Borrowed Wheels – Grand Chien Vehicle Directory

Grand Chien is beautiful, if you ignore the bullets, potholes, militia checkpoints, suspicious stains and the fact that every working vehicle probably belonged to three different people before breakfast.

Borrowed Wheels adds a tactical vehicle system to Jagged Alliance 3. Cars, vans and trucks can be recovered, repaired, parked, driven on tactical maps, loaded with mercs, abandoned in sectors, bought through less-than-official channels and abused in the reckless way Grand Chien deserves.

These vehicles are not clean. They are not safe. They are not yours.
But they move.

Borrowed Wheels is in beta. Bugs on the windshield are included free of charge.
V2.31-269: fixes passenger boarding attachment by preserving crew seat ids, resolving tactical units by session id, and blocking manual passenger movement.
+ New Feature, thanks to BajaResident : Headlights! The Driver can switch on and Off Headlights.

• Buy one through Borrowed Wheels. Open the Borrowed Wheels website, visit the Black Market, buy an offer and send someone to the listed delivery sector. The vehicle arrives there as a parked vehicle. Recover it with a mercenary to assign it to that squad. One active vehicle per squad.
• Build an IMP with Car Mechanic Specialization. Find a recoverable tactical vehicle, mark it, then repair and recover it through the Sector Operation. A mechanic-specialized IMP can also keep vehicles repaired later.
• Future Grim Perk Lab support. My upcoming Grim Perk Lab mod will include Car Mechanic as a Gold 90 Mechanical perk. Borrowed Wheels grew out of that project and became its own vehicle mod.

• Recover vehicles through dedicated Sector Operations.
• Bring vehicles into tactical maps and drive them around the battlefield.
• Vehicles have handling profiles, turn behavior, movement speed, damage values and seat layouts.
• Vehicle movement uses car-like logic: limited turning, no instant sideways driving, tight-space blocking and reverse support.

• Vehicles help squads travel faster between land sectors.
• Drivers receive an expanded inventory bonus based on the vehicle.
• Bigger vehicles generally carry more, because if the truck cannot solve your logistics problem, you probably need another truck.

• Vehicles can carry a driver and multiple passengers.
• Seat positions, names, stances, animations, exit angles and offsets are configurable per vehicle.
• Passengers visually follow the vehicle during movement.
• Group entry and exit is supported.

• Vehicles have HP, armor profile, damage reduction and critical states.
• Shots can hit either the vehicle or an occupant depending on body part and configured chances.
• Damaged vehicles can lose performance.
• Qualified mechanics can repair vehicles in tactical maps.
• Destroyed vehicles handle crew cleanup.

• Vehicles can be left in sectors and recovered later.
• Parked vehicles are tracked by sector.
• Tactical vehicles can be associated with squads and brought back when needed.

• Vehicle recovery uses custom Sector Operations.
• Operations require one qualified mechanic.
• Car Mechanic and Car Mechanic Specialization are valid qualifications.
• Recovery costs, vehicle names and vehicle types are configurable.

• Adds the Borrowed Wheels in-game website with vehicle pages, rumors, roadside opinions and other useful lies.
• The Black Market generates random off-book vehicle offers each in-game day.
• Offers include vehicle type, price, delivery sector, contact flavor, color and condition.
• Condition affects delivered HP and price.
• Buying a vehicle delivers it as a parked vehicle in the listed sector and confirms the purchase in the combat log.
• The GMC Vandura is not sold on the Black Market yet. The man with the keys has disappeared, which is normal logistics in Grand Chien.

• Vehicle configuration is separated from runtime code.
• Modders can edit seats, passenger names, stance behavior, exit angles, movement speeds, steering, damage, prices, inventory bonuses, sounds, Black Market colors and conditions.

A separate companion mod template, Borrowed Wheels – Vehicle Addon Template, is provided for modders who want to add vehicles without editing Borrowed Wheels directly. Duplicate it, rename it and load it after Borrowed Wheels.

The template includes:

• An English readme.txt with a step-by-step workflow.
• Documented Lua files and a vehicle field reference.
• A clean addon registration layer that injects vehicles after Borrowed Wheels core tables are ready.
• A sample vehicle configuration file covering entity id, name, driving proxy item, seats, offsets, exits, tactical movement, travel, inventory bonus, damage profile, steering, sounds, Black Market offers and fixed recoverable sector vehicles.
• A documented driving proxy inventory item example.
• A sample Sector Operation ready to duplicate for custom vehicles. Keep the recovery suffix consistent with the vehicle definition and let the registration code provide the safe Borrowed Wheels wrappers.

The sample vehicle is disabled by default because it points to a fake placeholder entity. Replace it with a real JA3 vehicle model before enabling it.

• UAZ
• Pickup Truck
• Minivan
• GMC Vandura
• Luxury Car
• Old Luxury Car
• Camp Truck
• Sturdy Camp Truck

This mod is built around tactical fun, not real-world insurance compliance. Vehicles in Grand Chien are loud, ugly, dangerous, occasionally haunted by pathfinding, and very useful when someone needs to cross a battlefield faster than a bullet can complain.

Expect improvements, fixes and new bad ideas over time.

If your mercenary company is swimming in cash, diamonds, suspicious bearer bonds or just feels like tipping the guy sweeping glass out of the garage, you can buy me a coffee or contribute to repairs for my real car, which is currently doing its best impression of a destroyed tactical asset.

• Buy Grim a coffee on Ko-fi[ko-fi.com]
• Contribute to Grim’s real-life vehicle repairs on PayPal[www.paypal.com]

No pressure. Grand Chien already has enough extortion rackets.

Thanks to permanent666 for the in-game website framework that made Borrowed Wheels possible.

Huge thanks to BajaResident for the original drivable vehicle concept, the “keys” to success ;), the vehicle icons, and his unwavering support.

Thanks to Svetlio for kicking this into motion with his code for locking character animations, and for his work on JA3_CommonLib.

Thanks to Silencer, also known as cockadoodledoo, for continued help, ideas and all the rest.

Thanks to Jäger Allianz for the relevant remarks and questions that kept pushing this project further.

And thanks to all the other modders I am forgetting, whose work, examples, discoveries and shared madness made it possible to get this far.

Drive carefully.
Or don’t.

– Grim

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Version: 2.31-273