Grand Theft Auto VI Extended Look reveals Its Nissan Skyline and BMW E30 lookalikes 

Rockstar Games has released roughly 26 minutes of Grand Theft Auto VI gameplay, and the car world has spent the hours since picking apart which real-world vehicles are hiding behind the game’s fictional badges. 

Rockstar has never licensed a real car for a Grand Theft Auto game. Instead it invents manufacturers whose names and design cues shadow the real thing – Vapid for Ford, Declasse for Chevrolet, Bravado for Dodge, Grotti for Ferrari, Pegassi for Lamborghini and Benefactor for Mercedes-Benz – which turns every trailer into a spot-the-donor-car exercise. 

Culture title Hypedrive got in early with an Instagram carousel identifying a BMW 3 Series E30 Cabriolet, a Mercedes-Benz CL65 AMG, a Mercedes-Benz S65 AMG parked alongside a BMW M2, a Rolls-Royce Cullinan, a Chevrolet Corvette C8 and, in the street-race sequence, a Nissan Skyline GT-R sitting next to what it called a Subaru BRZ. 

Its own comment section pushed back within minutes. The Nissan is widely read as an R32-generation Skyline GT-R rather than the R34 – it is the car already in Grand Theft Auto Online – while the four-door running beside it looks far more like an Alfa Romeo Giulia than a two-door BRZ. The ‘Range Rover Discovery’ label on another slide describes a car that does not exist, the Discovery being a Land Rover and Range Rover a separate line. 

Other outlets have gone further. TopSpeed reads the ’55 Vapid Stanier as an Oldsmobile 88 tribute and argues the game’s headline supercar is a composite – a Ferrari 488 Pista nose, an SF90 Stradale tail and a Pininfarina Battista side profile. Supercar Blondie flagged the Vapid Caracara as a close read of the Ford F-150 Raptor, plus an El Camino-style ute, a Porsche 718 Cayman analogue and the returning Bravado Banshee, long understood as the Dodge Viper. 

These are some of the comparisons made so far.

More interesting than any single badge is what surrounds them. The footage shows illegal street sprints in graphics-wrapped Japanese coupes, a circuit race with full aero, liveries and a genuine pack fighting for position, and dirt bikes running countryside trails with spectators. Rockstar appears to be building a car culture in Leonida rather than a car park. 

Grand Theft Auto VI launches November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with the Extended Look the last scheduled look at the game before hands-on previews begin. 

Customisation remains the open question. Rockstar showed modified cars but not the menus behind them, so whether Leonida’s tuning scene is cosmetic or something deeper is still anyone’s guess – and the spotting will keep going right up to launch.