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- Primary Subject: The Broken Car Subgenre - Driving and Fixing Games
- Key Update: An overview of the best games focusing on repairing, maintaining, and driving old or broken cars.
- Status: Confirmed
- Last Verified: October 30, 2026
- Quick Answer: The broken car subgenre focuses on maintaining and fixing unreliable vehicles. Top titles include My Summer Car, Jalopy, The Long Drive, and Car Mechanic Simulator.
While mainstream racing games often deal with the fantasy of driving fast, high-powered supercars that don’t get wrecked, there’s a growing subgenre of racing games that deal with the reality of the exact opposite: slow, clunky junkshop cars held together with scrap and metal.
These games fall under the broken car subgenre, a growing niche of racing games where the focal point is not on the vehicle itself, but on the intimate relationship between a shitbox and its driver.
Some players can relate to the experience of owning a cheap daily driver as their first car. Others like building up cars from the ground up, creating an unbreakable bond. Others still think of repairing cars as some sort of meditation, a form of therapy while performing routine maintenance.
Whatever your reason to play, here are some of the best games that capture the feeling of going from zero to hero in a beater car.
My Summer Car Tests Your Patience
This game is not for the faint of heart. My Summer Car is the ultimate test of patience for car enthusiasts. Here, you must assemble the “Satsuma” (a stylized Datsun) from scratch, piece by piece. That means building the engine, tightening every single nut and bolt, and wiring the electronics. If you miss a single step or put an assembly together out of order, you’re gonna have a bad time.
My Summer Car is also a survival game. You have to juggle thirst, hunger, and stress levels, all while doing odd jobs to earn money to keep yourself alive. It sounds like something from a coming-of-age road trip movie, except you’re the main character who has to fix everything.
If the player character has to manage stress levels in-game, then so do you. The game makes it easy to feel frustrated when unexpected problems and setbacks seem to chip away at your progress in building the car.
But on the flip side, when you manage to make things run smoothly, it feels equally as rewarding. There’s no better feeling than, well, success. Especially when doing it by yourself.
Of course, for new players, you don’t really have to do it all by yourself. There are guides available online that will give, but not spoon-feed, information to help you finish the game.
Even for those with no knowledge of how cars work, the entire game will leave you with a better understanding and appreciation of the mechanisms behind cars.
A Jalopy Can Save You
Where My Summer Car is about building a car from the ground up, Jalopy is about keeping a dying car alive until you reach your destination.
A jalopy is an old and dilapidated car that is falling apart, and unfortunately, it’s all you have as transport on your journey. You drive the “Laika” (based on the Trabant 601 Deluxe) and, together with your uncle, must traverse former Soviet bloc territories.
Jalopy is a poor man’s drive to survive, literally. It highlights the important bond between driver and car, with the player upgrading and maintaining the Laika to deal with the changing conditions of a procedurally generated world. Break the car, repair, and upgrade, then rinse and repeat.
The Laika becomes something more than a car; it’s a lifeline, a hope, a legacy. Jalopy forces you to look at the relationship between owner and thing in a world increasingly governed by planned obsolescence. Take care of your car, and it will take care of you.
An Open Road Sandbox in The Long Drive
The Long Drive is a different type of experience. The car can be a weapon or a friend. The road is dangerous. The world is chaotic. And the game is deeply unserious.
This game is a textbook example of jank, but the jankiness actually ends up becoming part of the game’s charm. The car/s are broken, and so is the physics engine. In The Long Drive, there are no rules—it’s a road trip sandbox.
It’s hard to describe this game to a person who hasn’t seen it yet. There are a lot of things that can be done in-game—such as swapping car parts on the fly and driving with one hand on the wheel and holding a cigar in the other. In fact, it might be faster to list things that can’t be done. The Long Drive is all about freedom, and it does that aspect pretty well.
Honorable Mention: Car Mechanic Simulator 2021
Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 (and the upcoming 2027 sequel) is a tried-and-true staple for the gearheads who like fixing broken cars. In this fix-em-up game, you manage an auto repair shop, diagnosing, repairing, and maintaining other people’s cars.
However, there’s also an option to build up project cars. You can restore old junkyard cars or even buy one for personal use and tuning. The finished cars can be sold for a high profit, which lets you restore even more cars.
Those players who heavily lean into the zen of doing car maintenance will greatly enjoy this pick.
An Evolving Subgenre
These games prove that there is a demand for “survival” mechanics in racing games. There’s nothing quite like fixing something right and making it work. A new red Ferrari is a fancy toy, but a beat-up, patched-up piece of junk that you fixed feels like an old friend.
Other games carry the spirit of the broken car subgenre as well, such as Pacific Drive, Mon Bazou, and Slaverian Trucker.
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