BeamNG.drive has found a new way to turn a sensible evening into an argument about whose fault the crash was. The BeamNG.drive 0.40 update, released on 19 October 2026, brings local split-screen multiplayer, a PlayStation 5 debut and physical occupants who contribute actual weight to the vehicle. Add a deeply configurable European truck and a substantial graphics overhaul, and there is considerably more going on here than another excuse to flatten a hatchback.
The interesting part is how these additions fit together. Split-screen makes the simulation easier to share, the new occupants give those shared drives a physical presence, and the performance work tackles some of the waiting and stuttering that can interrupt the fun. Existing PC players get fresh reasons to experiment. Console newcomers finally get an invitation.
Split-screen gives BeamNG a proper couch-multiplayer moment
The headline number is wonderfully excessive: local split-screen supports up to four players on PS5 and up to 64 on PC. That PC ceiling comes with a large hardware qualification. You need the input devices and a machine capable of handling the session; it is an upper limit, not a sensible expectation for the average gaming laptop.
For most households, the useful part will be getting two, three or four people into the same world. Start from the main menu, add participants and choose Freeroam or a game mode. You can also open split-screen through the pause menu while already inside a level. There is room for spontaneous chaos without rebuilding your evening around the setup.
Freeroam starts everyone together, with map-appropriate random vehicles and individual vehicle colours. Gearbox mode, clutch assist and throttle assist can be adjusted per player. That matters when one person wants to wrestle with a manual and another would prefer to concentrate on steering somewhere vaguely near the road.
Seven structured modes give that freedom some direction: Race, Drag Race, Pursuit, Derby, Drift, Rock Crawling and Soccer. Race supports more than 85 existing Time Trial and AI Race layouts. Derby is an obvious fit for BeamNG’s vehicle damage, while Soccer sounds like an excellent way to discover that your mate treats every team sport as a demolition event.
This is local multiplayer on the same system. The announcement does not establish online matchmaking or PC-to-PS5 cross-play. On PC, devices can be grouped per participant, so one player can use a wheel and pedals while another uses a gamepad. Player settings and roster changes can also be applied during play without restarting the entire session.
Mode settings allow changes to lap targets, score goals and penalties. That flexibility should help a mixed group settle on a competition everyone understands, whether the aim is a tidy race or simply keeping the last functioning car in the arena.
The PS5 launch opens the garage to a new audience
BeamNG’s official 0.40 announcement confirms that the update accompanies its console debut on PlayStation 5. That is a significant change in who can access the game, particularly for people who have watched the crashes and elaborate driving experiments but never had a suitable PC sitting under the desk.
The appeal is the ability to experiment with vehicles and see how the simulation responds. A quick race can become a lesson in weight transfer. An innocent road trip can become a recovery operation. Bringing that sort of open-ended driving to the lounge room, alongside four-player local competition, gives the launch a clear social hook.
Controls deserve attention here too. The patch notes list PS5 steering-wheel support, including the Logitech G29 and G923 and Fanatec’s Gran Turismo DD Pro, alongside other supported models. Compatibility is worth checking for your exact hardware. Our guide to getting started with sim racing on a budget is useful background if you are weighing up a desk-mounted wheel or a more permanent setup.
The Cherrier Percheron is a truck worth getting distracted by
The new Cherrier Percheron is an early-2000s European cab-over semi-truck with enough mechanical variety to keep the vehicle configuration screen busy. Its 12.8-litre turbocharged inline-six produces between 310 and 500hp, paired with either a 12-speed manual or seven-speed automatic. That is a strong starting point for anyone who enjoys making heavy machinery work for a living.
Three cab sizes cover a compact day cab and two sleeper-equipped options. Five frame lengths run from 6.17 to 9.80 metres, with two to five axles and more than 50 chassis combinations. Road-going 4×2 layouts sit at one end of the range, with 8×8 all-terrain setups at the other. Choosing a truck becomes a question of what you intend to haul and where you intend to take it.
It can be a fifth-wheel tractor or a rigid truck, with flatbed, insulated-box, concrete-mixer and tanker options. New FPU European trailers broaden the combinations further, including flatbed and insulated-box arrangements and fuel or foodstuffs tankers. The result is plenty of scope for a careful delivery run, an awkward reversing challenge or a recovery job that escalates.
BeamNG calls the Percheron its most interactive vehicle yet. Storage lockers, access panels and folding side skirts open, the sunroof works, and there are multiple interior lighting features. The separately suspended cab can even be unlatched and tilted electrohydraulically. These details give you something to investigate before the truck has travelled a metre.
Its hydrodynamic retarder is the particularly good engineering detail. Available in two outputs, it can provide up to 600kW of braking power at its maximum rated speed, helping manage long descents without relying entirely on the wheel brakes. Its effectiveness drops with speed, and its heat goes into the engine’s cooling circuit. Overuse can overheat the engine. Even slowing down requires a little judgement.
Bob adds 89kg and a new reason to think about passengers
Physical occupants make the cabins feel considerably less empty. Each occupant adds 89kg to the seat and vehicle, and seated characters use BeamNG’s JBeam physics system. They move and react with the vehicle, including during crashes, rather than existing solely as a visual figure behind the windscreen.
That mass has practical consequences. Carrying passengers changes the load the vehicle must accelerate, support and stop. Rally cars now have a co-driver physically seated alongside the driver, which the patch notes specifically connect to more realistic weight distribution. Anyone comparing handling setups has another variable to consider before blaming the suspension.
The system also makes split-screen more interesting. Players can leave their own vehicle and climb into someone else’s, with character colours retained so everyone remains identifiable. A shared journey can genuinely involve a driver and passengers. Whether the passengers use that opportunity to be helpful is, unfortunately, outside the physics engine’s control.
Walking mode gains a visible character mesh, including a reflection in mirrors, while the old driver camera becomes a more flexible occupant camera. Its wider rotation limits help reach cockpit interactions from different seats. Together, these are small changes that make getting into, out of and around vehicles feel more connected.
DLSS, FSR and XeSS join a broader visual upgrade
The BeamNG.drive 0.40 update adds NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR 3 and FSR 4, Intel XeSS and SMAA T2x temporal anti-aliasing. There is also an upscaler sharpness slider and PC multi-monitor upscaling support. It is a much broader set of options for balancing image quality with rendering demands.
The important distinction is that these are announced under anti-aliasing and upscaling. The release notes do not establish a separate frame-generation feature, so the presence of an FSR or DLSS name should not be read as a promise of one. Nor do the notes provide a universal performance gain for every graphics card. The useful result will depend on your hardware and chosen settings.
Reflections and lighting receive attention beyond the resolution controls. Stochastic screen-space reflections cover vehicles, glass and water, while specular occlusion reduces environmental reflections in cavities and sheltered rough surfaces. In plain English, surfaces should look more convincing where light is naturally obstructed, rather than reflecting the environment with the same intensity everywhere.
Light-source radius support allows more natural soft shadows from lamps and vehicle lights. BeamNG also reports improvements to shadow stability, reduced shimmering and flickering, and a fix for missing ambient light at night. These are worthwhile changes for a driving game, where scenery, headlights and reflective bodywork spend much of their time moving across the screen.
The settings menus have been reorganised around clearer groups for image quality, detail, lighting, reflections and display behaviour. Our guide to which gaming settings to lower first for better FPS provides a useful starting method: compare one change at a time in the same scene. A new upscaler menu is much more useful when you can tell which option actually helped.
Faster loading may be the upgrade you notice every session
The quieter performance changes could have the most lasting effect on regular PC play. BeamNG has optimised startup systems, level loading, mod discovery and the mounting and unmounting of mods. The vehicle selector also receives loading improvements, reducing the interruption between thinking of something daft and finding the vehicle required to attempt it.
There are striking developer figures, but they need their context. In some tested cases, vehicle-selector loading fell from 10–15 seconds to one or two. A large mod-mounting test involving 500 maps, 3,000 spawn points, 3,000 thumbnails and 500 missions dropped from three minutes to four seconds. Those are BeamNG’s specific tests, not measurements from TechDrivePlay or guarantees for every installation.
Rendering work includes bindless rendering for Vulkan and Direct3D 12, designed to lower CPU overhead in scenes containing many objects and materials. DirectX 12 changes also target memory usage, synchronisation and frame pacing. AI and traffic optimisations sit alongside a fix for a bug that could cause severe frame-rate drops, memory leaks and crashes.
Replay recording performance has been improved by up to three times to address a regression introduced in 0.39. That claim concerns recording, rather than a blanket tripling of gameplay FPS. Freeroam and split-screen also gain warnings when frame rates remain below 25fps, with prompts before adding another vehicle when the system is already struggling.
Photo Mode has also been brought along for the ride. It supports active upscalers and temporal accumulation, with frequently used environment controls moved into easier reach. A PC early preview of the overlay editor lets players edit overlays or build their own from images and HUD apps. That is a useful extra for anyone who spends as much time arranging a vehicle against the scenery as driving it. A carefully positioned truck deserves a decent photograph before the next delivery rearranges its front bumper.
Windows on Arm gets a native build, with a clear caveat
Compatible Windows on Arm devices can now run native ARM64 binaries, with the launcher supported too. Players can choose the native version or the emulated x64 version. BeamNG expects the native build’s performance benefit to show up mainly in CPU-bound situations, where processor work is the limiting factor.
The qualification is that the native version does not include the Steam SDK or Steam overlay. That makes this a welcome platform addition with a specific limitation, rather than a promise that every Arm-based laptop suddenly becomes an ideal BeamNG machine. It also gives those users a meaningful choice between the two builds instead of treating emulation as the only route.
Older favourites and everyday controls get useful attention
Existing vehicles have not been parked in a corner while the Percheron takes the photographs. The update refines drag and lift across much of the fleet, revises racing-seat stiffness and attachments, and adds parking-brake triggers across the vehicles. Individual models receive further structural and parts fixes. Players returning after our coverage of BeamNG’s 0.35 update will find a considerably broader set of changes to explore.
Italy’s trucking missions now use Percheron configurations, and TastiCola Driver joins the Freeform Delivery missions. Drift rewards have been made more accessible while retaining bonus objectives for experienced players. Rally’s default Enthusiast pacenotes support visual instructions, making the mode more useful when audio alone is not the best option.
A redesigned main menu gives major activities larger tiles, and numerous controller-navigation fixes address lost focus, awkward scrolling and other small irritations. First Drive replaces the previous Freeroam tutorial with guided lessons covering recovery, driving assists, spawning, customisation and interactions. For newcomers, learning how to recover the vehicle is likely to prove useful remarkably quickly.
A good first session would be a small split-screen race, followed by a Percheron delivery run and a look through the revised graphics options. Returning players can compare a familiar vehicle and map before adding more traffic or passengers. BeamNG’s full 0.40 patch notes cover the vehicle-specific details when you are ready to investigate further. Just leave enough room to turn the truck around.
Images: BeamNG GmbH, supplied through its official press kit. The featured image shows the Percheron on PC; supporting platforms are identified in the captions.
Elijah Cowling is a Melbourne-based technology and automotive journalist, reviewer and content creator at TechDrivePlay. A lifelong fan of cars, gaming and technology, he brings an enthusiast’s perspective to hands-on reviews, features and video content.
