I Drove Starfield’s New Car

Why fly when you can scoot along bumpily?

Alex Rowe
6 min readAug 22, 2024

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The customizable player character (right) and NPC companion Sarah Morgan (left) share a ride in the new REV-8 vehicle.
Your Starfield character and your current NPC companion will just stare straight ahead with dead eyes the entire time they ride in its new car. They’re clearly having a great time. Xbox Series S version screenshot taken by the author.

This week, Starfield got another one of its highly-touted “big updates,” and the standout new feature is a car — excuse me, a land vehicle. Known as the REV-8, this all-purpose rover can hold you and your current NPC companion, giving you a faster way to get across the game’s thousand-plus environments.

At least, that’s what it does in theory. In practice the implementation is a bit weird and goofy, as are so many other features in Bethesda’s year-old space opus.

Unlocking the car takes about 2–3 hours if you’re starting fresh from the beginning of the game, so you’ll need to put a little work in before you’re wheeling around in the space dust. The game doesn’t really tell you how to unlock the car, because of course it doesn’t. Wouldn’t want to make it too easy for players to find your prominent shiny new thing, right?

To get the car, you’ll need to talk to any of the game’s many spaceship-selling dudes. They usually stand around next to the docking bay in the major cities. The same team of guys who can repair your ship or let you build a new one also apparently now sell this exact one car. Unlike the ships, which can be built or customized with the same elaborate creation tools found in other Bethesda games like Fallout 4, the car only has a color…

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Alex Rowe

I write about gaming, tech, music, and their industries. Creators and fans are so much more than numbers on a graph.