Build 42 Vehicles: Hotwire, Fuel, Trailers & Work-Van Loot

How Do You Start a Car You Have No Key For? Cross-Verified

The gate is confirmed identically in both guides and matches the anchor already published on our Electrical skill guide: hotwiring needs Electrical 1 and Mechanics 2, or the Burglar occupation which skips the gates. The loop is seat → vehicle radial → Hotwire Engine → start, and a working battery is still required underneath it all. One guide adds that attempts make noise and can trip alarms, and that better-condition cars are harder — we treat the alarm-chance scaling as single-sourced until a third write-up lands.

Keys beat all of it: glove boxes, ignition, visors, nearby corpses, and the house that owns the driveway. A key start is quiet; a hotwire is a noise event with a skill check attached.

What Changed About Fuel in Build 42? Cross-Verified

Vehicles run inside B42’s new fluid rules, and the two guides agree on every load-bearing point:

• Siphoning requires a hose — carry one or you are pouring from cans.
• Gas pumps need power — stations work until shutoff; after that, powering the pumps with a generator keeps the underground reserve accessible.
• Gasoline evaporates from open containers — sealed cans, stored ventilated and outdoors.
• Plan routes like food — a thirsty sports car between towns is a trap; keep a can in the trunk, not only at base. The full fuel-system picture is in the water collection guide’s pump discussion.

Driving itself stays a noise magnet: engine sound pulls zombies, hitting them damages the car over time, and both guides’ rule is identical — use cars to leave, not to mow, and kill the engine when parked or the battery dies overnight.

Why Are Work Vans the Real Loot Update? Deep-Tested

The official Build 42.20 feature overview is the anchor: “business-related work vans — each loaded with its own special and specific loot,” plus location-specific liveries. Both guides then catalogue the same pattern from different angles — trade-branded step vans, Valulines and pickups carrying the tools of their business (blacksmith, masonry, butchers, mobile libraries, craft supplies), with per-container loot tables unpublished. The shared practical rule falls out of it: open every weird business vehicle you see — a florist step van is a container roll, not scenery.

Trailers move the same economy: general and covered trailers for stone, metal and logs, livestock trailers for moving animals by road. Both guides agree towing exists and behaves as a system with its own limits; the one-source specifics (exact trunk capacities, trailer detach thresholds, 42.21 driving fixes) are held pending a third written source rather than printed here.

Sources & Verification

Single-source numbers (capacities, detach behavior, 42.21 patch items) are named as pending and not asserted.