Awful GTA Online Vehicles
As of today, GTA Online has seen nearly forty updates and more than four hundred different controllable vehicles added to the game, a very impressive amount indeed. But many of these vehicles stood as a testament that Rockstar can sometimes be as bad as Gearbox when it comes to game balancing.
The following is a list of vehicles that are of simple bad design, or has been rendered obsolete thanks to poor balancing and power creeping.
The sad part about these vehicles is that they are online-exclusive and are not available in single player (thankfully, they can be added in with mods on PC), and in online, they cost ridiculous amounts of money in which grinding money is very difficult for beginners.
Ground Vehicles
Armored Boxville
For nearly 3 million dollars you can get what is essentially a regular Boxville van converted into an apocalypse survival vehicle, which large amounts of scrap metal attached to it serving as rudimentary armor and a .50 cal Browning M2 HMG turret mounted on the roof.
However, name of the vehicle is simply false advertisement, the Armored Boxville is not really armored in the conventional sense. It has no resistance against explosives, meaning that it takes just one hit from an RPG or grenade launcher to turn it into a blazing scrap heap. It’s not even protected from ballistics, its tires are not bullet proof (and since it cannot be customize it, this flaw cannot be fixed), its windows can be easily shattered by just a few hits from an assault rifle, and a few seconds of continuous fire from other turreted vehicles like the Insurgent Pick-Up Custom can easily blow it up. In fact, it's even less durable than the Post-Op Boxville you use in MC sell missions.
While the M2 Browning mounted on the roof of the Boxville is a decent enough weapon, the vehicle’s height makes it very difficult for the gunner to target enemies that are too close as the gun cannot be depressed enough to hit them.
Since it’s built on a delivery truck that is already oversized and underpowered to begin with, the Armored Boxville is easily one of the slowest turreted vehicles in the game, being easily beaten by the Insurgent Pick-Up, Technical Custom and Barrage. The only thing that is slower than the Armored Boxville is the Turreted Limo, but even then the Limo is still the preferable vehicle thanks to its superior weapons and durability.
RCV
RCV stands for Riot Control Vehicle. While a large armored truck equipped with a plow and two high pressure water cannons does look rather cool and can be great for role playing or film making. It's ultimately not a worthwhile purchase in GTA Online.
First of all, the RCV is not as durable as you'd expect, it has little to no resistance to explosives, and can be blown up easily by just a single rocket. The windshield is also not bulletproof, despite being covered in meshings like the Police Transporter and the Police Riot. And while the RCV does have decent acceleration for a truck of its size, its long wheelbase makes it difficult to go around bends and the low ground clearance of the vehicle turns even simple sidewalks to obstacles.
The only things the RCV has that can be considered weapons are its water cannons, sure, you can kill people with them, but good luck trying!
The only good use for RCV is in the Repo - Burn Rate mission. While it's featured in the Doomsday Heist prep, the players are forced to steal a RCV everytime, and cannot use their own personal RCV.
Worst of all, the RCV costs a staggering $3,125,500. Even with the trade price unlocked, it still costs $2,350,000 which is simply too overpriced for a vehicle with such little use. All of these aspects combined gives little incentive for anyone to purchase a RCV.
Cheval Taipan
One of the main reasons a lot of the older supercars and sports cars in GTA Online are able to remain competitive is that many of the later additions are slower for one reason or another. The Taipan is one such example for the latter, but to the extreme.
Introduced in the mouthful that is the Southern San Andreas Super Sport Series update, the Taipan is notorious for being one of the slowest supercars in the entire game. On Broughy1322's Cutting Corners GP test track, the Taipan is the second slowest supercar in the entire game, beating only the Bullet and the Voltic which are both part of the vanilla game. In fact, the Taipan is slower than most sports class vehicles.
The reason why the car performs so poorly has perplexed many players during the initial days of the update's release. Originally it was believed that the "fEngineReistance" in the handling files was to blame, but players later found out that this value does virtually nothing. Eventually the blame was pinned on the new "Advanced Handling Flags" added to the vehicles in this update. Of which, affected the new cars most negatively. One adds traction control and causes the vehicle to shift up at a lower RPM (with the side effect of causing the RPM to fluctuate erratically at the highest gear), and the other causes the car to hit the RPM limiter for longer before shifting up a gear (basically making the car shift up slower and causing the engine RPM to fluctuate even more when both flags are used together).
This ended up greatly inhibiting the Taipan's acceleration, even though the car has a fairly remarkable top speed, it takes a considerably long time now to actually reach it. Worse still is that every time the Taipan hits a pothole or a curb, causing it to bounce. The engine will automatically rev up due to a sudden drop in friction, causing it to hit the rev limiter much quicker and further inhibiting its acceleration.
These advanced handling flags are most likely added by Rockstar to prevent exploits such as curb boosting or clutch kicking. But instead have the unintended side effect of virtually ruining the car. While the argument that the vehicle now behaves more realistically can be made, it doesn't help that none of the other vehicles introduced earlier received these flags.
Stanley Tractor
Reaching the Sponsorship Tier 1000 in Arena War is incredibly grindy, especially when the player does it legitimately without using any kind of glitches (no longer possible as those glitches have already been patched), and the fact that it's very difficult to find matches nowadays as the majority of players can no longer be bothered with playing Arena War due to the events' low payouts. But what do expect the player should get? A high end supercar? A powerful weaponized vehicle? Tough luck, all the hard work the player does, the player awards with a old and rusty tractor which is so incredibly slow that the only way for you out outrun any pursuers in this thing is for them to kill themselves laughing. Also the vehicle is about as durable as a wet paper bag, at all as several gunshots causes the engine to smoke, and the absence of a cabin means that driver is left completely exposed.
MTL Cerberus
The Cerberus is a big scrappy truck made out of other, less fortunate scrappy trucks and built to resemble the War Rig from Mad Max: Fury Road. It's somewhat ironic that the most expensive Arena Wars vehicle also happens to be the most useless.
Arguably the only thing the Cerberus has going for it is its flamethrower, it's the only flamethrower in GTA Online, and it's remote controlled which means that it has a 360° firing angle. While it's a fairly unique weapon and can be fun to mess around with. It just doesn't serve much of a purpose as its range it simply too short to be used effectively in vehicular combat. Further not helping is how the reinforced windows prevents you from using drive-by weapons in the Cerberus.
Being a large, 14 wheeled jury rigged tanker truck means that you shouldn't expect much out of the Cerberus when it comes to performance, while it does accelerate relatively quickly for a truck of this size, it's still overall pretty slow. It's so slow in fact that even a Brickade can catch up with it. The Cerberus also handles like a shipping container on shopping cart wheels. The height of the Cerberus is also an issue, as it can easily get stuck when trying to pass underneath lower bridges.
All of these unpleasant characteristics means that only those who have a deathwish will take the Cerberus into the Arena. Almost any other vehicle can outrun and outmaneuver the Cerberus easily, staying out of the range of its flamethrowers and peppering it with gunfire. And since the Cerberus is such a large and tempting target, expect other opponents to gang up on you for an easy kill. While you might be able to find some use for the Cerberus in the Hot Bomb matches by blocking the goals if you want to play dirty, there's nothing stopping the other players from blowing you up and pushing you out of the way.
Durability wise, the Cerberus doesn't come off as impressive either. The front windscreen is somewhat bullet resistant, but the side windows are just made out of regular glass. The armor of the Cerberus is not much better than most other Arena vehicles, even with the armor fully maxed out, all it takes are 2 hits from an RPG and it blows up.
And the final icing on the cake is the price, which is a staggering $3.87 million, while a trade price of $2.91 million is available, it's still a fairly tall price and it's only unlocked via a Sponsorship Tier reward (a.k.a. unlocked randomly). And the less we talk about how even the upgrades for this vehicle has trade prices, the better.
Ocelot Lynx
One of the older vehicles on this list, the Lynx was added back in the Cunning Stunts update all the way back in 2016. It's a 2-door sports coupe based off the Jaguar F-Type and placed in the increasingly bloated Sports class.
In terms of performance, the Lynx is not considered "terrible", but it isn't outstanding either. Speed wise, the Lynx has decent acceleration and top speed as well as lower than average drag coefficient, allowing to gain some ground on tracks with long straights. Its brakes and steering are also fairly responsive. Traction, however, is not the Lynx's strong points, it tends to wheelspin a bit when launching and is prone to oversteer when cornering at high speeds. Customization wise, the Lynx has a fairly diverse selection of parts available, as well as 2 race car themed liveries which looked fantastic when applied to the car.
All of this, however, comes with a staggering tall asking price of $1,735,000. While nowadays there are dozens of vehicles that are far more expensive in GTA Online, back in 2016 this makes the Lynx one of the most expensive sports cars in the entire game. Making matters worse is there are many sports cars from vanilla GTA V such as the Coquette, the 9F, the Comet, the Feltzer etc. can perform just as well, if not better around the race track while costing less than 10% of the Lynx's price.
Overall while the Lynx is in the right class, it shouldn't cost half as much as it does currently.
RUNE Zhaba
The Zhaba is a amphibious vehicle that appeared in the The Diamond Casino Heist update based in the SHERP ATV. It has a very slow speed of 105 km/h in 36 seconds and a even slow speed in underwater which is even slower than the APC, the Technical Aqua and the Blazer Aqua. Offroading is good only for small slopes, but when it comes to steep slopes, it can be a problematic due to it's slow speed. The vehicle can't be installed with weapons unlike other amphibious vehicles.
However, the durability is fairly good as it takes 14 homing missiles. The windows are semi bulletproof, taking several shots to shatter them unless the enemy has FMJ rounds.
The vehicle costs $2,400,000 with a trade price of $1,800,000 which is expensive.
Air Vehicles
Oppressor Mk II
This list will be incomplete without this one. The Oppressor Mk II vehicle that has changed GTA Online forever... and for the worse.
First of all, the Oppressor Mk II looks like the Specter (the STAG hoverbike, not the sports car based in the Aston Martin DB11 that appears in GTA Online) from Saints Row The Third making it a copycat. It makes utterly zero sense engineering wise, and is simply too sci-fi to fit into the GTA universe without screwing up its timeline royally. It's essentially the same as adding attack helicopters and tanks in Red Dead Online.
The biggest issue for the Oppressor Mk II is that is has pretty much no Kryptonite. It’s a jet bike that can hover like a helicopter but with none of its cumbersomeness, and can accelerate as quickly as a jet can. Its small size also makes it an extremely difficult target to hit. This means that the Oppressor Mk II can easily outmaneuver most missiles with ease and pop off some countermeasures if things don’t work out for it. Did we mention that it can equip countermeasures unlike the Mk I Oppressor?
The missiles of the Oppressor Mk II, while limited in ammo capacity, are decently powerful, can be fired at steady and high rate and has homing capabilities beaten only by the Chernobog. And since it’s classified as a motorcycle in-game, it can easily be spawned by just pressing a single button on the MC or Terrorbyte menu, with no cooldown whatsoever. Heck, you can even register it as your favorite bike in your MC and gain increased health regeneration and other benefits from it.
All in all, the Oppressor Mk II is the GTA Online griefer’s wet dream, it requires next to no skill to use effectively, and has pretty much rendered most military vehicles, such as jets or attack helicopters, OBSOLETE. Griefers can easily spawn it using the MC menu, and back then use the passive popping exploit to troll the ever living daylights out of other players.
Thankfully, Rockstar has at least fixed the abuse with passive mode popping by preventing weaponized vehicles from entering passive mode, as well as forcing a cooldown before entering passive mode for those who have killed other players. But the Oppressor Mk II is still as irritating as ever, and the optimal tool for tryhards and griefers in Online.
However as for The Criminal Enterprises update it nerfed the Oppressor MkII by reducing the effectiveness of the homing missiles and countermeasures, with the former now struggling to hit the target. And what's better is that all Bussineses and Cargo missions can now finally do in Crew, Invite, Friends and Solo sessions meaning that the player can leisurely do those missions without the risk of dealing with annoying griefers, especially those riding in Oppressor MkIIs.
As for April 27th, 2023 the price is increased to 8 million making the paywall even worse.
Swift Deluxe & Luxor Deluxe
While these are two distinctively different aircraft, both the Luxor Deluxe and Swift Deluxe can be placed under the category of "bragging rights" vehicles. In other words, they are overpriced and useless by design.
These two vehicles are essentially "gold plated" versions (most likely just glided, as making any plane out of solid gold is a terrible idea) of their regular counterparts: the Buckingham Luxor private jet and Swift helicopter. They do not have any better performance compared to their standard counterparts and cost outrageous prices: $10 million for the Luxor and $5 million for the Swift. And the only special aspects they have besides the flashy golden paintjob is the ability to drink champagne, smoke cigars and browse the computer while riding as a passenger... (this feature was not available in the late PS3 and Xbox 360 versions from Grand Theft Auto Online making the purchase even more useless) in a plane that you have to pilot yourself, yeah.
So not only do these ultra-expensive vehicles do not come with their own chauffeur, but also you cannot enter passive mode in them, guess the bling is too much for this game. The ability to browse the internet onboard is also equally pointless, as you can just whip out your iFruit and browse the web on that instead.
RO-86 Alkonost
Ever since the Doomsday Heist, the players have been wanting a bomber that can enter stealth mode like the Akula attack helicopter. This request was finally answered by Rockstar in the Cayo Perico Heist update with the RO-86 Alkonost.
Problem? The Alkonost is a “semi-stealth aircraft”, and by semi-stealth we mean that it only enters stealth mode when you have reached 2000 ft in altitude. Anyone with some knowledge in WWII history will know just how hard it is hitting your targets from high altitude with unguided bombs can be. And it’s more or less the same in GTA Online, where you don’t even get a basic bomb sight. Hence why Pyre Realm describe bombs as “Hah, I was there 30 seconds ago!” weapons. But then again, even if you can enter stealth mode at any altitude like the Annihilator Stealth or the Akula, it’s not like it’s gonna help much. Since the RO-86 Alkonost is based off the Tupolev Tu-160, the world's largest supersonic bomber, it's rather cumbersome and absolutely enormous. In fact, it's so large that it takes up an ENTIRE HANGER just to store it! If you try to spawn it at a bad location, it can simply clip into the environment and explode!
Flying a big and slow aircraft like this at low altitudes makes you a rather easy target to hit. But sadly, it appears that the Alkonost is no more durable than the old Volatol. It can take only two hits from a homing launcher before exploding on the third hit. And while the Alkonost does have countermeasures, it's sluggishness and size makes it an easy target for a RPG as well, and one hit from that weapon means that the Alkonost becomes history.
What’s even more ridiculous is that the landing gears of the Alkonost are so stubby that it has next to no ground clearance! It’s pretty much impossible to land it at Sandy Shores Airfield, because you are definitely going to clip your wings against a rock or a bush, even landing it at LSIA is daunting thanks to the abundance of runway lights. It can easily scrape the ground if you do so much as turn too quickly while taxiing it. Thankfully, the Alkonost does have a very short take off distance. The short landing gears are most likely intended to facilitate in the enter vehicle animation, but this is pointless as the player can simply teleport into the cockpit by walking into it and press enter vehicle.
While slightly faster and notably more agile than the old Volatol, the Alkonost is still a big and heavy aircraft, the biggest issue is that it has rather poor yaw capabilities, which is something you really want on a bomber using UGBs in order to course correct it. Further not helping the fact is that the Alkonost can carry just a measly 50 bombs, even though IRL the Tu-160’s payload capacity is only slightly lower than the Avro Vulcan’s (40000 kg vs 45000 kg). Making things more problematic is how being a dedicated bomber, the bombs are the Alkonost's only weapons.
While a minor issue, unlike the Tu-160, the Alkonost has no functional variable sweep wings, which just goes on to show how lazy Rockstar has become when modders can easily incorporate this function into their aircraft mods. In fact, if it had variable sweep wings, it probably won't clip into so many obstacles when taking off and landing!
To top it all off, the Alkonost costs a staggering $4.35 million which you can reduce to a slightly lower $3.26 million by using it as the approach vehicle in the Cayo Perico heist. But even then it's simply too much of an asking price for a plane that is too impractical to use effectively.
RM-10 Bombushka
The RM-10 Bombushka is what you get when you combine the An-12 with the Tu-4. It's a weaponized cargo plane with a decent amount of space on the inside, a total of 3 gun turrets that can be used by the passengers, the ability to deploy countermeasures and a bomb way with the standard capacity of 50 bombs. All of this gives the Bombushka the appearance of a very versatile plane, but looks can be deceiving.
The first and most obvious issue for the Bombushka is incredibly slow speed. It's easily the absolute slowest plane in the entire game, even with all the engine upgrades it can barely manage 90 mph at altitude which is even slower than the already sluggish Titan. Helicopters like the Police Maverick can keep up with this thing effortlessly. So hopefully you have a friend on board who can operate the gun turrets, because otherwise you're pretty much free game for the entire lobby flying this slow and ungainly hunk of junk. While you can equip the Bombushka with JATO thrusters to allow it to take off much quicker, there's not much you can do about the speed unless you have a buddy in a faster plane use Formation Flight Assist.
Handling wise, the Bombushka performs just as abysmally. Its turning radius is not so much a turning radius, and more of a circumnavigation of the Earth. And in case you're wandering, never try to do stunts in this thing, you'll just stall and crash. Unsurprisingly, the awful handling makes it difficult to use the bombs. Another annoying little trait about the Bombushka is that it has a tendency to climb while cruising, forcing you to constantly force the nose back down.
The gun turrets on the Bombushka might just be its saving grace. They are equipped with dual .50 cal machine guns at stock, but they can be upgraded to dual 30mm autocannons loaded with explosive rounds. And while the fire rate of these cannons are laughably low, they still pack a decent punch and have excellent range, allowing a skilled gunner to wreak havoc on the streets of Los Santos. The gunner can also switch between the 3 turrets at any time.
Now, in order to use the Bombushka as a gunship or a bomber, it needs to have a decent amount of durability to survive whatever the average GTA Online player is capable of throwing at it. Sadly, durability is just another aspect that the Bombushka is lacking in. Even with maximum armor, the Bombushka takes just 3 missiles from a homing launcher to destroy. And while countermeasures can help you evade some missiles, the biggest problem for the Bombushka is the Heavy Sniper Mk II which can hit it with little difficulty thanks to the Bombushka's awfully low speed, and much like the homing launchers, three hits and down in flames it goes. While the Bombushka can endure one collision with obstacles, that's most likely due to how slow the plane is.
But, wait, remember how the Bombushka is a weaponized cargo plane? That's right, it has a decently sized cargo bay and you can open its rear door. It could even load up some large vehicles such as the Boxville. Originally, the players found a decent use for this aircraft in some relatively frustrating missions, such as the Post-Op Boxville sell missions for the MC. But much to the chagrin of the players, Rockstar added an invisible wall to the cargo bay of the Bombushka so nothing can be loaded into it anymore. So now even one of the niche uses for an already underwhelming plane is gone.
Now, the answer to the question of whether this plane is truly worth $5,918,500 is pretty evident now. Even the trade price of $4,450,000 is still too much.