Hey Dude Where's My Car? (Single player story mode)

[Shaoling]

Are your cars vanishing from your garages and safehouses? Wondering where they are? Where all that money you just spent on modding your dream ride has gone? Maybe this will help you out.

After some testing I have discovered the following.

If you take a saved car out of your garage in single player (Stolen or purchased/modded or not) and DON'T return it to the garage/safehouse garage before:

1) You exit the game
2) You die
3) It gets destroyed
4) You start any mission that requires a vehicle change

It will no longer appear in your garage. It will be gone for good. All that money you spent on modding will have been wasted. You'll need to repurchase/steal the car again and re mod it.

This has been my experience after some testing. Are you guys having similar things happen to your saved cars?

This is either a bug or a a very poor design decision as it defeats the point of actually using garages and modding your cars. Especially since a large majority of missions will require you to get out of your car into another car, helicopter etc which result in your saved car not being returned to the garage and thus lost.

I see there are many posts about people losing their cars, its probably a good idea to put all the posts about this issue in the same thread and sticky it if there is any hope of Rockstar fixing it.

Some are saying this issue has been in the console version since release and has never been fixed.


EDIT:

http://gta.wikia.com/LSPD_Auto_Impound

"Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online
In GTA V, Impound Garages return. If the player abandons (but doesn't destroy) a vehicle that they have modified at a Los Santos Customs garage or ordered online, they will be able to retrieve the vehicle from the Impound Lot for a fee of $250. Reasons for losing a vehicle might include triggering a mission that requires the use of another vehicle, the vehicle being commandeered by police (which can happen if it's parked outside a police station), wandering too far away from a vehicle and causing it to despawn, or loading an autosave that places the character back at a safehouse instead of in the vehicle."

[kirisute]

yep; thats exactly how it was on PS3 and consoles...and in fact exaftly how it is suppoosed to be!
why the hell would a car suddenly respawn in your garage from the other side of the city?

the ONLY cars that do that are your character cars! :
the Buffalo, the Jeep and the micheals whatever it is saloon!
you can mod these and they will always respawn fully modded even if they get destroyed!

in GARAGES you BUY: there are SPECIAL cars you can use, thees will also respawn if you take them out and nuke them etc

custom cars you store manually in garages will not do so, have never done so and chance are will never do so!

R* did fix a bug where cars were being lost from garages, but they never "fixed" the issue you are referring too...because that was a design choice! not an issue! :)

it was ALWAYS the case that you thrash a stolen car for missions etc and when your cruising or just hanging around then take your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wheels out!!

i store my racing car, a cruising car and thats about it.
trust me; at end of the game you will want to be getting rid of cars youve aquired and thought were cool and money wont be an issue to mod them up anyway!

[Shaoling]

Thanks for the response :)

I dont see having to remod cars over and over because they continually disappear as a fun game mechanic, Or having to return the car back to the garage before any of the above listed reasons. especially missions.

What if I wanted to drive to a mission in my new modded car because that's the one I like or that's the one I was currently in when I decided to head to the mission?

Nope I need to head back to the garage on the other side of the city to save it first, then steal some random car and then go to the mission, otherwise I'll just to lose it after the mission and then have to remod and resave it in the garage, and then have it happen again after the next mission.

I may as well not bother.

They could at least add the ability to call insurance and pay a fee to get it back like they do in online mode. Fine, make it expensive, since you'll have so much money it doesn't matter. Definitely better than having to go through the entire process modding/saving cars process over and over. That will get real tedious.

Also it discourages you to mess around/experiment while you're in your fully modded cool cars

Bad design decision imo.

[❤ FL☰☰K⬤]

Baby's First GTA: The Thread

[kirisute]

maybe they will change it on PC:
on initiasl release i believe the limtaion was simply the amount of data required to keep laoding one of the huge permutaions of modded cars in and out of the system every time you left it somewhere.
the game does respawn which "normal" car you arrive at the mission with when you return to mission start/end point.
it will also do so with the character cars: for exemplar my modded Buffalo was sitting pretty waiting for me at the end of a recent mission to recover a car stuck on some train tracks!

with more powerful pc systems then maybe they will patch it in to do so with modded cars...but i doubt that is their priority right now! :)

[ernest p. worrell]

I haven't gotten to the point where I've wanted to start collecting cars yet so I haven't gotten the opportunity to test it. I was under the impression from the game's in-game tooltips that the impound feature they have means cars that are abandoned will be picked up and you could get them back. I don't expect that it should just be magically returned to my garage, but I figured up to maybe 2-3 cars could be impounded and you could pay to get them out. That way if you have to abandon a heavily modded car for a mission you could grab it back. If it doesn't work this way, that's kind of disappointing, and I'd like to know -- what, then, is this impound thing for at all?

[kirisute]

as above:
impounded cars are recovered that way; but only if you get the "impounded" message.
Mission activations dont always impound the car you arrive in.

[Shaoling]

Thanks for the info about the impound. Found this as well

http://gta.wikia.com/LSPD_Auto_Impound

"Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online
In GTA V, Impound Garages return. If the player abandons (but doesn't destroy) a vehicle that they have modified at a Los Santos Customs garage or ordered online, they will be able to retrieve the vehicle from the Impound Lot for a fee of $250. Reasons for losing a vehicle might include triggering a mission that requires the use of another vehicle, the vehicle being commandeered by police (which can happen if it's parked outside a police station), wandering too far away from a vehicle and causing it to despawn, or loading an autosave that places the character back at a safehouse instead of in the vehicle."

How many cars can be impounded? I see there are 4 impound garages.

[Visozki]

Originally posted by kirisute:

yep; thats exactly how it was on PS3 and consoles...and in fact exaftly how it is suppoosed to be!
why the hell would a car suddenly respawn in your garage from the other side of the city?

the ONLY cars that do that are your character cars! :
the Buffalo, the Jeep and the micheals whatever it is saloon!
you can mod these and they will always respawn fully modded even if they get destroyed!

in GARAGES you BUY: there are SPECIAL cars you can use, thees will also respawn if you take them out and nuke them etc

custom cars you store manually in garages will not do so, have never done so and chance are will never do so!

R* did fix a bug where cars were being lost from garages, but they never "fixed" the issue you are referring too...because that was a design choice! not an issue! :)

it was ALWAYS the case that you thrash a stolen car for missions etc and when your cruising or just hanging around then take your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wheels out!!

i store my racing car, a cruising car and thats about it.
trust me; at end of the game you will want to be getting rid of cars youve aquired and thought were cool and money wont be an issue to mod them up anyway!

So much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in one comment- "How the hell whould a car suddenly respawn ?" Cuz this game ment to be realistic right ? a player get shot 70 times and still a live its realistic ? player smashin in 120 into a car and still alive is realistice right ?! cut the crap - if im spending 20k on moding a dam car i want to be able at least to save it in my garage and having it with me at any moment.

[Ya boi]

The impound was meant to be the solution for this, but the impound is just a mess. The impound will store your last TWO cars and that means ANY(with the exception of personal cars) so for example, you buy a hotknife and modify it, you take it on a mission, the mission forces you to switch to a different car and you have to leave your hotknife behind, the car will then appear in the impound, BUT if you get in ANY two cars that aren't personal vehicles or mission vehicles, they will replace the impound vehicles and sometimes for no reason at all, the car WON'T get impounded and will just sit where you left it, I left a car smashed into a wall outside trevors place and went back about 15 missions later and it was still there.The singleplayer needs insurance and the mechanic like in GTA Online.

[Ghoti]

Originally posted by Visozki:

Originally posted by kirisute:

yep; thats exactly how it was on PS3 and consoles...and in fact exaftly how it is suppoosed to be!
why the hell would a car suddenly respawn in your garage from the other side of the city?

the ONLY cars that do that are your character cars! :
the Buffalo, the Jeep and the micheals whatever it is saloon!
you can mod these and they will always respawn fully modded even if they get destroyed!

in GARAGES you BUY: there are SPECIAL cars you can use, thees will also respawn if you take them out and nuke them etc

custom cars you store manually in garages will not do so, have never done so and chance are will never do so!

R* did fix a bug where cars were being lost from garages, but they never "fixed" the issue you are referring too...because that was a design choice! not an issue! :)

it was ALWAYS the case that you thrash a stolen car for missions etc and when your cruising or just hanging around then take your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wheels out!!

i store my racing car, a cruising car and thats about it.
trust me; at end of the game you will want to be getting rid of cars youve aquired and thought were cool and money wont be an issue to mod them up anyway!

So much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in one comment- "How the hell whould a car suddenly respawn ?" Cuz this game ment to be realistic right ? a player get shot 70 times and still a live its realistic ? player smashin in 120 into a car and still alive is realistice right ?! cut the crap - if im spending 20k on moding a dam car i want to be able at least to save it in my garage and having it with me at any moment.

well no game can be 100% realistic, unless you want to get killed in 1 hit, no respawn, destroyed vhicle after every accident etc.

[kirisute]

not my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mate! its how the game has been since day 1 on the PS3!
deal with it or dont! not my fault!

[Visozki]

Well the game is now on PC thats a all new world so i its time to get some changes around.

[Shaoling]

So whats the point of the 2 garages with the green lights above them at the impound area? The gates open to allow cars in, but the cars arent saved or anything.

[kirisute]

they are just impound garages...if your car is impounded then it comes out of there when you buy it back!
you cannot save or store cars in them!
only your house garage or a property garage you buy/own as a character

[Machin Shin]

R* did fix a bug where cars were being lost from garages, but they never "fixed" the issue you are referring too...because that was a design choice! not an issue! :)

this bug still exists