GTA 6 car theft now has tiers: some cars need a Slim Jim

Stealing a car in Grand Theft Auto VI no longer comes down to one button. Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, told IGN on August 27, 2026 that certain parked cars stay locked until the player gets further into the story and picks up the right tools.

We have put some layers of stratification into the vehicles. Previously, you could just press triangle to automatically hotwire and steal any vehicle that you wanted and take off. We felt like that left a lot of potential gameplay on the table in terms of progression and decision-making for players. So now, you start off the game and there are certain parked cars that are not accessible to you until you get a bit further along with the story and you acquire certain tools to get into them, but you can always carjack any driver you see.

Two transcripts of that answer are in circulation. IGN ran the interview, so its wording is the reference, but the version RockstarINTEL published on August 27, 2026 carries a closing line IGN’s does not: “I think it gives all the vehicles more meaning, and you need to pay attention to what you’re doing a bit more.”

Two tools are named: a Slim Jim, the flat metal strip you slide into a car door, and a key cloner. One screen tells you which of them a given car wants. WAINK, an app on the character’s phone, scans a parked vehicle before the break-in.

For example, it tells me this car is locked, it’s got an alarm, and has no tracker. It also tells me how much it’s worth if I go to take it to a Pay n’ Spray or a specialty car fence, and how much it would cost for me to register it for myself. So, for example, this car needs a key cloner. This other car will just need a Slim Jim. So we’ve added a lot of fun little tools you need or mechanics you need to perform these formerly binary actions.

Carjacking survives. It just costs more than it did: the driver you pull out calls the police, which starts a wanted level an empty car would have avoided.

It brings a bit of risk now to jack someone out of the car, they’re going to call the cops, I’m going to have a bunch of trouble.

Rockstar has published no vehicle list, no count of tiers and no inventory of break-in tools.