Garages, Storage & Impound
Where your cars live when you're not driving them — storing, retrieving, paying the bill, and getting them back if things go wrong.
Every vehicle you own or hold keys to has to live somewhere. Garages are how you take a car off the street and out of harm’s way, and how you get it back again — plus what happens if you forget to pay for the privilege.
Storing and retrieving a vehicle
To store a car, drive it into a garage’s marked store zone while parked, or walk up to the garage’s attendant and interact with them. You can also open the Vehicle radial wheel and pick “Store current vehicle” from anywhere nearby. Either way, the car despawns and a stored record is created for it — a daily storage bill is filed straight into your Bills app the moment it’s stored (see Bills, Fines & Debt). Plenty of garages — most street-level ones, plus job and impound lots — are free to use; others, especially owned or business-linked garages, charge a daily rate.
You can only store a vehicle you’re currently driving and that’s properly registered to you or that you hold keys for (see Ownership, Keys & Security). Storing fails if the garage is full, if that garage doesn’t accept your vehicle’s class, or if a property garage’s access check turns you away.
To get a car back, approach the garage’s attendant or interaction point, open the status panel, pick your vehicle from the list, and confirm. The game finds a free spawn point and drops the car there. Retrieval is blocked if:
- your outstanding storage debt on that vehicle has built up past a threshold — pay it down in the Bills app first
- the vehicle is currently impounded or seized
- every spawn point at that garage is occupied
- the vehicle isn’t actually stored there
Selecting a vehicle in the garage panel also shows its full condition — engine, body and fuel tank health, fluid levels, tyre and door damage, odometer, paint, and lock state — before you commit to pulling it.
The Garages app
Both your phone and tablet carry a Garages app listing every vehicle you own or hold keys for, wherever it currently sits — stored, out on the road, impounded, or needing to be claimed. Each entry shows its garage, condition, and any storage debt owed, and tapping Navigate drops a GPS waypoint straight to it. The app is read-only: you can’t store, retrieve, or pay a bill from your phone — those stay physical actions at the garage itself, or in the Bills app. See Phones, Tablets & Radios for the rest of what your devices can do.
Storage bills and non-payment impound
Storage isn’t a one-off charge — it’s a running daily bill for as long as the car sits there, and it behaves like any other bill (see Bills, Fines & Debt). Let it run too far into debt and retrieval locks out until you settle up.
Ignore a storage bill for long enough and it escalates: the vehicle is relocated to a non-payment impound lot, and a one-off release fee is filed on top of whatever storage debt was already outstanding. At the impound lot you use “Recover” rather than “Retrieve” — the flow’s the same, but it won’t hand the car back until the release fee and all debt are cleared. The car itself is never lost for good; the release bill just keeps reappearing while it sits there waiting for you.
If your car ever despawns unexpectedly — a server clean-up, disconnecting without storing it properly — it’s automatically swept into a public impound lot instead of vanishing, so there’s always a way to get it back. Recovery there is free unless that particular lot charges its own daily fee.
Recovering a police-impounded vehicle
This is a separate path from non-payment impound. If police impound your vehicle in-world, it goes to the police impound lot, and getting it back means paying the standard release fee there rather than going through the Garages system. Ordinary storage and retrieval carry no police, fine, or dispatch exposure at all — non-payment impound is purely economic.
Buying and running your own garage
Over a dozen locations across the city are purchasable garages, each with an attendant you can speak to for a buy preview and confirm at the listed price. Buying one for the first time sets you up with a backing business account, and from there you choose the daily fee non-employees pay to store with you, and can list the garage for resale later — either directly, or through the Estate Office (see Property & Housing) as a money-free alternative sale channel.
Once you own one, a dedicated “garage” tab appears on your business dashboard (see Owning a Business) showing capacity, how many cars are currently stored, demand for parking nearby, your current fee, recent and lifetime passive income, your business balance, and what the cheapest competing garage nearby is charging. You can adjust your fee, toggle the listing, and move money between the business account and your personal bank from the same screen.
Every priced garage — yours or a business’s — earns a trickle of passive income from virtual “NPC” customers parking there, based on how your fee compares to nearby competitors. Price yourself out of the market, or sit next to a free public garage, and that income dries up.
Some businesses — Benny’s Motorworks is one — run their own garage for staff parking and a small company fleet, and can optionally take public storage from non-employees for a flat prepay fee, a share of which goes straight to the garage’s owner.
Your starter vehicle
When you create a new character, you’re handed a modest starter car automatically, filed at a public garage near Legion Square from the moment you spawn in. It’s a one-time gift per character and runs on exactly the same storage-fee rules as anything else you store — so don’t forget it’s sitting there racking up a bill if the garage it’s in isn’t free.