Pacific Drive: How to Diagnose and Fix Your Car

In Pacific Drive, your jalopy car is your lifeline. It needs to be running at all times if you wish to survive from one roadtrip to the next, and maintenance is positively crucial for this to work. As cool as it might be to replace bits and bobs and customize your ride, after all, it's all for nothing if the bloody thing doesn't run. If you need a primer on how to figure out what's wrong with your ride, and how to fix it - this is the guide to read.

As we previously explained, there's a whole lot of complexity to your Pacific Drive car. Even in its simplest, most basic setup - the rust-ridden jalopy you start with - it'll still require some extra panelling work and a tyre replacement or two to keep it trucking. And boy howdy do you want to keep it trucking, now that you're stuck in the Olympic Exclusion Zone. The good news, though, is that it's easy enough to maintain your Volvo lookalike if you cross your Ts and dot your i-s. It all boils down to diagnosis and preparation, really!

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Fixing your car in Pacific Drive

Just the way you need, say, the Impact Hammer to break apart plasma containers, so too do you need the right tools to fix up your car in Pacific Drive. Broadly, the vast majority of problems can be resolved by keeping a healthy stock of Sealing Kits and Putty at all times. Ideally, you'll have a few of these kits around in your headquarters garage, yes, but also in the trunk of your car. After all, tires can and will pop - especially the early-game trash you'll be stuck with for a little while.

So, Sealing Kits and Putty as a baseline, but how do you identify what needs fixing in the first place? That's where the game's diagnostics tools come into the picture.

Diagnosing the problem

Almost immediately upon reaching the garage, you'll have to pick up a set of fancy diagnostic glasses hanging nearby. These are, in effect, your most useful gadget, as they project a cool HUD onto your eyes and allow you to diagnose any and all problems with your vehicle. To learn what's up with a particular jalopy part and, more importantly, how to fix it, simply hold 'C' while hovering over the part itself.

After a moment or two, the diagnostics UI will let you know what the issue is and what items you'll need to resolve it!

Fixing the issue

After diagnosis, you simply need to use one of your crafting stations to build the appropriate repair kit, then apply it to the component that's been broken. Note, however, that while you can patch up a tire that's deflated, that same tire might eventually outright explode. If that happens, you'll need to replace the part outright, which is a bit more hands-on.

Can you fix your Pacific Drive car while on a mission?

Indeed, you can fix your car while on the road in Pacific Drive. That's arguably half the game, now that we think of it, as almost all the Olympic Exclusion Zone anomalies you'll come across will punt your jalopy around like it's made of cardboard.

The same principles we outlined above apply here, too, thankfully. The only real difference is that you'll usually be facing resource limitations and, potentially, immediate danger. That's precisely why we recommend keeping a stock of repair kits and a spare tire in your car's trunk. You never know when the ground might start receding, after all.

Play Pacific Drive on PC today!