In Martin Amis’ satirical paean to 80s excess, Money, his antihero John Self drives a large, self-regarding, and overbearing purple car. Its name? The Fiasco, ‘a vintage-style coupe with oodles of dash and heft and twang.’ Along the way, Self encounters various other car brands – Farragos, Tomahawks, Boomerangs and Autocrats.
The opening image, as rendered in game
They’re exactly the kind of names that would tickle the creatives at Rockstar Games, who have long populated their Grand Theft Auto series with a variety of outlandish – but not entirely improbably named – vehicles for players to steal, race, collect and cruise around a vast game world.
GTA 6 is no different. So much so, that Rockstar has allowed the virtual to spill over into the real world, with six fully driveable versions of their digital counterparts seeded on the streets of Miami, Florida, as the ultimate stealthy promo for the game (due out November 2019).
In GTA, vehicles are similar but not lawsuit-adjacent to real-world cars, satirical take-offs of the kind of machines favoured by those on adjacent, outside, above and beyond the law. The unlicensable kind, in other words.
For example, there’s the low-slung elegance of the Grotti Cheetah, a dead-ringer for the 80s-era Ferrari Testarossa (as driven by James ‘Sonny’ Crockett in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, one of the foundational jumping off points for GTA’s sojourns in the city). Or you could choose the Invetero Coquette, a car with more than a passing resemblance to the current generation Corvette.
For a more vernacular feel, there’s the Albany Manana, seen here running the kind of Hi-Riser wheel set-up favoured by the area’s custom culture and based in part on the eighth-generation Cadillac Eldorado (1967 to 1970) – the purest, boxiest era of American car design.
It’s joined by another ‘Albany’ model, the Buccaneer, a mash-up of the 70s Buick Riviera and the seventh-generation Ford Fairlane, albeit with tiny wheels and a menacing grille, both inspired by custom buildings.
Then there’s the Pegassi Tempesta, shown here in Police logo. It’s a clear derivation of the Lamborghini Huracán, particularly the version supplied for use by the Italian police force. Finally, there’s a hypercar, the Progen Emerus, Rockstar’s take on the limited-edition 2018 McLaren Senna.
To bring these cars into the real world, Rockstar Games teamed up with West Coast Customs in Los Angeles to bend, shape and spray a series of real cars to resemble their fictional counterparts.
We’re willing to bet that real examples of the Ferrari, Corvette, Lamborghini and 70s American metal lie beneath these machines; maybe Rockstar’s budget even ran to modifying one of the 500 highly collectable Sennas ever built.
West Coast Customs went to work with metal fabrication and CNC machining, transforming all the cars inside and out so match the virtual models in ever way. In game, Miami’s fictional stand-in, Leonida, will have its own array of custom shops where you’ll be able to carry out similar modifications, choosing paint, trim and accessories.
It’s worth noting too that two of the architectural locations seen here, the currently threatened Miami Marine Stadium, designed by Hilario Candela in 1963, and Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage, look like they’ll also turn up in the finished game as locations to visit.
Grand Theft Auto VI is available on 19 November 2026 for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, Pre-order now.