation test track, allowing players of both games to test their car designs personally. Players who own one of the two games even got a 20% off coupon for the other on Steam when the respective updates launched.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: In Freeroam, a single keystroke lets you respawn your car in the same spot it sits at after you've crashed it, and sets its new respawn point in the process. Holding down the key allows you to rewind to an earlier point along your journey, so you can, for example, respawn at the top instead of the bottom of a cliff.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Drifting.
  • The Civetta Bolide, an Italian 80s supercar without any modern bells and whistles like ABS or TCS. It's significantly easier to drive with a gamepad (or especially a steering wheel) than with a keyboard and, if you master it, it's a very fast, nimble, and rewarding car.
    • The Bolide's Group 5 race car variant takes things up to eleven with an abundance of turbo lag. Its description even states the following:
      Light, powerful and nimble; the 320 GTR will reward those that can tame it, and punish those that cannot.
  • Heck, any car without ESC or TCS can be this to keyboard drivers (due to the lack of proportional controls, which gamepads and wheels have), but it's all the more satisfying when you tame a Barstow with little more than the WASD keys.
• Down L.A. Drain: Present in the West Coast USA map.
• Driving Stick: The game gives you the choice between an arcade gearing style (where gas just means forward and holding brake reverses the car after stopping) and realistic gearing. With automatics, this means you have to put it into the proper mode, and it cycles like a real automatic: Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, and specialized modes (which can be 2 and 1 in older automatics to Sport and Semi-Automatic in modern manumatics and DCTs). While keyboards, gamepads and non-stick wheels allow you to move through gears sequentially, wheels with sticks like the Logitech G2(X) series not only let you use the stick for manual gears, but also for positions in an automatic (1st as Park, 2nd as Drive, etc).
  • The game offers multiple gearbox-related assists that you can enable or disable. Clutch assistance allows you to change gears without having to use the clutch pedal; otherwise, you'll damage a gear when shifting into it with the clutch still engaged. Throttle assistance cuts the throttle when shifting—preventing the engine from revving too high—and will automatically rev-match for you, preventing lurches and clutch strain. Gear selection safety stops you from shifting into a lower gear that would put the engine beyond its redline, and also prevents you from shifting out of semi-automatic in manumatics and DCTs unless at a complete stop.
  • 0.11 introduced sequential transmissions, which only require you to (without the clutch assist) clutch in when shifting into first or reverse to prevent a stall when starting off, but afterwards, you can freely shift up or down without using the clutch until you come to a stop again.
• Eagleland: Available as a skin for the Gavril T75, complete with bald eagle.
  • The "Hero" bus, a stunt bus equipped with rockets and a cape, is a literal Flying Brick decked out in red, white and blue.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Downplayed; a hard enough impact to the engine or gas tank can set those respective parts on fire. Otherwise, the radial menu allows you to blow up any car on command, deflate the tires, and/or set the car on fire to eventually overheat and melt the engine.
  • Averted before the 0.5 update; cars weren't able to catch fire no matter how they crashed.
• Explosive Overclocking: If you edit a car's engine files, you can have a car that has tons of power... and overheats constantly, if you don't modify the cooling system files as well.
  • In-game, adding a Stage 3/4 turbo or supercharger, or adding a variable-boost turbocharger and cranking the wastegate limit all the way up without upgrading the cooling system, creates the same effect, sometimes even melting the engine block if you drive the car long enough. Usually, though, the boost of a higher-than-usual wastegate limit just blows the engine due to excessive torque.
  • Using too big of a nitro shot for a given engine can rupture the engine block from excessive torque.
• Excited Show Title!: For whatever reason, the UI app that allows you to control the wind is labelled as "Winds!".
• Fauxrrari / Fictional Counterpart: Most official vehicles look very much like certain real cars, and many mods also get in on this by adding their own counterpart companies or adding vehicles to the existing brands. The manufacturers, too, with:
  • Autobello being an Expy of Fiat.
  • Gavril being one of Ford, with elements of GM and Chrysler thrown in.
    • The Grand Marshal resembles a sedan using the Ford Panther platform, shared by the Crown Victoria, Mercury Grand Marquis, and Lincoln Town Car.
    • The Barstow looks like a cross between a Mustang and a Charger, leaning more towards the latter with the wood grain dashboard and optional rotating hidden headlights. In fact, the Barstow is also an Expy of the Gavril Bandit from the Rigs of Rods days, particularly with its resemblance early in the Barstow's development.
    • The Gavril Roamer is a midsize SUV similar to the first-generation Ford Explorer, name and all.
  • Ibishu being a catch-all for Nissan, Toyota, and Honda.
    • The 200BX is a nod to Nissan's 180SX and 240SX.
    • The Hopper is based on a Jeep Wrangler, Toyota Land Cruiser, or really any company's adaptation of World War II's general-purpose vehicle (hence why one variant is a tribute to it, with no cover, no roll cage, and army green paint.)
    • The Pigeon combines elements from the Reliant Rialto, Reliant Robin, and first-gen Daihatsu Midget. The Ibishu Wigeon is straight up modelled after the Bond Bug, complete with the lift-up canopy, side screens, and partially sunken-in headlights.^note And never mind that canonically, the Wigeon's biggest market was the UK.
  • Civetta being a stand-in for Italian supercar makers, with the Bolide in particular drawing inspiration from the Ferrari 308 GTB and some elements of the Lamborghini Countach.
    • The gravel rally Bolide with its Volitalia paint scheme is a less-than-subtle nod to the Group 4 Lancia Stratos and its Alitalia livery.
  • Bruckell being a Bland-Name Product version of Buick^note The Moonhawk, while modelled after something from Chevrolet, is possibly named after the Skylark. The same goes for the LeGran (which is markedly different from its presumed namesakes, the Buick LeSabre and Chrysler LeBaron). (at least, prior to the introduction of the Bastion).
    • The Bastion is based upon the 2015-on facelift of the seventh-generation Dodge Charger, and even includes analogues to the Charger Hellcat and Redeye models with the Battlehawk and Redtail models, respectively. However, while the majority of the configurations are automatic-only (including the Redtail), included in the default configurations are a Sport 5.7, a Sport GT 6.5, and a Battlehawk, the former two being analogues to the R/T and SRT 392 models respectively, with a 6-speed manual transmission (apart from two customized configurations), whereas seventh-gen Charger is available exclusively with an automatic transmission (Initially a 5-speed for the pre-facelift models, and then an 8-speed for the post-facelist models) . This may allude to the fact that the related Dodge Challenger can be optioned with a manual on V8 performance models.
  • Burnside being one for DeSoto.
  • ETK replacing BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi. "Ersatzteilkatalog", commonly abbreviated to "ETK", happens to be German for "spare parts catalog".
    • The 800 Series is evocative of the F31 BMW 3-series Touring station wagon.
    • The K-Series has a body shape close to that of a Mercedes-Benz SLK, but uses BMW-like hardware like the 800 Series.
    • The I-Series seems modeled after the E28 iteration of the BMW 5-series. Some models use "TT" to abbreviate "twin-turbo" in their name (like Audi), and the branding on the tachometer is similar to Audi's style, even though the visuals are still based on BMW models of its era. The Brigsby body kit on certain models of the I-Series makes it resemble the Evolution versions of the AMG-tuned Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.5-16, while its track configuration gives it more than a passing resemblance to the Sonax-sponsored 190E DTM racer from 1992.
  • Hirochi is one for Subaru and Mitsubishi.
    • The SBR4 is an unusual rear-engined fastback with design cues from a mix of Toyota 86/Subaru BRZ, Nissan GT-R, and Lexus LFA, powered by a range of flat-four engines with optional all-wheel drive. An electric variant similar to the Tesla Model S, called the eSBR, is also available.
  • Soliad seems to be the game's version of Pontiac.
    • The Wendover has a digital dashboard with a rudimentary touch screen in the centre console and a transverse 3.8-litre V6 as an engine option, not unlike the Buick Reatta. The pace car configuration and facelift model's hidden headlights are likely a nod to the 1987-1993 Chrysler LeBaron.
  • Cherrier is a stand-in for Citroën, Renault, and Peugeot.
  • Many player designs from Automation tend to use the players' own brands or existing Beam brands.
    • Pretty much averted with some replica packs though.
• Featureless Protagonist: The Player Character of the "A Rocky Start" campaign; the only identifying trait is that he's male, but his face is never shown or he's silhouetted to let the player insert themselves as the character.
• First-Person Ghost: No driver is ever seen in the cars, presumably to reduce visual clutter in the cockpit, keep the player character ambiguous, and to prevent depiction of bodies torn apart in grisly car crashes, even with human-like crash test dummies or robots. This even extends to the "Driver's School", "A Rocky Start" and "Hustle and Bustle" campaigns, where cutscenes and art show characters inside and outside of the cars, but they're completely absent during gameplay.
  • Somewhat averted with Walking Mode introduced in 0.22. When exiting a vehicle and enabling free camera, you can see that the character is made up of an octagonal prism and a spherical mesh (although it can be changed to a snowman). This character disappears as soon as you reenter a vehicle though.
• Free Wheel: The physics makes this a frequent occurrence in severe crashes. If your car has hubcaps, expect to see the minor version of this trope come into play.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The nature of soft-body physics may, on occasion, result in glitches that cause beams and/or nodes to be catapulted into the horizon and stretch cars to the ends of the universe, but the game usually detects those things happening and prevents itself from crashing by resetting the car and pausing the game if the nodes and beams become extremely unstable.
  • The odd bug here or there is humorously acknowledged by the devs. The first hotfix to 0.11 was named "The Vacuuming", due to the turbo sounds being broken and sounding like a loud vacuum cleaner before they were fixed.
• Game Mod: Tons. Any mods that don't blatantly infringe on copyrighted brands can be approved and made available to download on the official repository, while replicas can be found on the game's forums.
• Gateless Ghetto: Basically every vanilla level that isn't on an island, with the exception of Gridmap, the Small Pure Grid, and the Showroom. Of note are the Automation Test Track, the ETK Driver Experience Center, and West Coast USA with blocked-off roads, as well as Utah with two seemingly separate highway tunnels, which are actually two ends of the same tunnel.
• Holiday Mode: Official Halloween mods were released on October 31, 2017 and October 2018, which unlocked a respective achievement when the game was run with either installed. Most of the maps have their default time set to late evening to give everything a very creepy, shadowed ambience and many jack-o'-lanterns and candles adorn the maps, particularly in areas where scenarios and campaigns take place.
  • Christmas 2017 upped the ante with another special mod, adding falling snow and setting the lighting so it's similarly overcast. Most cars have a unique Christmas variant with a special horn that plays Jingle Bells, and Christmas scenery is scattered throughout the maps. The achievement requires you to find all 90 snowmen in 9 of the official maps (10 snowmen in each map). It's easier when using the minimap, showing circular areas where one is found along with the sound of sleigh bells when nearby. It also has a bit of No Fair Cheating—using the free camera removes the map indicators, and the jingling sound is volume-scaled by vehicle distance, not camera distance, so it's better to drive to find them.
• Hot Pursuit:
  • One scenario has a police car pursue an Internet service van due to their service provider not addressing Internet problems at the police station, instead of, say, threatening them with legal action.
  • Subverted with traffic; AI cops may pull you over for justifiable offences, and when driving a cop car, you're seemingly only able to arrest speeders (as opposed to ramming someone because you don't like the car they're driving).
• Instant Convertible: As shown in videos like this, many cars' physics structures don't distinguish between roof and body stiffness—even if everything below the so-called "glasshouse" is intact, the fact that the roof stays attached to the car results in this trope being subverted.
• Interface Screw: Damage to the suspension and wheels, even minor, results in some awkward steering. This can happen from scraping the wall during a turn or hitting bumps too big for the car's suspension to handle. This is especially noticeable with force feedback, sometimes causing the wheel to forcibly turn in one direction.
• Itasha: Being a widely-enjoyed driving game with mod support, such skins were bound to be created sooner or later.
• Joke Character: The second-gen Pessima's stanced version is meant to ridicule the stanced car scene. As such, it has very bad handling. Its reputation as a joke car is established by the in-game description, which has this to say about it:
  Completely useless and undrivable, this version is designed only for aesthetics.
  • Some of the derby cars include The Malodorous^note a 200BX named for its musty interior, The Disgraceful^note a lifted ETK I-Series past its "country club yuppie days", The Pessimistic, and The Disastrous^note an H-Series van described as a "suitable replacement for track-side haybales".
• Level Editor: 0.12 introduces a 3D track builder that allows you to assemble tracks in a way not too dissimilar from TrackMania and tweak the variables of each track segment, such as width and banking.
• Made of Iron: Many of the derby cars.
  • The Gavril Roamer can survive a few rollovers, a 40 MPH frontal impact and a few jumps and still drive.
  • The Ibishu Miramar is a unibody car from the infancy of the technology, but is just as durable as the '90s Gavrils or the Moonhawk, and beats the more modern cars in durability.
  • The Ibishu Pigeon's very light weight and simple construction allows it to bounce back from impacts that would crumple other cars. In addition, the engine is placed towards the middle of the vehicle, preventing all but the fastest frontal impacts from damaging the engine block or driveshaft.
• Mega-Corp: BeamNG, an in-game company that refines and sells fuel, performs national and international shipping, operates driving schools, and sells roofbags and satellite navigation systems. It might also be selling beer ("Beambeer") and offering Internet services ("Beamcom").
• Mid-Life Crisis Car: From the official SBR4 showcase video:
  SBR4. Your midlife solution.
• Nitro Boost: 0.11 introduces the ability to add a nitrous oxide injection system to most cars, sometimes offering larger bottle sizes and allowing you to use preset shot sizes or tune the shot itself. Arming the system (visually) purges it and it will only inject if you are at the defined gear or above, above the defined minimum engine RPM and applying full throttle. Alternatively, you can inject nitrous at any time using a key binding. Be careful with using larger shots; too much and the sheer power can cause the engine block to rupture. One way to avoid overtorque is by only injecting at higher RPMs where the torque usually falls off in favor of power.
• No One Could Survive That!: The very severe crashes. As in, the ones where you toss your vehicle off a cliff and watch it tumble downwards, reducing it to a pile of scrap that barely resembles the car in question.
  • Crash head-on into a wall or streetlight fast enough and the passenger compartment will fold.
  • Some vehicles (the Gavril Roamer and D15 especially) are still capable of driving after sustaining multiple serious accidents that make them look ready for the scrapheap.
  • Additionally, as long as the moving parts still work on some level, the player is capable of driving the car, even if the passenger compartment is too damaged to realistically ride in.
• Optional Traffic Laws: Well, there really isn't a way to enforce them outside of scenarios or traffic.
• Overheating: Each major part of your car is tracked individually, heat-wise. Having an insufficient, damaged or missing radiator leads to a lot of problems if you're pushing your car to the limit. First the coolant overheats, then the piston rings and head gaskets will break or melt, resulting in power loss due to a lack of a seal in the cylinders, and soon the oil will overheat. This is followed by the connecting rod bearings becoming damaged and producing a clattering noise. Keep driving after that? The engine will eventually die. As in, the block itself will start to melt.
  • There's also brake temperature, which in particular can accumulate very fast if you brake hard a lot and/or haven't put racing-spec discs and pads on. You'll eventually learn to brake lightly for cornering to reduce wear and heat.
  • 0.11 introduced clutch temperature; clutches will overheat under high load, particularly if you're holding the clutch halfway open or if you lock up the engine in a high gear and at high speed.
• Pimped-Out Car: There's a mod for the LeGran that makes it look like something straight out of Need for Speed: Underground.
• Pun: The Pessimistic derby Pessima, as well as the description for the Gavril H-Series Vantastic configuration.
  The perfect vehicle for your next camping ad-van-ture. I'm not sorry.
• Ragdoll Physics: Not with people, but vehicles (and crash dummies).
• Rambunctious Italian: An automotive example—the Civetta Bolide is loud and very tail-happy.
  • To a lesser extent, the performance variants of the Autobello Piccolina (albeit for the same reasons).
• Ramp Jump: Some scenarios are this trope. Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay in that your car typically dips forward and smashes its front in.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: A common complaint from people unfamiliar with how real cars, especially everyday economy models, handle at high speeds. The developers released a video showing how realistic their handling model is with demonstrations of understeer, oversteer and drifting in order to dull these complaints, however there was still a valid point that the physics model was a lot more slippery than in real life. Tweaks to tire-ground physics as part of version 0.21 seem to have made said complaints a non-issue, though.
• Reduced-Downtime Features: 0.24 added a Point-and-Click Map through which you can fast travel to a level's various spawn points or choose from various missions (ranging from timed rally stages to delivery routes). Said missions also return you to Freeroam mode when completed or abandoned.
• Relocating the Explosion: The first mission of the Hustle and Bustle campaign has the player drive a bus with a bomb that will go off if the bus goes below a certain speed. After evacuating the passengers onto a truck along a highway, the bus has to be driven off to one of three locations where the explosion won't hurt anyone.
• Removable Steering Wheel: Similar to in Project CARS, a gameplay option allows you to visually remove the steering wheel if you're using a steering wheel controller to avoid duplicate wheels (and/or to view the dashboard more easily).
• Rice Burner: These can be created using the customization tool. Take the lowest-powered base model of a vehicle, lower the suspension, and add aesthetic features from the sport or race variants of that car (such as body kits and spoilers).
  • Conversely, sleeper cars can also be built using this tool. Take the base model of a car such as the Pessima, replace the stock engine with the highest-powered option (and add forced induction if possible), add race or rally suspension and any other performance enhancement that doesn't alter the bland exterior, and you've got an econobox ready to embarrass muscle cars at the stop light.
• Ring Menu: The radial menu, which provides mouse access to a variety of what would otherwise be keybind-only functions.
• Shout-Out: Opening the key cover of the piano plays a short loop of Claire De Lune, the theme used for Car Boys.
  • Some of the wackier part additions to the vehicles seem to be inspired by MythBusters, the first being the ram plow that is one-for-one to the one used in "Traffic Ram". v0.20.2 added square wheels straight out of the myth of the same name and, thanks to the physics, the ride indeed smooths out as you drive faster.
  • The Fink Appliances Ten Thousand (FATT) configuration for the Soliad Wendover^note added in v0.22 is a more-or-less-obvious reference to KITT.
• Spaghetti and Gondolas: The Italy map contains a handful of picturesque villages.
  • The Piccolina is basically this trope in car form.
• Spiritual Successor: To Rigs of Rods.
• Subsystem Damage: To the point that there is almost no such thing as Critical Existence Failure. Each part of the car and even each part of the engine can be damaged to some degree depending on the nature of the impact or how you're handling the engine and car.
  • Exceed the redline for too long (either because the engine lacks a limiter or you downshift too early) and the valvetrain suffers due to valve float, reducing performance.
  • Bottom out the suspension and you might find yourself completely immobile from a broken driveshaft, despite a fully functional engine and intact wheels.
  • Run the engine hot for too long? The piston rings and head gaskets in the cylinders can become damaged, causing a loss of power due to an improper seal and will allow oil to seep in and burn, leading to further damage.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: A lot of tropes and quirks you take for granted in other games do not apply here.
  • Typically, you might scrape against the wall in some games and, in fact, help yourself take a corner. Not so here, as even a minor graze against the wall can irrepairably mess up your steering alignment, requiring your car to be reset.
  • Taking a Ramp Jump as described above, front-engined cars will typically nosedive, wrecking the radiator if not outright popping the engine block out from the hood. Even if your car was balanced out to land parallel to the ground, you'd still bottom out (except for with really high-riding cars) and damage the suspension, the undercarriage, and even the driveshaft, crippling your car. There's a reason Real Life ramp jumps have opposing ramps—so they can land while angled downward to redirect downward momentum.
  • Not every car is designed for racing, sporting, or even just spirited driving—most of the regular cars are hard to control at higher speeds or can overheat when pushed to their limits.
  • Using a Nitro Boost generally puts strain on your engine from the increase in power, and too big of a shot for a given engine will simply cause it to blow in an instant.
  • If you've gotten the muffler ripped off your car or have otherwise removed it, you can expect for the engine sound to become more rough and unrestrained. Who needs fartcan exhausts anyway?
  • From 0.24, an AI traffic car may follow you after a fender bender with the expectation that you'll pull over and stop for a bit, the reason being that the driver would like to exchange insurance information.
• Universal Driver's License: It's easy to drive any car or truck despite the pedal positions or transmission type differing (since bindings on your keyboard, wheel, or gamepad are consistent between vehicles).
  • Averted in case of non-land vehicles like planes; those usually have custom controls.
• Unconventional Vehicle Chase: Some of the chase scenarios, like one where you chase a modern supercar in a 90s police SUV, or one where you chase a van in the beater Covet.
• V8 Engine Noises: Zigzagged; all cars except for the Ibishu Covet used to have V6 engine noises, despite only two of them actually having a V6 (and only with the highest trim levels). This was fixed in the 0.10 update, which added unique sounds for most engines.
  • In the 0.16 update, the Civetta Bolide ditched its odd-firing V8 sound for a more exotic even-firing V8 sound. 0.19, the update that introduced the Cherrier Vivace and Tograc, also brought with it new inline-3 and inline-5 sounds (both of which are used by the aforementioned cars).
• Vanity License Plate: The license plate on any car defaults to as many characters of your username (on BeamNG.drive's website or Steam client) that the plate can fit. You can even set your own lettering via the car editor or garage and choose from a variety of plate designs from a few American states (with the American plate format, that is), as well as a made-up "virtual reality" one. Many more plate designs for both American and European formats are available via the mod repository.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Freeroam in particular. The Career mode is implied to be this once it's released, with a free selection of missions and activities to earn money for buying, repairing and customizing vehicles.
• Wreaking Havok: Despite running on Torque 3D, this game is this trope, as it has great vehicle damage simulation and a lot of freedom for players.
  • The addition of torque forces in 0.11 opened up some additional fun with the physics. Particularly the fact that, without any additional scripting, the torque forces ripple throughout the exhaust system, causing the tailpipe to wobble when revving the engine and accelerating in a realistic manner as a consequence of the soft-body physics.
  • The second campaign is called "Senseless Destruction". It's all about trying to make it as far as possible and/or causing as much destruction to each scenario's vehicles as possible.

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