^{Click here to see the pre-0. 23 graphics}

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 BeamNG company also develops a fork called BeamNG.tech, intended for research, development and academic purposes. This fork allows their clients to develop their own models for such experiments, with a particular emphasis on autonomous driving.

BeamNG.drive's website can be found here, and information on BeamNG.tech can be found here.

Tropes in BeamNG.drive:

General

• 555: The phone number on the Bruckell Bastion taxi is 385-555-5555.

• Aborted Arc: The "A Rocky Start" campaign was intended to be the first part of a campaign series and had features like comic book-style cutscenes and named characters. This was in 2016, and nine years later it has never been updated or even addressed by BeamNG.

• Ace Custom:
  • The FATT (Fink Appliances Ten Thousand), a heavily modified Soliad Wendover.
  • One of the variants for the Civetta Scintilla is a movie car featured in "Dark Owl II: Striking Talons", where it's said to be used by the titular character.

• The All-Seeing A.I.: AI-controlled cars set to chase, follow, or flee from your vehicle will always know where you are (as long as they don't fall victim to Artificial Stupidity, which they probably will).

• 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.
  • Many cars are available in demolition derby variants, which have missing body panels, stripped-out interiors, and plenty of disgusting-looking rust.
  • 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.

• Amphibious Automobile:
  • In the earliest versions, all cars were able to work underwater. This has been fixed, however, 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.
  • The FPU Wydra (roughly pronounced "Vidra") is a truly amphibious eight-wheeled ATV, with a pontoon-like body and buoyant tires that let it float on water. The latter also act as paddles.
  • 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, doing so 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 don't have intakes to flood.

• Anti-Frustration Features: Version 0.21 added a "smart spawn" system that prevents cars from (re)spawning inside of objects or other cars. A later update added a keybind to respawn your car on the nearest road (useful for when you've driven straight off a cliff). Version 0.25 added an oversteer assistant that make certain driving activities (such as drifting, taking the Bolides or the then-upcoming Covet MR Turbo for a spin) much more manageable on keyboard and with a gamepad.

• 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 stopping at stoplights, but they're not perfect, which winds up adding a bit of realism in itself.

• Artistic License – Cars: Averted for the most part. Being an out-and-out simulator, the developers do nearly everything to prevent this trope from going into play. However, there are a few straight examples:
  • Every vanilla vehicle with a fuel tank (bar the T-Series) lacks a fuel filler cap.
  • The trolleybus wires in Belasco City would be useless in real life due to being spaced way too far apart and isolated from any larger network, unlike the cable car tracks, which are shown leading into two depots.

• Artistic License – History: A subtle and perhaps pedantic example, but the Group 5 Civetta Bolide with its 1984 facelift styling is two years too late to its respective racing series—at least discounting Beam's Alternate History world. However, since its Group 4 siblings use the original '81 styling, they're exempt from this.
• Artistic License – Physics: BeamNG's famous softbody damage engine is the most advanced in the industry, but it's not perfect. The engine is specialized in deformation instead of shattering, so plastic bumpers designed to crack in real life will instead bend, attempting an Instant Convertible crash is more likely to rip the body from the chassis than sever the roof and a crash that would split a car in two in real life will instead crumple it up as if it were made of tinfoil.
  • The latter is averted somewhat, as some cars, like the Civetta Scintilla and Bolide or the Grand Marshal limousine, can be torn in half horizontally in a crash, and areas of non-metal components, like the Pigeon's fibreglass body, will vanish as if they had shattered instead of bending if hit hard enough.

• Automated Automobile:
  • Due to the game never showing a driver operating the vehicle, the cars are basically this. Technically justified since the game renders cars on CPU threads, and adding human(oid) drivers in means adding to the already sizeable CPU performance requirement.
  • This trope however is the intended aim for BeamNG.tech, as clients use them as a research software for autonomous driving projects.
  • Update v0.38.4 added a vehicle called the "Robot Van", a driverless car inspired by memetically unflappable autonomous delivery vehicles deployed in China.

• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The drag cars have several hundred horsepower 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 can twist to one side from torque steer if you floor it from a standing start, which can result in a 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.
  • 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 top-tier 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.

• 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 T-Series generally looks rather pedestrian, but it packs a massive 15-litre (900 cubic inch) inline-6 or an 18-litre (1100 cubic inch) V8, and an optional ram plow. Some configs even come with more bells, whistles, wheels, warning lights, and square feet of chrome trim than you can toot a horn at.
  • New for 0.33, the Gavril MD-Series is the T-Series' little cousin, or a D-Series on steroids. Whether that translates into a workhorse that's a step above the ol' D-Series or an unmistakable Hummer Dinger Compensator depends on the config.
  • Update 0.38 adds the Hirochi HT-55 mining dump truck to the game, which can carry dozens of tons of cargo and dwarfs every other vehicle in the game.

• 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, there's the Autobello Stambecco, whose offroad ability reflects its namesake (the Alpine ibex).
    • In the same vein, "Civetta Bolide" literally translates to "Owl Fireball" in Italian, and "Scintilla" to "Spark" (hence its update's Tag Line, "Spark Your Passion"). The Bolide also has a tuned variant named the Notte ("night").
  • Gavril, the name of an automaker, is a variant of the name Gabriel (the trailer BGM composer and lead vehicle designer's first name).
  • "ETK" is an acronym for "Ersatzteilkatalog"—German for "spare parts catalog".
  • "Miramar", the name of a Japanese 60s sedan, is Spanish for "sea view", and is a possible reference to either the Nissan Skyline or 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 "very bad" or "terrible".
  • "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 D15 pickup is the default vehicle that a player will spawn in. It's slow, ugly, and has poor handling compared to most other cars. Despite its mediocre performance, the D15's suspension travel, four-wheel drive and torquey V8 give it an edge on rough terrain, making it good for exploring.
  • The Ibishu Covet is an 80s/90s front-wheel drive subcompact, but even the base models have decent handling.
  • The base versions of most 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, making it much easier to drive.

• 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 it as a selectable custom variant or even the default vehicle that the game starts you in when loading a level.

• 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 Chinatown, a concrete canal, a scenic coastal road, a winding mountain road through a redwood forest, and an urban financial district all within two kilometres of each other.

• Checkpoint Starvation: Used to be the case, as even though checkpoints were present in all scenarios and time trials from the beginning, they merely served as waypoints, not areas you could restart from if something went awry—especially frustrating on longer rally courses.

• Chronically Crashed Car: Anything the player drives (usually), thanks to the on-the-spot respawn mechanic (see Death Is a Slap on the Wrist below).

• Clown Car: In Walking Mode, 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 isn't a bug, but rather intended behavior.

• Construction Vehicle Rampage: The HT-55 mining dump truck and WL-40 front end loaders are great for crushing ordinary cars, with their large tires, immense torque and incredible weight. The HT-55 Car Crusher in particular is described as being modified for crushing cars in a scrapyard, with stiffer struts and underbody armor to keep it from being damaged by the cars it smashes.

• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • The Soliad Lansdale 4.4 Tuner Special has almost three times the power of a stock Lansdale 3.8 Sport, as well as massive supercar wheels to help put all that power down. Unfortunately, it isn't any lighter and its stiff suspension limits its family-hauling capabilities, making it a Master of None. It might turn heads at the drag strip... but that's what the better-equipped drag config is for.

• Cool Car: Several; the mid-engined Civetta Bolide and Scintilla supercars, the rear-engined Hirochi SBR4 sports car, the Gavril Barstow and Bruckell Bastion muscle cars, and any of the competition or performance versions of cars.

• Crippling Overspecialization: The FPU Wydra is a Polish amphibious offroad vehicle that can take rocky trails and ponds like a champ, but its short gearing and lack of actual steering geometry (instead relying on skid steering) make it a chore to drive on any relatively smooth dirt roads, let alone pavement. Making a 180 degree turn on a paved surface from a standstill, without first gaining speed, will cause the clutch to overheat comically quickly.

• Crossover:
  • With Automation since 2018, in which you can export car designs from that game to drive, along with this game getting the Automation test track, allowing players of both games to test their car designs personally. Players who already owned one of the two games even got a 20% off coupon for the other on Steam when the respective updates launched.
  • A 2023 update added a handful of car configurations and missions made in collaboration with the real-life Gambler 500 rally event (think the 24 Hours of LeMons meets the Dakar Rally with some environmental stewardship on the side).

• 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.

• Developer's Foresight: Some customization parts on certain vehicles aren't used in any vanilla configs, with examples being the Nomi GTRX hillclimb aero on the Scintilla and 90s Pessima, the USDM variants of the JDM Ibishu BX "Runner"'s headlights,^note The two sets of lights differ in which side the low beams are aimed off to, as the US and Japan drive on different sides of the road or the non-sport AWD exhaust on the Wendover. These parts are ostensibly intended to give players more options when it comes to custom configs in a way that reduces mod clutter (since mods are generally best reserved for bigger things like engine swaps or whole packs of tuning parts).
  • Decreased engine power at high altitudes is simulated accurately in spite of there being no default maps with high enough mountains for it to make a difference.

• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • As in real life, 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 a step further 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.
    • Arguably, however, it is actually easier to drive than the street-legal Bolide due to the racing slick tyres and aero parts, which mitigate the extreme tail-happiness that makes the stock Bolide so challenging to drive.
  • 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: A large storm drain system is present in the West Coast USA map (accessible by car, of course). In 0.30, an underground section was added that leads to a steel mill.

• 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 an automatic, this means you have to put it into the proper mode, and it cycles like a real automatic, with Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, and specialized modes (which can be 2nd and 1st gear in older automatics to sport and semi-automatic modes 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 G2x 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.

• Driving Up a Wall: Quite possible with enough momentum (or downforce).

• Eldritch Abomination: Cars that have been severely deformed can very rarely cause the underlying structure of beams and nodes to glitch out and explode into giant polygons, although in most instances the game will catch onto this and reset the car.

• 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:
  • Adding a Stage 3 turbo or supercharger, or adding a variable-boost turbocharger and cranking the wastegate limit all the way up without upgrading the cooling system can sometimes melt the engine block. 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 also rupture the engine block, again from excessive torque.
  • 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.

• Fauxrrari: 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 and Steyr-Puch.

  • 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 facelift of the seventh-gen Dodge Charger, and even includes analogues to the Charger Hellcat and Redeye models with the Battlehawk and Redtail, respectively.^note However, while the majority of the configurations are automatic-only just like their real-life counterparts, 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, whereas the seventh-gen Charger is available exclusively with an automatic (initially a 5-speed for the pre-facelift models, and then an 8-speed for the facelift 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, with their Special basically being a Firedome.

  • Cherrier is a stand-in for Citroën, Renault, and Peugeot, with some engineering cues from Audi (namely the turbo inline-5 engine paired with all-wheel drive).

  • Civetta is a stand-in for Italian supercar makers in general, with the Bolide in particular drawing inspiration from both Ferraris and Lamborghinis of the time.
    • 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, as well as the Lancia 037.
    • The Scintilla has sculpting reminiscent of both modern Ferraris and the Lotus Evija and Emira. Under the skin is a naturally aspirated V10 engine, metal space frame chassis, and a choice of RWD or AWD à la the Lamborghini Huracán.

  • ETK standing in for BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi.
    • The 800 Series is evocative of the sixth-generation BMW 5-series.
    • The K-Series has a body shape close to that of a Mercedes-Benz SLK, but has BMW-like styling like the 800 Series.
    • The I-Series seems modeled after the E28 iteration of the BMW 5-series. Some models use "TT" in their name to abbreviate "twin-turbo" (like Audi), and the branding on the tachometer is similar to Audi's style, even though the visuals are still based on BMWs of the 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 config gives it more than a passing resemblance to the Sonax and Hugo Boss-sponsored 190E DTM racer from 1992.

  • Gavril being one of Ford, with elements of GM, Chrysler, and Kenworth thrown in.
    • The Gavril D series is heavily inspired by 80s and 90s GM and Ford trucks, with the D10 SUV being highly reminiscent of the Ford Bronco and Chevrolet Blazer. The extended-frame D20 and 30 Kentarch variants, meanwhile, are likely based on four-door Bronco conversions built by Centurion in the '80s.
    • The Barstow looks like a cross between an early 70s Ford Mustang and a mid-60s Dodge Charger, leaning more towards the latter with its 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 Grand Marshal is a rear-wheel drive, body-on-frame, full-size sedan, borrowing design elements from the Ford Crown Victoria and Chevrolet Caprice.
    • The MD-Series takes after the first two generations of the Chevy Kodiak and GMC TopKick, along with the sixth-gen medium-duty Ford F-Series.
    • The Roamer is a midsize SUV similar to the first-generation Ford Explorer, name and all.
    • The T-Series, in its conventional, long-nose trim, is something of a mash up of a Kenworth W900, with bits of International and Western Star thrown in for good measure, while its cabover variant is an almost dead ringer for a K100.

  • Hirochi is one for Subaru and Mitsubishi.
    • The Sunburst takes inspiration from both the Subaru Impreza (styling-wise) and, formerly, the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo (mechanical/running gear-wise). The remaster introduced via the 0.35 update leans even more heavily towards the Impreza side, with the retirement of the old version's transversely inline-4 engines in favour of longitudinally-mounted flat-4 engines and a requisite rework of the car's existing transmission options. However, its new custom front bumper does incorporate a split trapezoidal grille like on the Lancer Evo X.
    • The pro drift config bears quite a resemblance to the Team Orange drift WRX, with yellow mirrors and silver Enkei RPF1-style wheels to match.
    • The SBR4 is an unusual rear-engined fastback with design cues from the 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 Porsche Taycan is also available.
    • The Aurata side-by-side ATV vaguely resembles a Polaris RZR.

  • Ibishu being a catch-all for Nissan, Toyota, Honda, and Suzuki.
    • The 200BX and 240BX are a nod to Nissan's 180SX and 240SX. Their platform-mate, the Ibishu Diana, is essentially a Silvia with a few Skyline styling cues.
    • Covet. Civic. Need we say more? However, as Group B homologation hatches go, the MR Turbo is very Renault 5 Turbo-like in its execution, with a longitudinal engine and no AWD.
    • The Hopper has elements of a Jeep Wrangler, Toyota Land Cruiser, Suzuki Jimny Sierra, or really any company's adaptation of World War II's general-purpose vehicle (hence why one variant is a military tribute, with no cover, no roll cage, and army green paint.)
    • Aside from any cursory links to the Skyline present in the Miramar, its ute version also references the Nissan Sunny Truck and Datsun 520/521, and the race car references both the 1969 JAF Grand Prix-winning Nissan Skyline GT-R and its four-door Prince Skyline 2000GT predecessor.
    • The late-80s Pessima is basically a Nissan Maxima, and the 90s Pessima a Mazda 626.
    • The Pigeon combines elements from the Reliant Rialto, Reliant Robin, and both generations of Daihatsu Midget. The Ibishu Wigeon takes direct inspiration from the Bond Bug, complete with a lifting canopy and partially sunken-in headlights.^note And never mind that canonically, the Wigeon's biggest market was the UK.

  • 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, whereas its name is a nod to the Pontiac Bonneville (Wendover, Utah being the closest town to the Bonneville Salt Flats).
    • The brand even has its very own minivan named after a place in the US.

  • Zig-zagged with player designs from Automation; plenty of them use the players' own brands or established Beam brands, but others may use real-life car names and brands, like these replica packs.

• 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 being 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: Several of the scenarios in the game are car chases, including:
  • A police car pursuing an Internet service van due to their service provider not addressing the internet problems at the police station.
  • Filming a scene in an action movie where the hero wrecks the villain's car after a chase.
  • Stopping a rampaging semi truck with a police SUV.

• 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.

• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: Subverted in several maps, where roadworks are used to block roads at the map's edge. Whilst the jersey barriers are indestructible and can't be shunted with a heavy vehicle, they can still be jumped with a movable ramp or climbed with a rock crawler, and the game won't stop you from driving out of bounds if you get past them.

• 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: The 0.35 remaster of the 2009 Hirochi Sunburst brought with it an elaborate itasha livery, central to which is a Magical Girl named Bea.

• Joke Character:
  • The aforementioned Lansdale Tuner Special. That said, it does pack a punch if you're good with handling heavy but powerful cars.
  • 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 Pessimistic, The Disastrous^note an H-Series van described as a "suitable replacement for track-side haybales", and The Malodorous^note a 240BX named for its musty interior.
  • The Wydra is generally regarded as one by the community, for reasons mentioned above.

• Law of Cartographical Elegance: Most maps that aren't either quasi-infinite (e.g. the Small Pure Grid or SSRB), or a copy or port of a real-life road or circuit (such as the Shuto Expressway mod), appear designed to fit within a square. Particularly noticeable with West Coast USA and its Eastern counterpart due to their road layouts.

• Level Editor: Just an F11 key press away. You can use it to arrange cinematics and custom missions or even just play with existing maps.
  • 0.12 added 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.
  • 0.33 introduced the Road Architect Tool, meant to aid in putting roads in place for custom maps. The following updates added the Biome Tool and Building Architect, utilities for easily populating forests and assembling buildings, respectively.

• Made of Iron: Many of the derby cars.
  • The Bruckell Nine, period. Being a car from The '30s, you can throw her off a cliff and drive away with only some misaligned steering.
  • 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.

• MegaCorp: "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 a brewery ("BeamBeer") and a telecom provider ("Beamcom"). In comparison, the real-life BeamNG GmbH, located in Bremen, Germany, is a rather small software company.

• Mid-Life Crisis Car: From the official SBR4 showcase video:
  SBR4. Your midlife solution.

• Multi-Track Drifting: The "Skid Brick", a stripped and nitrous-equipped drift config of a medium-duty truck.

• Mythology Gag: The keychain on the Large Roller features the roller's original pre-version 0.37 design.

• Nitro Boost: 0.11 introduced 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 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 torque gives way to RPM in the power equation.

• 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, being reduced 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.
  • Subverted (to an extent) in Career Mode, where speed cameras can lead to fines.

• 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 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 heat buildup.
  • 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.

• Popular History: Many models serve as cursory glimpses of the eras they came from, at least with regard to the automotive world.
  • The pre-war Bruckell Nine has an almost comically clattery four-cylinder and a vintage "awooga" horn, plus configs for a canned macaroni delivery van and blacked-out bootlegger coupe. It also has a slew of hot rod configs that hail from the latter half of the 20th century.
  • As befitting of a '70s car, the Bruckell Moonhawk has massive engines that make next to no power and comes in several different shades of brown, beige, and burgundy.
  • The Civetta Bolide has a flamboyant air about it that only an exotic car from The '80s can have. Its facelift also introduces turbos, which first hit the performance car mainstream in the '80s, even being used on a few bikes!
  • On the other end of the '80s spectrum, you have the miserable box that is the Bruckell LeGran, with lazy handling and a variety of gutless engines appropriate for a post-malaise family hauler.
  • The late-80s/early-90s Ibishu Covet, BX, and Diana come with no less than six Japanese-style aftermarket configs (Diana Street Drift, BX V-Special, 2 Street Tuned cars, and 2 Runners),^note eight if you count the Diana Track and BX Pro Drift cars each of which reflects a particular aspect of Japanese tuning culture.
  • For a good representation of the blobby car design trend that swept The '90s, look no further than that decade's Ibishu Pessima.

• 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.

• Punny Name: A few of the driver names on race liveries, including "D. Rivel" and "B. Aguette".

• Ragdoll Physics: Not with people, but vehicles (and crash dummies).

• Rambunctious Italian: An automotive example—the Civetta Bolide and Scintilla are 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 end 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.
  • Following the 0.33 release of the Gavril MD-Series, many players complained about the lack of shock absorbers, giving the truck oddly jittery handling for such a heavy vehicle. Although shocks were added as an option in 0.36, their absence was intentional, as the truck becomes more planted with a full load of cargo.

• 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).

• Retro Upgrade: A few older vehicles have received some sort of modernization or present-day custom treatment, from the Piccolina dragster and Baja buggies to the facelifted, exocage-clad diesel late-'80s Stambecco lineup (extending its production run from 1971 through 2007).
  • The trusty D-Series received two facelifts, resulting in a production run from 1986 through 2003.

• Rice Burner: These can be created using the customization feature. 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 a higher-powered option (preferably with forced induction), 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 and controller access to a variety of what would otherwise be keybind-only functions.

• Shout-Out: Has its own page.

• Shown Their Work: Extensive on-location research at Johnson Valley was involved in the making of its in-game counterpart. The offroad bypass shock absorber simulation, introduced in the same update, was also worked on with help from industry professionals.

• Spaghetti and Gondolas: The Italy map has many archetypal locations like picturesque villages with maze-like streets, large vinyards and olive gardens, and so on.

• 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.

• Super Prototype: Any of the silhouette versions of cars like the Autobello Piccolina and Civetta Bolide. As the term "silhouette" implies, the only major thing carried over from their production counterparts is the body shell.

• Tech-Demo Game: Intentional, as the game was made to showcase the realistic physics explained below. It also takes advantage of system resources to render multiple vehicles and detailed environments smoothly.

• 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 irreparably 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, as the driver would like to exchange insurance information.
  • While the Civetta Scintilla's fancy doors may present a problem if the car is upside-down, one safety feature is included as it would be in real life: small pyrotechnic charges that break the doors off their hinges so the driver and passenger aren't trapped.
  • Hurling a traffic cone, hay bale or other non-car object past a speed camera at sufficient speed will trigger it, as it would in real life—speed cameras, at least the older models depicted in the game, have no way to determine whether or not the speeding object is a car before taking a picture, and have famously been triggered by flying birds in the past.

• 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 diesel V8 engine noises. This was fixed in the 0.10 update, which added unique sounds for most engine layouts.
  • In the 0.16 update, the Civetta Bolide ditched its generic "American" crossplane sound for a more exotic Maserati-style crossplane V8 sound. 0.27, 0.33, and 0.34 added three more crossplane V8 sounds: a raspy European-style sound used by the Bastion, Dunekicker, 800-Series, K-Series, and V8-swapped Lansdale, a more modern Chevy LS/Ford Coyote-like sound used by the Grand Marshal and V8-swapped BX, and an older side-valve sound used by the Nine and '53 Special, respectively.

• 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 or European countries (depending on plate format), as well as a made-up "virtual reality" one. Many more plate designs for American, European, and Asian formats are available via the mod repository.

• Watch the Paint Job: All but guaranteed (well, depending on the whims of the player).

• Wearing a Flag on Your Head:
  • An American-flag inspired skin is available for the Gavril T-Series, 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.
  • One configuration for the Autobello Piccolina is the self-explanatory "Tricolore".

• What a Piece of Junk: The drag BX-Series looks like it's seen better days, but rips down the quarter mile all the same. Ditto for the "Junkhana" Wendover, which is tail-happy but not uncontrollably so.
  • The Burnside Special has a rat rod config.

• 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 the car to accelerate 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 you can and/or causing as much destruction to each scenario's vehicles as possible.