American Truck Simulator Let Its Truckers Climb Down From the Cab. Next Up: a 1970 Charger 500

American Truck Simulator has always been a strange and wonderful thing: a game where the fun is backing a 53-foot trailer into a dock in Reno at 2 a.m. without clipping anything. Its players are some of the most dedicated car people in gaming, the kind who argue about real truck specs and drive the speed limit on purpose. This fall, SCS Software handed them something they had wanted for years. You can now step out of the big rig and drive a car.

The Road Trip: Ford DLC went live on Steam on Sept. 29, according to SCS's own blog. Then on Oct. 30, the Czech studio showed the first car from the next pack, Road Trip: RAM & Dodge, and it is a 1970 Dodge Charger 500.

What Road Trip: Ford adds

SCS says it first announced the Road Trip project in April of last year and built a dedicated team for it, working with its vehicle team, coders and testers. The Ford DLC is the first release from that project. Buying it unlocks Car Mode and four personal vehicles, per SCS:

Each car can be customized with accessories and paint, according to SCS. And the studio did not just drop cars onto truck roads and call it done. Road Trip comes with its own things to do: smaller deliveries through Quick Jobs and the Dispatch Market so you can build a courier reputation, and a new Atlas feature that sends you to iconic locations to learn about them and collect postcards. At launch, Atlas and its Tourist Boards cover California plus the Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota DLCs, with more states coming in later updates.

The part that will matter most to the community is multiplayer. SCS says players can team up in Convoy mode with trucks and cars sharing the same highways. That means a trucker hauling a load across Wyoming can have a friend in a Mustang running alongside, or a Crown Vic playing escort. Anyone who has spent time in the truck sim community knows those convoys are as much social events as games.

The Mustang came first

SCS gave the '67 Mustang Fastback its first real showing back on July 31, in a gameplay preview that ran from Carson City, Nevada, into Yosemite National Park. The studio said at the time that the car's sounds and driving behavior were "still very much a work in progress," which is exactly the kind of honesty its players appreciate. A preview built around a winding mountain road in a vintage fastback also tells you what kind of driving SCS has in mind. This is not about lap times. It is about the drive.

Next: the Charger 500

The Oct. 30 post introduced the 1970 Dodge Charger 500 as one of several vehicles in the upcoming Road Trip: RAM & Dodge DLC. SCS laid out the real car's history: the Charger 500 arrived in 1969 as a performance-focused version of the second-generation Charger, developed with aerodynamics in mind for NASCAR, with a flush-mounted rear window replacing the standard car's recessed glass and a modified nose for better airflow. For 1970 it got a redesigned grille and front bumper, and it was the last year of the second-generation Charger.

In the game, SCS says the Charger 500 will come in standard and SE trims, the SE with a more luxurious interior and its own exterior badge. It gets a V8, several vinyl roof options, multiple exterior and interior colors, two steering wheel designs, the hidden headlights behind sliding covers and a wide selection of aftermarket parts. SCS did not give a release date or name the other vehicles in the pack.

Why a truck sim adding cars is a big deal

Truck sims sit in a different corner of car culture than Forza or Gran Turismo. The appeal is authenticity and routine, not speed. Players run virtual trucking companies, follow real routes and drive the speed limit for hours. American Truck Simulator has built a huge version of the American West and Midwest to do that in, and SCS keeps expanding the map with new states.

Adding cars changes what that map is for. Suddenly the same roads support a weekend cruise in a '67 Mustang, a backroad drive in a Bronco or a slow roll in a Crown Vic. It also connects the game to two things American car culture runs on: the road trip and the classic muscle car. Putting a Charger 500 and a fastback Mustang on the same highways as Peterbilts is a very American idea, and SCS knows its audience well enough to have started there.

It is also a smart way to bring in new players. Not everyone wants to manage freight and fuel stops. Plenty of people just want to drive somewhere beautiful in a cool car with the windows down. Road Trip gives them a reason to try a game they would have otherwise skipped, and Convoy mode lets them ride along with friends who are hauling for real.

SCS has not said when RAM & Dodge will land. But with Ford out and Mopar next in line, the most patient fans in gaming finally have something to look at besides the back of a trailer.