Can Someone Explain How Saving Cars Works?

Saving cars at pads seems unreliable. Besides the characters starting cars, whenever I save a car, take it out, and lose it, it wont reappear at the pad I saved it at. Is there a limit to the amount of cars you can save at a pad? That could be the reason...

Also, is there any other garages in the game besides the one Franklin can buy (at least, I think it was limited to him). I remember seeing a really nice looking one in a trailer, though it might have been the GTA online trailer)?

I want to know if I can buy or steal a car, store it, grab it a few hours later, crash it, and reliably go back to my garage to see it back in there.

My exact issue!

This has made me appreciate SR4's "push down on the d-pad to download your car" system that much more. It wouldn't make any fucking sense in the context of this game, but it sure as hell would be convenient.

Check the impound. I kept finding my car that I modded end up there a lot.

So far I haven't lost a car that I've stored either at my own place or at the local garage. But the game constantly tells me some car or another have been impounded but I have never picked up an impounded car to find out what those cars are. If they're just cars I've used and discarded or cars I've used to some capacity to where the game thinks it's a car I want to keep around. But the game also seem to randomly decide which cars are displayed at your place if you have more than 2 there. But the other ones you have saved doesn't seem to disappear either, they just don't always show up.

I don't know if this is a bug, but I constantly run into the issue of saving a car in the garage, only to find it missing later on when I feel like accessing it.

It doesn't, most of the time. The garage system in this game is pretty much garbage right now and totally untrustworthy. If you take a car out of the garage and don't bring it back there's a good chance it's gone, or if you're lucky it got impounded and you have to constantly go there to get it back. I wish there was a way to actually just take ownership of the car, like setting it as the character's car instead of the one they have or something.

I'm pretty sure it's like other GTA games in that you don't get a car back if it gets destroyed (besides the main car for each character of course). This sucks but that seems to be the case. Ok actually I'm not sure about the conditions for having a car go to the impound. Seems pretty inconsistent from what I've seen. I think I heard something about buying insurance for a car in GTA online so the problem may be solved in that case but we'll have to wait and see.

edit: To be safe, I just wouldn't buy any cars right now.

I'm not confident in the garage system either.

For one, I'm not sure what the game considers ownership. The manual only references vehicles you purchase as being owned and that only owned vehicles get respawned if destroyed or impounded if abandoned. However, I drove a golf cart around a golf course for a few minutes and then abandoned it in the street after stealing a real car. Some time later I got a message that said the golf cart had been impounded. Why? I didn't own it. And why haven't the other cars I've stolen and abandoned been impounded as well?

Two, I wasted a ton of cash customizing the Elegy RH8 "special vehicle" you can get at your garage. I parked it at the FIB yard at the beginning of a heist and then spawned another at the garage later on. It spawned bone stock - all the upgrades were gone. Maybe that was my fault for spawning another copy and not going back for the one I left parked? Would the one I left parked still have been there if I went back for it? I don't know.

Buying and customizing vehicles just seems too risky at this point to me.

It does appear to be broken at the moment, and that is straight from the horses mouth. http://support.rockstargames.com/hc/en-us/articles/200218557-Vehicles-disappearing-from-the-GTA-V-garage-or-losing-upgrades

As other people have said, check the impound. I used that special car, the Elegy something, a lot early on and when I finally checked the impound, two of those damn things were in there taking up space. And from what I can tell, only the first two impounded vehicles are saved, the rest are just gone. So I had two cars in the impound that I can get infinite amounts of anyway, when I wanted to see if my bicycle was in there (because I parked a bike in Michaels' garage and it decided to disappear). Oh well.

Anyway, the only cars I've really modded have been the personal cars of each character. Those have stayed customized as far as I can tell, and are a guaranteed respawn.

Like other have said, it should be just like every other GTA game. When you "save" a car you're just storing it until you want to take it out again. Once you take it out it's not stored anymore and you have to put it back in the garage for storage until next use. It's just a place to keep cars until you want to use them again. This whole unique vehicles respawning has really confused a lot of people into thinking it's like that for all stored vehicles.

@capum15: Even the canonical cars haven't worked right for me. I spent a fairly massive sum of money on Michael's car, just to find it was back to stock a couple missions later. That was disappointing.

@naru_joe93: @believer258: I can confirm that this works with planes (so I assume it would work with cars as well). I stole a private jet from Los Santos airport and stored in Trevors garage in the desert(the one that belonged to the bikers). I've since flown it, crashed it and returned to find it there again.

There are times where all vehicles are gone though which is always when a mission ends at that airstrip. When Trevors lands there after missions all plains, choppers etc. are gone, but they return by leaving the area and having it reload.

@jjweatherman: I had this happen with Michael too. He turned up to the sawmill mission in his stock Tailgater.

Does anyone know if you can change the stock car for the three characters, or are those cars permanent?

The impound only stores the last two cars you used and then abandoned. Modded cars often take precedence. If you have a four car garage in Los Santos for any of the three characters, the cars will disappear if you abandon them after taking them out of the garage. you have to drive them back to the garage and manually store them for them to be saved again. Slightly realistic, but a bit of a pain in the ass, nonetheless.

@greggd: I modded a car, put it in my garage, switched characters, did a few missions, switched back and the car was gone. Nowhere to be found, not in the personal garage, not in the colored ones and nothing at the impound. That can't be normal.

How does saving cars work? It doesn't! The garages are actually bugged.

My impression was that the impound only works for cars that are flagged as being owned by your character. So basically, just your starting vehicles and then anything you purchase with actual money. I'm not sure how I got that impression though, you may very well be right. All I know is, the game does a shit job explaining how the impound system works.

The irony of it all is, I work for a roadside services company and I'm constantly dealing with impound lots in real life. How is it that I know all there is to know about how actual impounds work, but I can't for the life of me understand how they work in a video game? Also spoilers: real-life impound lots are a total racket and every one of them is crooked and/or tied into the mob.

Did the garage door close when you switched characters? Some people think that if you switch before the garage door completely closes the chances of you losing your car is greater. I'm not completely sure if that is true though.

If its anything like GTA used to be, you don't keep the car unless its physically in the garage. Meaning if you take it out of the garage and blow it up- its gone. No clue if that's still the case and always loved that SR doesn't do that because there's nothing crazier then collecting every single car and upgrading every single vehicle to be ready for the zombie apocalypse.

DON'T JUDGE ME!

Do not use the garage. There is a major bug right now that RockStar is aware of and working on.

@andorski: Yes, it did close. It wasn't the first time it happened to me, so I was extra-careful and even checked twice if it didn't disappear after I walked a few feet away from the garage. But anyway, as somebody else said, this is apparently a known issue. I hope they'll slove it soon, I mean, it is Grand Theft Auto, isn't it?

Unless you have a four car garage, in which case go right ahead. Just be sure to park what you take out back at said garage when you're done with it.

Did you consider the possibility that someone stole your car? It's not a bug, it's karma bitches!