BeamNG Hits the Couch: The Soft-Body Sim That Taught a Generation How Cars Crumple Is Now on PS5

Ask a certain kind of car person under 30 how they learned what a crumple zone does, and there is a decent chance the answer is a video of a pickup folding itself around a pole in BeamNG.drive. The soft-body physics sim has spent years on PC as the place where people crash cars on purpose, build absurd off-road rigs and test whether a lifted wagon can survive a jump. On Oct. 19, it showed up somewhere new: the PlayStation 5.

BeamNG.drive arrived on PS5 the same day the developers pushed version 0.40 to PC, and the timing was not an accident. The console work forced changes to almost every system in the game, and PC players got the benefits too. Here is what the console launch brings, what it leaves out, and why a physics sandbox reaching the living room is a bigger deal than it sounds.

Five months from tease to launch

BeamNG first said the words PlayStation 5 in a May 28 post titled "Something new is on the horizon." Bringing the game to consoles, the team wrote, "has been one of the most complex challenges the team has ever taken on." It took optimization across performance, controls, interface and usability, "all to make sure BeamNG keeps its soul intact on the way to the couch," as the developers put it.

The same post laid out the PC update that would build the foundation, version 0.39: a new Direct3D 12 renderer, HDR support, improved lighting and shadows, lower RAM and VRAM use, and expanded aerodynamics with slipstreaming, side drafting and bump drafting. It also answered the question the community had asked for years. Official multiplayer is real, the team said, but not here yet, and it is "still far from what we'd call ready."

On Sept. 24, BeamNG set the date. "BeamNG.drive arrives on PS5 on 19 October 2026," the studio wrote, along with a warning so nobody would be surprised: VR and mods would not be supported at launch.

Split-screen, finally

The headline feature of version 0.40 is local split-screen, and it is built for exactly the kind of chaos BeamNG is known for. On PS5 it supports up to four players. On PC it supports up to 64, which the developers acknowledged is mostly theoretical. "If you have that many friends, and the hardware to handle 64 players, you're living the dream," they wrote, asking for photos of any record attempts.

There are seven split-screen game modes: Race, Drag Race, Pursuit, Derby, Drift, Rock Crawling and Soccer, plus Freeroam, where everyone spawns together with a random vehicle suited to the map. Each mode has its own settings for track layouts, lap and score goals and penalty rules. Rock Crawling runs through challenging trails with optional penalties and recovery rules, which is about as close as a lot of people will get to a trail day without buying a set of 37s.

Bob rides along

The second big change is subtle and very BeamNG. Occupants now physically sit in vehicles. Each one adds 89 kilograms to the seat and the car, and they are fully simulated, so they wobble and react to the way the car is driven. The team insisted the passengers were added for the sake of accuracy, and said the fact they look a little silly is "a happy coincidence, we swear." The default character got a name, too: Bob.

It is a joke, but it has real effects. As the developers pointed out, rally cars now have a truer weight distribution because there is an actual person in the co-driver seat. "Turns out that adding the weight of a whole person to the car changes things. Who knew?" the team wrote. In split-screen Freeroam, players can climb out of their own car and ride in a friend's, messing with the interior while someone else drives.

A semi truck that does everything

The new vehicle is the Cherrier Percheron, an early-2000s European cab-over semi that BeamNG called its most interactive vehicle yet. It comes as a tractor or a rigid truck with flatbed, insulated box, concrete mixer and tanker upfits. Cabs come in three sizes. Frames come in five lengths from 6.17 to 9.80 meters, with two to five axles and more than 50 chassis setups, from road-going 4x2s to 8x8 all-terrain trucks. Power comes from a 12.8-liter turbocharged inline six making 310 to 500 horsepower, with a 12-speed manual or seven-speed automatic.

The cab is even suspended separately from the frame and tilts electrohydraulically. For a game built on simulating every part of a vehicle as a deformable structure, a cab-over semi with that much hardware is a showpiece.

What console players give up

The biggest catch is mods. On PC, BeamNG's mod community is a huge part of the appeal, with user-built cars, maps and parts that extend the game far beyond its stock lineup. Console players do not get that at launch. BeamNG said it is aiming for feature parity across platforms where possible in the long term, but could not confirm timing or scope.

Steering wheel support is also limited at first. BeamNG listed three wheels with force feedback on PS5, the Fanatec ClubSport DD+, the Fanatec Gran Turismo DD PRO and the Thrustmaster T98 Ferrari 296 GTB, and said other wheels have not been tested and may or may not work. It promised to improve support over time.

The PC side benefits

The console port pushed improvements back to PC. BeamNG said the PS5 work revealed tweaks for several PC wheels, adding default controls for the Thrustmaster T98, Revosim Pure DD and Initiale DD, Logitech RS50 and the Logitech RS shifter. Gamepad throttle and brake response got rebalanced because the old curve favored very gentle inputs. "We know our players," the developers wrote. "Gentle driving is generally not what they're here for."

Version 0.40 also adds a long list of upscaling options, including NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR 3 and 4 and Intel XeSS, a new First Drive tutorial, Percheron-based trucking missions and a big round of fixes for the West Coast, USA map.

Why it matters for car culture

BeamNG has always been more than a crash toy. It is a place where people tinker with suspension setups, learn why a solid axle flexes differently than independent suspension, and find out exactly how badly a cheap lift handles in a corner, all without a repair bill. For plenty of players, bending a virtual frame comes long before owning a welder.

Putting that on a console, with couch split-screen and a controller, opens it to players who would never build a gaming PC. They will start without mods, and that is a real loss. But a kid on a PS5 sending a virtual pickup off a cliff with three friends on the same couch is exactly how a lot of car people get started. BeamNG just made that a lot easier.