GTA 6 vehicles: what is confirmed so far

Rockstar has never published a vehicle list. Everything in circulation is the result of people freezing trailers and screenshots and identifying what is on screen, which is why the counts disagree: community databases currently land anywhere from about 198 to 272 confirmed vehicles.

Treat any exact number as a running tally rather than a fact. The gap between those two figures is almost entirely a question of what counts. A car clearly in focus in a screenshot is a confirmation. A silhouette three streets back in a trailer at 24 frames per second is somebody's opinion, and different databases draw that line in different places.

The manufacturers

Rockstar's in-universe car makers have been stable across the series for twenty years, and each maps onto a real manufacturer closely enough to predict what a new model will be.

• Declasse, the Chevrolet and wider General Motors analogue: utility pick-ups, everyday sedans, police cruisers and muscle classics.
• Bravado, the Dodge analogue: heavy muscle, high-torque drag cars and the SUVs that share their engines.

The naming convention itself is part of the joke. Declasse builds the cars ordinary people actually drive, and Bravado builds cars for people who want to be heard arriving.

Vehicles as a system

Cars matter more mechanically this time, and this is the part worth paying attention to over the model count.

Confirmed footage shows larger weapons stored in your vehicle and retrieved when needed, which makes the car part of your loadout rather than transport. The wanted system tracks your vehicle as a discrete piece of evidence, so the car the police are looking for is a problem you have to solve separately from the face they are looking for. And stealing a car now involves a choice between a Slim Jim and a broken window rather than a single button.

Put together, that is a game where which car you are in, how you got it and what is in the boot are all live concerns. No previous entry in the series has asked those questions.

The ones Rockstar has actually named

Almost everything above comes from community identification. There is now a short list of vehicles the studio has named itself, in its own press material, with manufacturer, model year and storage location attached. Those are the firmest entries in this section, and every one is an edition or pre-order bonus rather than a base-game guarantee:

• '95 Grotti Cheetah, the Ultimate Edition headline car
• '67 Vapid Dominator Buggy, which ships with a weapon locker
• '55 Vapid Stanier, from the Vintage Vice City pre-order pack
• Vapid Ganado, a coupe utility at Jason's safehouse
• Shitzu Squalo, a speedboat with a weapons crate
• Dinka Enduro and the Crest Kayak
• The Wyman car collection, a yard of classics

Customisation is no longer an open question either. Rockstar has photographed a body shop, Rideout Customs, along with finished builds and a car on stands.

What is not confirmed

Leaked builds have described fuel consumption and vehicle condition as tracked systems. Neither has been shown in official material and neither should be treated as real yet.

Customisation has not been demonstrated in any detail. Given that Los Santos Customs and the Benny's shops were central to Grand Theft Auto V and its online mode, an equivalent is a safe expectation, but it is an expectation rather than a confirmation.