Mechanics & Customisation
Book your car into a garage for repairs, servicing or a full custom build — and find out what it's like working the other side of the ramp.
Booking your car in
Every mechanic shop has a customer bay out front. Drive your car onto it and press E to open the builder — a right-hand panel with a free-look camera that orbits your own car so you can see exactly what you’re changing.
If a mechanic is on duty, you get the full builder: every performance, cosmetic and servicing option the car’s model supports. If nobody’s clocked in, the builder scales itself down to servicing only, charged as a flat instant fee with no waiting around and no custody — handy for a quick oil change between jobs, but you won’t get bodywork or a respray without staff on site.
You need to actually own the car (it has to be properly registered to you) and have it parked on the bay — a borrowed or stolen car won’t open the builder.
The builder, tab by tab
The builder is organised into tabs so you’re not scrolling through one huge list:
| Tab | What’s in it |
|---|---|
| Performance | Engine, brakes, transmission, suspension, armour, turbo |
| Wheels | Every wheel style the model supports |
| Bodywork | Bumpers, skirts, spoilers, bonnets and other body mods |
| Interior | Interior trim and dashboard options |
| Extras | Model-specific extras (roof racks, livery slots, etc.) |
| Paint | Primary, secondary and pearlescent colours, custom RGB on primary/secondary, and window tint |
| Servicing | Oil, coolant, brake fluid, air filter, tyres, a general repair, and the MOT test line |
Anything already fitted that isn’t factory-standard can be reverted back to stock too — that’s a labour-only line, since there’s no part to buy back.
Submitting the order charges you a deposit up front covering the cost of the parts themselves — labour is settled later, once the work’s actually done. As soon as that deposit clears, the car goes into the shop’s custody: you can’t drive it away until it’s finished, and only an on-duty mechanic from that shop can move it off the bay. If the shop’s out of stock on something you’ve picked, the whole order’s rejected before a penny leaves your account.
Budget the parts deposit before you commit — a big performance rebuild can be pricier up front than you’d expect, on top of the labour bill still to come.
Getting your car back
Once every part on your order is fitted, the job moves to ready-to-bill and the mechanic bills it from their end. That bill lands on your phone the same way any other bill does — see Bills, Fines & Debt for how paying (or not paying) those works.
Pay it, and the car’s released — either handed straight back to you on the spot, or left with the business in its own garage for you to collect later through the normal garage menu, depending on what the mechanic chose when they closed the job out. Either way, you keep the finished car — every mod, repair and respray persists properly through storage and re-spawning, the same as anywhere else.
A mechanic can also cancel an order outright, which refunds your parts deposit and releases the car back to you unfinished — you just won’t get anything they’d already started fitting.
MOT tests
Any work order can include an MOT Test line, and it’s free to add on the order itself — it’s only offered when a mechanic’s on duty, since it needs someone to run it. Once everything else on your order is finished, the test itself runs automatically: the mechanic’s inspection takes a few seconds, then you get a pass or fail with any advisories noted.
A pass issues you a proper certificate item you can view like a document, and resets your MOT clock for a good long stretch of driving. A fail still costs you the inspection fee, but nothing else changes about your compliance — you (or the mechanic) can pay for whatever repairs are needed and retest right away, no cooldown. The certificate item, exact fee and mileage countdown, plus what happens if you let your MOT lapse entirely, are covered properly in Vehicle Documents & the DVLA.
Working as a mechanic
Mechanic shops are staff-provisioned businesses — you can’t set one up yourself, but you can be hired on as staff or made the business owner. Once you’re clocked on through the tablet’s Mechanic app and hold the right permission for the till, the workflow runs like this:
- Park a customer’s held car on a work bay and target it to lock the order in — that claims the job.
- Pull the ordered parts out of the shop’s stock room into your own inventory.
- Target each individual part on the actual car — the bumper, the wheel, the engine bay, whatever’s on the order — to fit it. Each one plays a proper fitting animation (spanner work under the bonnet, kneeling wheel changes, a spray pass for paint, and so on) and a HUD tracker shows you what’s still outstanding.
- Once every line’s fitted, the order auto-advances to ready-to-bill, and you close it out from the tablet.
Trying to fit a part you haven’t pulled from stock yet is blocked with a prompt rather than losing your progress — grab it and try again. Stock itself is kept topped up through the business’s wholesale ordering, either buying parts straight into your inventory or having a delivery truck sent to the shop for staff to unload by hand or forklift.
Billing a customer pays you a commission on top of crediting the shop’s business account, so a busy shop is a genuine earner on top of any base wage. Running the shop day-to-day — staff ranks, stock, the till — works the same as any other business; see Owning a Business for that side of it. Inspecting mechanics also pick up skill experience for every MOT they run, feeding into the wider skills system.
An order abandoned mid-job by a mechanic who disconnects will sit on that bay until the server restarts — worth flagging to a manager rather than leaving it.