Fuel & Maintenance

Keep your tank full and your engine healthy — from petrol station pumps to jerry cans, siphoning, and running your own fuel station.

Every vehicle in the city runs on real fuel and real wear. Ignore either for long enough and you’ll be stranded with an engine that won’t turn over — so it’s worth knowing how filling up and servicing actually work.

Filling Up at a Pump

Pull up to any fuel station and 3rd-eye the pump to take the nozzle — it locks the pump to you and puts a physical hose in your hands. Walk it over to your fuel cap and plug in, then 3rd-eye the nozzle itself to start fuelling. You’re held in place while the tank fills at a steady rate; it stops automatically once you’re full, once the station itself runs dry, or once you can’t afford any more. Nothing is charged during the fill — 3rd-eye the pump again afterwards to bring up a Cash or Card payment screen for whatever you owe. Electric vehicles use the same take-nozzle-plug-in-pay flow at compatible pumps.

Keep an eye on your fuel gauge on the HUD — running dry away from a station means walking, calling a mate, or reaching for a jerry can.

Jerry Cans

A jerry can is your safety net for running out in the field. Buy one outright, already full, for cash at any pump — or fill or top up an empty or partial one through the same kind of timed pump session used for a vehicle. Once it’s in your inventory you can use it directly on any vehicle to add fuel wherever you are, no station required. It’s worth always keeping one in the boot if you drive long distances or work a job that takes you off the beaten track.

Siphoning Fuel

If you’ve got a siphon hose on you, 3rd-eye a nearby vehicle — your own, someone else’s, or an ambient car on the street — and choose “Siphon” to draw fuel out of its tank. You can send it straight into your own vehicle’s tank or into a jerry can that’s got room. Each siphon session only pulls a capped amount before you have to start again, so don’t expect to empty a car in one go. It works on registered player vehicles and ordinary NPC traffic alike, which makes it a handy trick when you’re stuck without a station nearby — just know that draining someone else’s parked car without asking is exactly the kind of thing that gets noticed.

Wear, Fluids & Breakdown Risk

Every vehicle tracks its own condition behind the scenes. Oil, coolant, brake fluid and the air filter all wear down as you rack up mileage, and that wear speeds up the longer you go without a service. Tyres wear too. Neglected fluids combine with any collision damage you’ve taken to drag down overall engine health — and once that health drops far enough, the engine simply won’t start, the same as if any single fluid runs completely dry. Before it gets that bad you’ll notice the car losing power and responsiveness, which is your cue to get it looked at.

Getting Serviced

A service tops your fluids back up, resets tyre wear, and resets the mileage counter your car uses to judge whether it’s “due.” You can do this yourself (or have a co-owner or key-holder do it) directly, or take it to a mechanic shop and have an on-duty, billing-permitted employee handle it as part of a proper work order alongside any repairs or mods you want done. The full booking-in, parts-and-labour, and billing flow for mechanic shops — including MOT testing — is covered in Mechanics & Customisation. Servicing regularly is a lot cheaper than letting a car limp along until it needs major repair work.

Owning a Fuel Station

Fuel stations themselves are businesses you can buy through the Estate Office under the “Fuel” category, the same as any other commercial property covered in Property & Housing. Once you own one — or manage one for someone else — the tablet’s Gas Stations app is your entire back office: a tabbed dashboard covering current stock, pricing, wholesale orders, auto-restock, profit and loss, reputation, and analytics.

From there you set your own per-litre prices within sensible limits, and place wholesale supply orders that escrow the cash up front — a tanker delivers automatically after a wait, and you can cancel a still-pending order for a full refund if you change your mind. An optional auto-restock upgrade keeps stock topped up without you having to place manual orders at all. Your profit is simply the gap between what you charge customers at the pump and what you paid wholesale, so pricing sensibly against nearby stations matters. Note that station ownership is capped to one per character, and the state-run stations you’ll see around the city aren’t for sale — they run off unlimited fuel at fixed government prices with no dashboard behind them.

For the wider ins and outs of running any business — staff, permissions, payroll and the rest — see Owning a Business.

Locking your vehicle, key-holders, VIN scratching and seatbelts are all covered over in Ownership, Keys & Security rather than here. If your car’s been impounded and you need to pay to get it back, that’s in Garages, Storage & Impound. And MOT certificates, tax and insurance — the paperwork side of keeping a car road-legal — live in Vehicle Documents & the DVLA.