BeamNG.Drive and the strange satisfaction of simulated destruction
1.8.2025
By Jordan Oloman, Contributor
More often than not, the engine powering these delicious viral snippets of crumply chaos is BeamNG.Drive. A meticulous vehicular simulator that first launched in 2013, BeamNG.Drive still boasts an unparalleled damage model more than a decade later, making it the envy of all arcade racing games. As well as being used by technicians and car manufacturers to gather physics data, train drivers, and model traffic scenarios, it also shines as a video game—albeit one with a little bit of a learning curve.
There are hours upon hours of hilarious four-wheeled experiments (or hardcore simulated driving experiences) waiting just around the bend. The developers have consistently updated BeamNG.Drive over the years, drawing in user-friendly campaigns as well as new maps, modes, and cars to turn this simulation into more of a playable game, one that allows you to deform and implode a monstrous library of cars at a moment's notice.
Learning the hotkeys
Upon booting up BeamNG.Drive, you're confronted with a whopping twelve modes to tinker with, including early previews of the tantalising-but-still-work-in-progress Rally and Career modes. To ensure you understand the capabilities of the game and aren't turned away by harsh edges immediately, the best place to start is Freeroam. Load into the Gridmap v2 testing environment—a car crash connoisseur's theatre of dreams—and spawn at the "Destruction" point of interest.
Once you're behind the wheel, gun it dead ahead with the arrow keys and slam into that wall at the end of the track—baby's first crash. Now, let's make it more interesting. Hit the R button to reset your car's position and repeat the process, but hit Alt and the up arrow before you reach the wall to discover the wonders of slow motion. Now you can pinpoint the second your car's heart rips in half!
If you hold Alt and tap the left and right arrow keys, you can adjust the slow-motion to your liking and reset to real time by hitting Alt and up again. There's heaps of crumply fun to be had with these inputs alone, but if you want to get a bit artsy with it, you can change the camera angles with the number keys 1 through 9, or hit Shift and C to unlock the camera so you can fully frame your crash. With free camera enabled, you can zoom to a different location and hit F7 to spawn your car in front of a new exciting obstacle, or hit Ctrl and Home while driving to set a spawn point.
Finally, if you want to take a screenshot of your soon-to-be-mangled hooptie, press Alt and U to remove the HUD and Alt and P to snap a picture. If you hit the Esc key, you can also click the Environment tab to play with the weather and day/night cycle and modify the gravity to conjure biblical fender benders.
Chasing cars
Now that you've got a bread-and-butter understanding of how BeamNG.Drive works, you can hit M to open the map and fast travel to several new points of interest designed to test the limits of its soft-body damage simulation. You can also click on the blue and green markers to find challenge scenarios, which are little minigames spread across each of the game's maps that allow you to test your racing, drifting, and destruction skills.
Back in Freeroam, you can complicate matters by hitting the Esc key to pull up the radial menu and then clicking into the AI Tab, then Traffic and Spawn (Normal). This will unleash a group of vehicles around you who will conform to the rules of the road (if there are any). Or, if you head back to the traffic menu, you can tell the cars to chase you and watch them slowly hone in on your position like metal vultures.
Crash toys
By now, you're probably sick of your stock car, so hit Esc again and click the wrench. You can clone or remove your current vehicle, switch to one of the traffic cars, or select a new whip from BeamNG. Drive's bustling library that includes big rigs, buses, supercars, old-timey coupes, and dune buggies. Their watchmaker-like design ensures that parts will spill into the environment at a different cadence, so picking a new car is like playing with an entirely different instrument. Pick what takes your fancy and then "Replace Current" to swap it into the map. Of course, you can also "Spawn New" to create a procession of buses in the vicinity if that suits your destructive tendencies.
Scroll further down, though, and you'll find a series of spawnable obstacles, from pianos to boulders, suspension bridges and retaining walls of concrete. You can drop these "crash toys" into the map and then use Tab to hop between cars and obstacles to move them around and engineer mayhem. Articulated obstacles like the crushers, rollers, and cannons tend to have their own input methods, which will be shown on screen.
The Node Grabber
You can also hold the Ctrl button and hover over any car or obstacle to find a litany of green nodes. If you hold Ctrl and click on a node, you can move the mouse to pull it around in space. It's perfect for nudging a vehicle in a proposed direction in slow motion, but it also allows you to connect cars and objects together. If you spawn a Giant Flail and then grab the node at the end of its chain, you can drag it to a node on your car and tap the middle mouse button to couple it. Now you can drive around with a flail attached and show those metal vultures what for.
Exploring the mod scene
Like any good simulation game, BeamNG.Drive boasts an active modding scene and features a built-in repository full of ingenious user-generated content. Just hit the Esc key and click on the Mods tab to dig in. The game already features a smattering of gorgeous real-world maps based on locations like Italy and Utah, but the mod repository offers hundreds more. The sprawling vistas of "Somerset, UK" sit alongside silly simulacrums like "Crash Hard 2.0" and novelty spots like the aptly named and persistently satisfying "Leap of Death."
But my favourite BeamNG.Drive mods are based on immersion in Freeroam and expose its evident capacity as an open-world driving game. Universal Dummy Mod allows you to plop crash test drivers and passengers into most of the game's cars, an extra dynamic that brings welcome presence and realism (as well as rogue limbs flailing skyward). Then there's the Upgraded Orbit Camera and Enhanced Interior Camera, which push the perspectives to better resemble Grand Theft Auto V. And speaking of which, another favorite is the Most Wanted Mission pack, which embellishes the game's existing evade missions with Hot Pursuit-style heat levels and user interface tweaks.
Of course, there's some silly stuff to round out the set. Universal Weapons allows you to attach a machine gun to the top of a three-wheeled pigeon, and the Explosive Propane Tank and DSC Trampoline obstacles help triple the bombast of any downhill tumble. BeamNG.Drive's mod scene is an embarrassment of riches, and we are only scratching the surface here.
Driving away in style
With that, you should have enough grounding in BeamNG.Drive to lose hours fooling around with its uncompromising and weirdly satisfying sandbox. Advanced features like the built-in World Editor and Track Builder and a treasure trove of vehicle configuration settings are embedded if you want to dig deeper. You may be the player who wants to design liveries in the Garage and fine-tune every detail of your experience, and there's plenty of room for that.
There are also the more structured aspects of BeamNG.Drive that we haven't touched on here. As well as the Tron-like Light Runner mode, you can embark on a surprisingly deep bus-driving adventure in Bus Routes, or as I like to call it, "Sane Taxi." There's also the aforementioned Career and Rally modes, which, while still a work-in-progress, have eaten up plenty of my time in spite of the odd bug here or there. The fact that there are still modes in development points to the bright future ahead for BeamNG.Drive. Even in its old age, it is still in its own lane.
BeamNG.Drive is available on Epic Games Store.