Chop Shops

Strip a car for parts on the street or drag it into a bay for a full teardown, then turn the salvage into cash through the fence.

Chopping cars is the back end of the vehicle-crime economy. Any ambient or NPC car left standing on the street is fair game to strip for parts — no player’s own car can ever be touched this way, ownership records rule that out completely. What you pull off gets sold to a fence for quick cash, worked into an order board contract for a much bigger payday, or held onto for trading with other players.

There are two ways to do it: a quiet field strip wherever you find a car, or a full bay teardown at the dedicated chop shop. They share the same tools and skill, but differ a lot in speed, risk, and how much of the car you can actually take.

Field Stripping On the Street

Find a stopped NPC or ambient vehicle anywhere outside the chop shop, aim at it, and — with a field-strip kit in your inventory — start a strip session. This opens the car up just for you; nobody else can pull parts from your session. Bone-scoped options appear on the car for the parts you can reach: wheels, seats, the stereo, the catalytic converter. Each one needs a specific hand tool and puts you through a short skillcheck with a timed progress bar and an animation, and a success physically rips that part off the car in front of anyone watching.

Field mode is deliberately limited. You can’t touch drivetrain parts or body panels this way — that needs a bay — and what you do pull pays less than the same part would at a bay strip. The trade-off is convenience: you can do it anywhere a car happens to be sitting.

The kit only burns on your first successful part, so a session where the skillcheck beats you every time costs nothing. Walking away, going idle, or the car despawning ends the session quietly after a while. A short cooldown stops you opening another field vehicle straight after your kit is spent.

The longer you keep working the same car in the open, the worse your odds get of a patrol rolling up — see Getting Caught below.

Bay Teardowns: The Full Strip

Drive an eligible car into the marked strip zone at the chop shop and start a session the same way. Bay sessions are shared — anyone can walk up and start pulling parts alongside you, and each part goes to whoever personally pulls it, so a full teardown is a genuinely good group activity.

This is where the real money is. Bay stripping is faster, the skillcheck is eased, and every part pays full value — including the drivetrain (engine, gearbox, brakes, suspension, and turbo or armour if the car’s been modified) and the body panels field mode can’t reach. A shared checklist tracks the whole car’s work order on your task display as it’s worked through, showing salvage value pulled against the shell’s total worth.

Once everything reachable is gone — or whenever the group decides to call it — “Crush Shell” scraps the wreck for a payout and ends the session. The person who opened the session is the one whose cooldown starts and who can call the crush.

Leaving the strip zone with the vehicle still attached to a session ends it early, so get it fully inside the marked area before you start.

Selling to the Fence

The fence NPC stationed by the bay buys everything chop-related: parts, chop-only items like doors and panels, and scrap metal, all listed with quantity and a per-item price. Tick what you want gone and it pays out in cash immediately.

Selling to the fence is the fast, lazy option — the rate is well under what a part is genuinely worth. Working parts into a trade with another player, or holding them for the order board, gets you more. Cash from the fence and from contracts comes in as crime-sourced money rather than clean spendable cash, so treat it the way you’d treat any other dirty earnings — see Crime & Consequences for how laundering fits in.

Parts you’ve earmarked for a claimed order board contract are held back from the sale sheet automatically — you can’t cash those out until the contract’s finished or you drop it.

The Order Board

Also at the fence, the order board lists a handful of rotating contracts, each naming a specific vehicle model and a short shopping list of parts. Claim one — you can only hold one at a time — then go find and strip a matching car by whatever legal means, field or bay, and bring the exact parts back to auto-settle. The premium pays out first, well above what those parts would fetch individually, then the parts themselves are consumed.

It has to be parts you genuinely stripped off a real matching car; parts from a wholesale-bought or otherwise laundered source won’t satisfy a contract — the fence can tell where parts really came from. Unclaimed contracts reroll on the board after a while, and a contract you claim but never finish gets released back automatically, so don’t sit on one you’re not going to complete.

Gear You’ll Need

Kits and tools are both sold through the general tool trade — see Shops & Services. Taking the Chop Shop skill track sweetens the deal at higher levels with an easier skillcheck, and perks can add a chance at bonus parts, cut how much heat you generate, and boost contract payouts — never the raw price a part fetches.

Getting Caught

Both tiers can bring police down on you. A bay session rolls one chance of an alert when it ends, win or abandon. A field strip is riskier the longer you run it — the odds of tripping an alert climb with every part you take off the same car, so a long solo field session on one vehicle is the most exposed way to chop.

An alert pings on-duty officers with a location and logs an incident on their side, so there’s a real chance of a response any time you chop — especially deep into a field session. There’s no forensic trail beyond that dispatch and the logged incident; no plates or prints get pulled from a stripped car specifically. For the wider picture on heat, evidence, and cleaning up crime money, see Crime & Consequences and Evading the Law.

If you’re sourcing cars to chop rather than working with what you find parked, Car Boosting covers lifting a vehicle in the first place — chopping is one of the choices you’re left with once you’ve got one.