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Death Stranding 2
All Death Stranding 2 vehicles and how to get them
Joel Franey
26 June 2025
There are two proper DS2 vehicles, along with their upgrades and a wildcard third option: monorails.
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(Image credit: Sony)
All vehicles
Best vehicle
The Tri-Cruiser
The Pickup Off-Roader
The Monorail
Death Stranding 2 vehicles will speed up your ability to traverse and explore the world while also acting as pack mules, with the Tri-Cruiser bike and Off-Roader Pickup being your main choices. There aren’t many vehicles in Death Stranding 2 beyond this basic design of car and trike, though there are a few other useful travel options – powered exoskeletons, the DHV Magellan used for fast travel, and the real third option, the Monorail tracks that you can build to create your own rail network.
I’ll go through all the specific vehicle options below for Death Stranding 2, as well as how you can unlock those vehicles yourself and what they have to offer in gameplay. I’ll also cover a few of the extraneous options, and what you can do to improve them.
All vehicles in Death Stranding 2
(Image credit: Sony)
There are two deployable vehicles in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach that you can unlock throughout the game, as well as a third vehicle system built into the game’s infrastructure:
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The Tri-Cruiser (trike)
The Pickup Off-Roader (truck)
The Monorail (trains)
I’ll cover each of these below, but ultimately the three of them are designed to work well in different situations and have different strengths. I found that the Pickup to be the most useful, though the Monorail is incredibly helpful if you can get it set up correctly. Death Stranding 2 fast travel is a completely separate matter, however.
Best vehicle in Death Stranding 2
(Image credit: Sony)
There’s no definitive best vehicle in Death Stranding 2 (they’re all designed to serve different functions), but if you don’t know what you’re dealing with ahead and want an all-rounder, I recommend the Pickup Off-Roader truck. It’s fast enough, has a decent battery life, can hold and protect a lot of cargo, and the Sticky Cannon and heavy machine gun give it a serious edge once you unlock them.
That being said, all the vehicles have their own particular niches. I’ll lay out those below, as well as how you acquire all these special vehicles throughout the game.
How to unlock the Tri-Cruiser bike
(Image credit: Sony)
The Tri-Cruiser is unlocked as part of the main story, after you complete Main Order 6 and defeat the Death Stranding 2 first BT boss. This motorcycle isn’t given directly to you but you’ll get a blueprint from Alex Weatherstone at the Geophysics Lab that lets you fabricate a Tri-Cruiser in any settlement using the following components:
160 Ceramics
10 Chemicals
The trike is, in essence, an option that prioritizes speed and control at the cost of all else. It has very few customization options, not much battery and can’t carry much cargo, but if you need to reach a location on the map as quickly as possible, this is the vehicle for you. Just make sure you have some spare batteries or a PCC to build a generator, as the battery wears out fairly quickly, especially when driven through water and when using the boost.
How to unlock the Pickup Off-Roader truck
(Image credit: Sony)
The truck that DS2 offers is the Pickup Off-Roader, a buggy-like construction that Sam rides at the front of. You can find lesser versions of this vehicle in bandit camps, but they’re not as good as the versions you build yourself. To unlock this, simply progress the story until you complete mission 13 and restore a section of the monorail attached to West Fort Knot (F1). As a reward, the city’s leader, Olivia Westbury, will give you the fabrication schematics for the Off-Roader. Building one will cost you the following materials:
230 Ceramics
20 Chemicals
(Image credit: Sony)
The Pickup is designed for massive haulage and can carry about 900kg of cargo before being full. It’s fairly resilient, can be modified more extensively than the Tri-Cruiser, and can be outfitted with a Heavy Machine Gun and Sticky Cannon that automatically retrieves nearby cargo. You’ll unlock these additional upgrades when you reach the point in the story where you add the F2 Distribution Centre to the Chiral Network, while building reputation with other settlements will unlock minor additions, like bigger battery upgrades.
How to unlock the Monorail
(Image credit: Sony)
The Monorail and train system is a part of the Australian infrastructure system in Death Stranding 2, and requires players to find Tracklayer stations. Basically, all the monorails are broken and you need to rebuild them. This system will be introduced to you as part of Mission 13, but there are plenty of optional sections of monorail around the world for you to find. They usually connect major cities and large mines together, so that massive amounts of resources can be extracted and sent to various locations.
To build a monorail, you just need to find a Tracklayer terminal and give it large amounts of Chiral Crystals, Resins and Special Alloys. The quantities will vary, but it’s far better to do this after the area they’re in has been hooked up to the Chiral Network, so other players can contribute and you have to add less.
(Image credit: Sony)
The monorail can be used as a zipline by Sam in an emergency, but that will only carry him and what’s on him. To move huge amounts of cargo and vehicles, you need to complete the entire monorail between two key locations, with no gaps in the track. Then go to any settlement or building that’s hooked up to the network, interact with the terminal, and choose to use the monorail. You can pick what you load on, and what your destination is. You can even choose to drop down at any point along the route (though the contents of the cargo containers will keep going), if you see something you want to interact with.
While we reckon the Off-Roader is the best vehicle, the Tri-Cruiser is great to have early on in Mexico when you need to deliver cargo to the Death Stranding 2 Artist and the Death Stranding 2 Bokka.
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Joel Franey is a writer, journalist, podcaster and raconteur with a Masters from Sussex University, none of which has actually equipped him for anything in real life. As a result he chooses to spend most of his time playing video games, reading old books and ingesting chemically-risky levels of caffeine. He is a firm believer that the vast majority of games would be improved by adding a grappling hook, and if they already have one, they should probably add another just to be safe. You can find old work of his at USgamer, Gfinity, Eurogamer and more besides.
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