I tried American Truck Simulator’s cars, and now I can’t wait for more The upcoming Road Trip car DLC is set to add a fresh perspective to American Truck Simulator, but it was the collectable nature of the Atlas system that really engaged us. When American Truck Simulator confirmed it would be making cars, and licensed ones at that, the Traxion team was simultaneously bemused and intrigued. Firstly, the SCS Software development team do an exemplary job at simulating truck driving and replicating real-world vehicles accurately. So, naturally, we expected the cars to be exacting in their detail. But what would you do with them in-sim? It’s not like a Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat is used to haul freight or diggers around, is it? It transpires that a whole new gameplay loop has been created, dubbed the Atlas system, which was detailed in recent weeks. Which leads us to Gamescom, where, when trying the new Thrustmaster SimTask Truck-40 wheel, we had a brief and surprise hands-on with a car in ATS. This upcoming downloadable content sits under a ‘Road Trip’ umbrella, with two available packs. One for Ford cars and one for Dodge and RAM cars. There’s no release date yet, although alongside Coaches for sibling title Euro Truck Simulator 2, they seemed polished already based on this particular work-in-progress build. I was able to drive the Ford F-150 truck. That’s ‘truck’ in the pick-up truck sense, not HGV sense. Using only a keyboard as my control device, I was able to cruise the highways near, and drive through the city of San Francisco. The high-torque engine under the hood burbled authentically, the interior looked detailed and even the reversing camera was functional. I was able to reach highway speeds too, something I did wonder how the slow-paced game would