BeamNG.drive PS5 Launch Guide (Oct 19): Price, Split-Screen, Wheel Support and What v0.40 Adds

BeamNG.drive has been the go-to "what happens if I hit this wall at 140 mph" game on PC for more than a decade, and as of this morning it is finally on a console. The PS5 version went live at 8:00 AM Central on Monday, October 19, and it did not launch on an old build. BeamNG shipped it on the same day as Version 0.40, one of the biggest PC updates the sim has had in a while, so console players and Steam veterans are starting the week on identical footing.

If you are on PS5 and wondering whether $24.99 is worth it without mods, or you are on PC and want to know what 0.40 actually changes beyond "split-screen is here," this guide covers both. Everything below comes from BeamNG's own v0.40 release post, its PS5 date announcement, the official press release, and the PlayStation Store listing.

BeamNG.drive PS5 Release Time, Price and Editions

The PlayStation Store unlocked the game at 13:00 UTC worldwide, which works out to 6:00 AM Pacific, 8:00 AM Central and 9:00 AM Eastern. There was no midnight rollout and no preload. Until launch the store page only had a Wishlist button, so everyone downloaded at the same time this morning.

A few quick facts worth knowing before you buy:

• Price: $24.99 on the US PlayStation Store and £17.99 in the UK. That is the same as the PC price on Steam. BeamNG confirmed the US figure on X on October 16 and said final regional prices would appear at launch.
• Editions: one standard digital edition. No deluxe tier, no bundle, no pre-order bonus.
• Physical copy: none announced. This is a PlayStation Store release.
• Early Access: the PS5 version is sold as Early Access, just like the PC build. The store listing says the game "is still actively being developed" and that buyers will help shape it through feedback.
• Players: the listing shows 1 to 4 players with offline play enabled, plus DualSense vibration and trigger effects and 17 listed accessibility features.

BeamNG had flagged the two big caveats back in its September 24 announcement: mods and VR are not supported on PS5 at launch. The press release goes further and says mod authoring tools are "not currently planned for PlayStation." The studio says it is aiming for feature parity where possible in the long term, but it would not commit to timing or scope.

What You Actually Get on PS5

Even without mods, the console version is not a cut-down demo. You get the full current vehicle roster, 12 open-world maps, Career Mode, scenarios, time trials and Freeroam with the environment controls that let you mess with gravity and wind. Career is the structured option: you start broke in a beater and work toward a garage full of nicer cars, or a lot full of rust buckets if that is more your style.

On the visual side, BeamNG says the base PS5 runs AMD FSR 3 and the PS5 Pro uses PSSR, Sony's own upscaler, and the store page carries the PS5 Pro Enhanced label. That matters more than it sounds. BeamNG is a CPU-heavy game because every vehicle is a full soft-body simulation, and upscaling buys headroom for more cars on screen before things chug.

The update also adds Low Performance notifications. In Freeroam and Split-Screen the game now warns you if your framerate stays below 25 FPS, the warning shows up in the Pause Menu, and trying to spawn another vehicle while the system is struggling triggers a heads-up. On console, where you cannot just lower a dozen settings, that warning is your cue to delete a few AI cars before your derby turns into a slideshow.

Racing Wheel Support on PS5

This is the part sim fans were nervous about, and BeamNG came through better than expected. Eleven wheels are supported with force feedback on day one:

BeamNG says other PS5 wheels have not been tested yet and "may or may not work correctly," with support improving over time. If you own something outside that list, do not assume it is broken, but do not buy the game specifically for wheel play until someone with the same hardware confirms it.

Pad players get a fix too. Throttle and brake trigger linearity has been rebalanced because, in BeamNG's words, the old curve "was heavily geared towards extremely gentle driving." Expect the triggers to feel less sluggish than they did on older PC builds.

Split-Screen: The Headline Feature of v0.40

Local split-screen has been one of the most requested features in the community for years, and it landed on both platforms today. You can start it two ways: from the Main Menu by adding participants and picking Freeroam or a mode, or from inside a level by choosing Split-Screen in the Pause Menu.

The player cap is where the platforms differ. PS5 supports up to 4 players. PC technically supports up to 64, which BeamNG openly admits you will need a lot of friends and a very serious machine to try. Realistically, two to four players is where it will feel good on most hardware.

In Freeroam, everyone starts together at a random location with a random vehicle that suits the map. Each player gets an automatic vehicle color and their own gearbox, clutch assist and throttle assist settings, so a wheel user in manual and a newcomer on a pad in automatic can share a session without anyone suffering. Thanks to the new occupants system, you can also hop out of your car and climb into a friend's. They drive, you mess with the interior.

If you want structure, there are seven split-screen modes, each with its own settings for layouts, lap and score goals and penalty rules:

For mixed groups, Derby and Pursuit are the easiest sells for mixed groups because nobody needs to know a track. Race is the deepest because it pulls from more than 85 existing layouts. Soccer is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds when the "players" are a pickup, a box truck and a hatchback.

Bob Has Arrived: Occupants and the New Walking Mode

The second big system in 0.40 is physical occupants, and BeamNG leaned into it with a character the studio calls Bob. Walking mode now uses a new character mesh whose head follows the camera, and you can finally see yourself in mirrors.

The important part is the physics. Occupants now sit inside vehicles and are simulated like everything else:

• Each occupant adds 89 kg to the seat and the vehicle.
• Seated occupants are fully JBeamed, so they wobble and react to how you drive.
• Character colors carry over into the car, which makes players easy to tell apart in split-screen.
• The old driver camera is now a generic occupant camera usable from any seat, with wider rotation limits so you can reach every interactive trigger in a cockpit.

There is a real gameplay side effect here. Because a whole person now adds weight, rally cars have a more realistic weight distribution, and anything light and tail-happy may feel slightly different than it did in earlier builds. If you had a favorite drift or rally tune saved, give it a test lap before you trust it.

A couple of camera quality-of-life changes come with it. Free cam now kicks in automatically when you remove the last vehicle, and spawning a vehicle while you are on foot puts you straight back into the vehicle camera.

New Vehicle: Cherrier Percheron Cab-Over Semi

The new vehicle is the Cherrier Percheron, a full-size European cab-over semi from the early 2000s. BeamNG calls it the most interactable vehicle it has ever made, and the feature list backs that up: interior lighting, door lights, a night light, a working sunroof with sunshade, openable storage lockers, an openable front fascia panel, a left-side spoiler panel, and foldable side skirts so you can reach the fuel tanks.

The modularity is the real draw for truck fans:

• Body styles: fifth-wheel tractor, or a rigid truck with upfits including a flatbed or insulated box platform, concrete mixers in several sizes, and an interactable fuel or foodstuffs tanker with custom liveries.
• Cabs: S (low-roof day cab), L and XL (both with a sleeper bunk). Each cab sits on its own coil or air springs at all four corners and can be unlatched and tilted electrohydraulically from a control panel on the rear right corner.
• Frames: five lengths from 6.17 m to 9.80 m, air or leaf suspension, and 2 to 5 axles. That adds up to more than 50 chassis setups, from road-going 4x2 tractors to 8x8 all-terrain trucks.
• Powertrain: a 12.8L turbocharged inline-six from 310 to 500 hp, with a 12-speed manual or a 7-speed automatic.
• Extras: its own horn and reverse beeper.

To pair with it, BeamNG added FPU European truck trailers in semi and rigid versions, with flatbed and insulated box platforms, two sizes of fuel and foodstuffs tankers, and various axle layouts. There is also a new Muhten Tag milk brand with tanker liveries, and BeamNG fixed some trailer parts that had wildly inflated prices.

The Percheron also reshapes Career content. Every Italian trucking mission now uses a Percheron configuration, and Abseiling Fuel and Trailer Ferry have been turned into Freeform Delivery missions built around it. There is a brand-new Freeform Delivery mission called TastiCola Driver as well.

And yes, there is a new prop worth mentioning: the Tyrannos Dinosaur Mascot, an 86 kg fiberglass statue that normally lives near Tyrannos fuel stations. It has an optional 560 kg base you can dig into the ground, it is a load option for a long list of pickups and truck beds, and BeamNG notes that it floats. Plan your next river crossing accordingly.

Graphics: Upscalers, Reflections and a New Settings Menu

PC players get the biggest graphics menu change in years. New anti-aliasing and upscaling options include SMAA T2x, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR 3 and FSR 4, and Intel XeSS, plus a sharpness slider and multi-monitor upscaling. Photo Mode now respects upscalers and temporal accumulation when they are active.

Lighting got a serious pass too:

• Stochastic screen-space reflections for vehicles, glass and water.
• Specular Occlusion, which darkens reflections in cavities and sheltered rough surfaces.
• Light-source radius support for softer shadows from point lights, spotlights and headlights.
• Faster, more stable cluster shading, SSAO and screen-space shadows, which should cut shimmering, flickering and ghosting.
• A fix for missing ambient lighting at night.

Under the hood, bindless rendering on Vulkan and Direct3D 12 lowers CPU overhead in busy scenes. BeamNG also retired several old post effects, including chromatic lens, flash, turbulence, the old motion blur, edge AA and the old SSAO shaders. If you used any of those in a preset, expect it to look different.

The Graphics and Display menu itself is reorganized into Image, Detail, Brightness and HDR, Framerate and Sync, Multi-monitor, Lighting and Reflections, with a new Resolution Scaling slider and a Screen Space Reflections quality option. VR players on PC can now run Direct3D 12 through OpenXR, and head-bobbing turns off automatically in VR.

Rally, Maps and the New First Drive Tutorial

Rally fans get dynamic in-world 3D countdown clocks that modders can build in any style, along with a choice between a fully realistic clock, a zoomed view or a plain UI version. The default pacenotes switch from Pro to Enthusiast. BeamNG explains that Pro notes come from freeform recordings without the metadata needed for visual pacenotes, which made them a poor fit for non-English players and for quiet play like streaming. Enthusiast notes support visual pacenotes and usually work on mod stages too.

On the map side, West Coast, USA got a large cleanup covering holes, sidewalk heights, building collisions, textures and a new backdrop, while Italy gained longer building LOD distances and fixes to roads, trees, line markings and the hospital entrance. Foliage soft collision was optimized on almost every foliage object, which should help framerates in dense areas like Jungle Rock Island and Italy.

New players, which today means a lot of PS5 owners, get First Drive, a new onboarding tutorial that replaces the old Freeroam Tutorial. It walks through vehicle recovery, driving assists, spawning and customizing vehicles, interactions, the radial menu, map view, challenges and the environment. You can launch it from the onboarding popup, the Quick-Start Menu or the Gameplay Selector, and the related achievements and trophies moved over with it. If you are brand new, do First Drive before Career. Recovery alone will save you a lot of frustration.

PS5 vs PC: Which Version Should You Play?

Here is how the two versions line up as of today:

The honest answer: if you already play on PC, nothing about the PS5 version should pull you over, because mods are a huge part of what keeps BeamNG fresh. If you do not have a gaming PC, or you mainly want a couch game for friends, the PS5 version at $24.99 is a strong deal. Split-screen, wheel support and the full official content set give you a lot to chew on, and BeamNG ships big updates to both platforms together.

For PC players, 0.40 also brings native Windows on Arm binaries, with BeamNG noting the gains are mostly in CPU-bound scenarios and that the native build does not include the Steam SDK or overlay. Other optimizations speed up mod mounting, Vehicle Selector loading and replay recording, optimize AI and traffic, fix a bug that caused big framerate drops and crashes, and improve DirectX 12 memory use and frame pacing.

Tips for Your First Night on PS5

A few practical things that will make the first session smoother:

• Run First Drive once. It teaches recovery and the radial menu, which are the two things new players struggle with most.
• Start split-screen in Freeroam. It is the easiest way to learn which vehicles your group likes before jumping into competitive modes.
• Watch the performance warning. If the sub-25 FPS notice pops up, remove AI traffic or extra cars first. That is where the CPU cost lives.
• Pick the right assists per player. Gearbox, clutch and throttle assists are per player, so set them individually rather than forcing one setup on the whole couch.
• Try the Percheron in Career. The Italian trucking missions are now built around it, and it is the clearest showcase of what the new interaction system can do.
• Keep wheel expectations realistic. If your wheel is not on the supported list, test it before spending a whole evening on setup.

Frequently Asked Questions

What time did BeamNG.drive launch on PS5?

BeamNG.drive unlocked on the PlayStation Store at 13:00 UTC on October 19, 2026. That is 6:00 AM Pacific, 8:00 AM Central and 9:00 AM Eastern. It was a simultaneous worldwide release with no preload.

How much does BeamNG.drive cost on PS5?

It costs $24.99 on the US PlayStation Store and £17.99 in the UK, the same as the PC version on Steam. There is a single standard edition and no disc version has been announced.

Does BeamNG.drive on PS5 support mods?

No. Mods are not supported on PlayStation at launch, and BeamNG's press release says mod authoring tools are not currently planned for PlayStation. The studio says it wants feature parity where possible in the long term but has not given timing or scope.

How many players can play split-screen in BeamNG.drive?

Split-screen supports up to 4 players on PS5 and up to 64 players on PC. You can use it in Freeroam or in seven modes: Race, Drag Race, Pursuit, Derby, Drift, Rock Crawling and Soccer.

Does BeamNG.drive have online multiplayer on PS5?

No. The PS5 version is offline play with local split-screen for up to four players. There is no official online mode on either platform; multiplayer in v0.40 is local split-screen.

Which racing wheels work with BeamNG.drive on PS5?

BeamNG lists 11 wheels with force feedback at launch: Fanatec ClubSport DD+ for PS and Gran Turismo DD PRO; Logitech G29, G923, RS50 and G Pro for PS; and Thrustmaster T248 for PS, T598, T98 FERRARI 296 GTB, TGT2 and T300 RS. Other wheels have not been tested yet.

What is new in BeamNG.drive v0.40?

Version 0.40 adds local split-screen, physical occupants that weigh 89 kg each, the Cherrier Percheron cab-over semi, FPU European trailers, DLSS, FSR 3, FSR 4 and XeSS upscaling, new reflections and shadows, a redesigned Main Menu and graphics menu, the First Drive tutorial, new Percheron missions, Direct3D 12 VR through OpenXR, and native Windows on Arm builds.

Is BeamNG.drive on PS5 worth it without mods?

For players without a gaming PC, it is good value at $24.99. You get the full official vehicle list, 12 maps, Career Mode, scenarios and four-player split-screen, and the PS5 version receives the same major updates as PC. If you already own it on Steam and rely on mods, the PC version remains the better experience.