Everything on this site is written by a small editorial team led by Jarno. The method matters more than the byline, which is why the method is on this page and the byline is at the bottom of every article. This page describes exactly how a claim gets onto GTA Playbook, and what has to be true before it does.
Sources, and only these
Six sources, all published by Rockstar Games:
- Trailer 1 (December 2023) and Trailer 2 (May 2025)
- the Extended Look, 26 minutes 48 seconds of gameplay footage
- the official press pack, 99 screenshots at 3840 × 2160
- the cover art
- the studio renders on Rockstar’s own media page, images at 3840 × 2160 made for the Ultimate Edition and the Vintage Vice City Pack, 46 of which are on file here. They are promotional images rather than gameplay, they are labelled as such on every page that uses one, and like the press pack they have no timecode, because there is no video behind them
We do not use leaked builds, datamined files, or the 2022 development footage that was stolen and published. That material may well be accurate. It is not ours to republish, and a site whose value is that its claims are checkable cannot rest half of them on a source it will not show you.
From footage to a claim
The footage is cut into contact sheets and every sheet is looked at by eye. Anything identifiable is logged as a sighting: what it is, which frame, the timecode, the camera angle. A sighting is an observation, not yet a page.
Then the part that takes the time. For each sighting the subject is measured — a box placed over the frame on a coordinate grid, recorded as a proportion of the image so it stays correct at any resolution. That box is what you see on the page, and it is why a crop here lines up with the thing it claims to show.
Measuring is not a formality. Early on, three crops were estimated by eye instead of measured. All three were wrong. That is a 100% failure rate on a sample of three, which is small but was enough: nothing is published from an estimate now.
The measurement also catches misreadings that a glance never would. Rendering the crops for the press pack turned up a “police car” that was the rear of a dark saloon with its brake light on, a “pump-action shotgun” that was a carbine with a ribbed box magazine and a flat-top rail, and a “motor yacht” that was a speedboat up on the plane. All three had been logged by someone looking at a full frame. All three were corrected by looking at the crop.
The principle that came out of it is short enough to remember: a note on a frame is a suspicion, a note on a crop is an observation.
What a page claims, and what it does not
On 22 September 2026 we re-read five pages that had passed a text check with no errors found. The second reading found ten errors in eighty claims — 12.5%, close to this site’s own average. Two of the ten were in text written that same day, from the master image, by the person doing the checking.
The useful thing was not the number but the kind. A tailgate exhaust called chrome that measures darker than the paint around it. A position given as a percentage of the rear panel. A saturation ratio that could not be reproduced. A wedge on a roof rack described as sitting on the wrong end. A second ceiling light nobody had counted. Micro-claims. Every extra sentence is another chance to be wrong, and not one of those five would have helped anyone recognise the thing on the page.
So the rule changed on 22 September 2026, and it runs the other way from what you might expect of a site that measures everything:
A page claims, in its running text, only what helps you. What it is and what class it belongs to. The three to five features that tell it apart from something similar. Where and when you can see it, with the source and the timecode. What the name rests on, and what that does and does not carry. And what we do not know.
That leaves a list of things you will not find in the prose any more: RGB values, pixel sizes, percentages of the frame, hue and saturation figures, magnification factors, coordinates on the master image. Those measurements have not gone away — they are why the page exists. They live in the data and appear on the page in a small table that the site builds from that data. The distinction matters more than it looks: a number the site generates has been validated, and a number typed into a sentence has not. A figure in running prose is a figure nobody checks again.
We measure everything. We claim what counts.
Lettering has a floor of its own. Below twenty pixels of letter height on the original frame we do not read it, and the page says so. The floor used to be ten. Between 20 and 22 September 2026 every reading that failed — a pawnshop sign, a route number, a word on a lifeguard tower, a number on a jersey, one character of a registration — sat between ten and twenty pixels, or was half covered. At ten the strokes still come apart; what comes apart is a word you expect, laid over pixels that do not carry it.
How small is too small
Not everything visible deserves a page. A car three streets down is in the footage, and a crop of it is forty pixels of colour. The rule that decides has three parts, and all three are measured against the frame rather than fixed in pixels: the frames on file here come at two sizes, 3840 and 1920 pixels wide, so a rule written in pixels would quietly be two different rules.
- The floor. Below 5% of the frame height, or 0.25% of its area, nothing is logged at all — unless there is lettering on it we can read. That figure is not arbitrary: it is the size of the police helicopter crop published here, 96 by 54 pixels on a frame 1,920 wide, and that one works only because a helicopter against an empty sky cannot be mistaken for anything else. The exception has one condition: the lettering has to come apart on the true pixels of the original, not on an enlargement. The floor is there to stop crops too small to say anything about; a name you can read is proof that this one is not.
- The gate. A page has to pass the recognition test: can three things be written down from this crop that rule out a different vehicle? A colour and a body shape are not three things. Square headlights, a bright strip along the flank at door-handle height and a badge on the wing behind the arch are. When the answer is no, the sighting joins the gallery of a vehicle that already has a page and no new page is made — because the alternative is a page whose “how to recognise it” section describes half the cars in the game.
- The sieve. 0.7% of the area and 5% of the height decide how that test is taken, not whether there is a page. Above those figures the test is simply put to the crop. Below them a record can still earn a page, but the three features have to be written out one by one, and each has to rule out a different vehicle on its own. Lettering you can read on the vehicle counts as one of the three, and is itself the proof that the image is large enough: what you can read, you can see.
Size used to be the gate, and it was moved twice before we accepted it was answering the wrong question. The height figure was 8% and then 5%. The 8% came from the crops we had in September 2026, which were nearly all cars, and on a car height and area rise together — so the two lines said much the same thing twice. On something long and low they do not. A freight train on a bridge stands 1,067 pixels wide in the frame, three times the area we ask for, and failed on a height of 159. Lowering the height to 5% brought the train in and then, on the five pages still below the line, four of them turned out to be failing on area instead — three of those had cleared the old height figure all along. A number you have to move three times is not measuring what you wanted to know. What you wanted to know is whether there is enough there to tell this vehicle from another one, and that is the recognition test. So on 22 September 2026 the measurements stopped deciding and went back to what they are good at: saving us from opening a forty-pixel crop at all.
The rule is now enforced by the thing that builds the site rather than by whoever is writing that day. The figures come from one place in the code, so a second version of them cannot grow up alongside; the three features are a field on the record itself, and fewer than three means the record cannot carry a page, whatever its size. We made that change on 22 September 2026 after finding pages that had gone up without the measurement being taken. There is no list of exemptions: a record that sits under the sieve and keeps its page carries its own written-out test, in public, on the page.
Of the seven records that sat under the old line, five stay and two do not. The offshore racing boat keeps its page on the name across its hull; a transit bus and a pipe trailer keep theirs on three features each; a dark crossover with a red zigzag along both doors gets one. A white saloon does not: what looked like three features was a colour and a shape in three wrappers, so the page has come down, the sighting stays in the gallery, and it is listed with the reason on the verification page. A dark red coupe seen from behind on a forecourt stays what it was, an observation on someone else’s page.
Names
One rule, and there is no second way in: a vehicle carries a name here when Rockstar gives that name in its own material, or when the name is legible on the vehicle itself in a frame we can show you. A recognisable in-game emblem counts as lettering under that rule, provided the emblem is on the page. A badge you can see and match across two frames is evidence; a badge you were told about is not. Where we identify a maker from its emblem rather than from a word, the page says so in as many words.
What that comes to, as of 18 September 2026: Rockstar has named seven GTA 6 vehicles in its own website material, and all seven have a page here. Six more pages carry a name we read off the bodywork ourselves. So thirteen of our 115 vehicle pages carry a name with a source you can check; the other 102 describe what is visible — a red mid-engine supercar, a box truck in gold livery — and say so.
Until 17 September 2026 there was a third way in, and it was a mistake. A name that a community database carried was good enough, as long as the credit went with it. Nineteen pages were titled that way, and on 17 September all nineteen were retitled for what is in the frame. The identifications did not disappear: each of those pages now carries the name as somebody else’s claim, with the page it came from, the date we read it, what in our own frame supports it and what does not. Every named vehicle, and why lists all of it, name by name.
When a real name appears — Rockstar publishes it, or a sharper frame makes a badge legible — the page moves to it and the old address redirects. That has already happened in both directions.
The same rule runs the other way for the real car underneath. Rockstar never names a real manufacturer — Grotti and Vapid exist precisely so that it does not have to — so a real-world donor on this site is either something we argue from the frame, with the features written out so you can check them, or something we have taken from somebody else. Twenty-seven pages carry a donor from GTABase’s GTA 6 list, and each says so in the facts panel with their page for that vehicle and the date we read it. A donor can never carry Rockstar as its source, and it never appears here with no source at all.
Where a name comes from somebody else, one source puts it on the page and two put it in the title. The block below a vehicle’s picture, the page description and the structured data can carry a single citation, because all three say plainly whose claim it is. A title cannot: that is where a search engine and a reader take the name to be what the page is about, however carefully the attribution is worded. So a borrowed name reaches the title only when two independent sources give it for the same shot, and two sites that copy each other are one source — if one of them credits its data to the other, or is a fork of it running the same text, they do not count twice. The two sources do different jobs, so we ask different things of them. One of them has to point at the picture we are showing you — the file name of the same official screenshot, or a timecode in the same shot — because otherwise nobody has confirmed that the thing in our frame is that vehicle. The other only has to carry the same name for the same vehicle, which is what tells us the name is in circulation rather than one list’s invention. Both must give the same name, and neither may get that name from leaked material. The largest vehicle database we cite never names a picture at all: it says a vehicle was seen in “the official screenshots of the game” and illustrates the entry with its own artwork, so it can be the second voice and never the one that points. Applied to the fourteen borrowed names here on 18 September 2026, six cleared the bar and eight did not. You can see which is which under each picture: a source that points at our frame says so, and a source that does not says that too.
And there is material we will not cite at all. This site works from what Rockstar has published, so when we pass on somebody else’s identification we check what that page says it rests on. If it rests on leaked footage, we do not use it — not as a claim, not with a caveat, not in a block that says the identification is theirs. An attribution that is honest about whose claim it is still brings the leaked material in. Of the fifty-five outside pages cited here, all fifty-five say they rest on the trailers, the Extended Look or Rockstar’s official screenshots. Four more were checked and refused. Two said outright that they rest on leaked gameplay from August 2026. The other two passed that first test and failed a second one we added on the same day, because the first test asks the wrong question: a page can rest on an official screenshot for the sighting and still get the name from a leak. A wiki that marks its leak-only entries told us exactly that about two names we were carrying — one read off a badge and a heads-up display in stolen footage, one off a heads-up display alone. Both names have come off, along with a real-world donor that came from the same page. Where a leak supplies only part of a name and the rest still points at one vehicle, the shorter name stays: the red and black cruiser carries somebody else’s Sovereign, without the number that only the leak attests.
Some crops show a part of a vehicle rather than a vehicle: the rear deck of a convertible with its roof down, a landing gear leg hanging below a wing, the doorway of a cabin. The kind of view decides nothing. Such a crop gets its own page when it clears our size threshold, when three features in it rule out a different vehicle, and when it demonstrably belongs to no vehicle already catalogued here. Then the title says what it is — “rear deck of”, not the whole car — and the page’s own list of what we still do not know opens with the rest of the vehicle. If a fuller view turns up later the two pages become one, and the part keeps its crop and redirects to the whole.
The crop has to show where the name came from. A name we read off the picture is only as good as the picture we show you, so every such name here carries at least one crop in which that lettering is wholly visible. We added that as a check on 18 September 2026 and it caught five crops that cut off the very words they were named for: a neon sign reading “Jack of Hea”, a shopfront reading “CHECKS CA”, a hotel whose name runs off both sides of the screenshot. In each of those the name itself was read correctly, from the whole frame, but the crop on the page proved nothing — and that is the quietest kind of mistake this site can make, because there is a picture and it looks fine. Four of them are now wider. Three could not be widened, because the lettering runs off the edge of Rockstar’s own screenshot. One of those three, Jack of Hearts, has since been read across two pictures under the rule below; on the other two the page says the name is a completion rather than a reading. One crop was worse than too tight — it showed a mobile home and a porch under a name read from a sign we could not find again — and that page has gone, with its address redirecting to the place it stood in. A vehicle page went the same way the same week, for a worse reason: the crop under it holds no vehicle at all, only an advertising banner in a shop doorway that a half-size copy had made look like a van.
A name may be read across two pictures. Sometimes no single official image holds the whole name. The neon over the door of Jack of Hearts gives “Jack of Hear” and then runs off the top of the frame; on the banner inside the club, a man’s head covers the J and what is left reads “ACK OF HEARTS”. Neither picture proves the name on its own, and together they leave nothing to argue about. Since 22 September 2026 we allow the join, under three conditions, all of them. Every character has to be read on the true pixels of at least one of the two images, with nothing filled in that stands in neither. The two readings have to overlap far enough to be demonstrably the same name — at least half of its letters, and never fewer than four — and the two images have to belong demonstrably to the same business or object, by something other than the name itself: the same scene, the same building, the same vehicle. And both images have to be on the page, with the overlap written out, so you can make the join yourself instead of taking our word for it. Jack of Hearts is the first name here to rest on that rule. The two readings share ACK OF HEAR, nine of its twelve letters, and the same man in the same clothes stands at the door in one picture and on the booth inside in the other.
When part of a name is hidden, we say which part. Some names are legible except for a letter or two that something in the picture stands in front of: a grab rail across the RE of RESCUE, a palm frond over the last letter of a shopfront, the curve of a bottle, the edge of the screenshot itself. No wider crop reaches those, so the choice is to complete the word or to stop using it. We allow the completion under three conditions, all of them: the hidden part is small, the page says in as many words which characters are completions and what is covering them, and what is visible admits no other reading. If any of the three fails it is not a name here, it is a description. Nine names on this site are completions under that rule as of 18 September 2026, and each says so on its own page.
The same check turned up something we should say plainly about all of it. Until 18 September 2026 most of that reading was done on copies at half the linear resolution of Rockstar’s originals, because that is what this project carried: 107 of our 118 readings were made that way. Half resolution does not only hide lettering, it invents it — a number board that read MARTEC at 111 by 178 pixels says WANTED on the original. So every reading on this site has been listed with the size of the text at the size it was read, and they are being redone against the originals, smallest first. The verification page carries the ones that did not survive, and it grows as the round runs.
There is one deliberate exception in the other direction. Characters and places need a proper noun before they get a page at all, because “man with a beard in a boat” is not a description anyone can search for and will never be corrected into something better.
The crop is part of the check, and it goes first. Twice now a page has survived a check because the check was made inside the stored crop. One crop held a roll-up advertising banner in a shop doorway and the page called it a panel van, because nothing else was in there to call it. Another began to the right of its car and ended above its wheels, so two thirds of it was empty road, and the check concluded that the car’s front wheel “is not in this frame” and wrote that down as a fact about the still. A check made inside a wrong crop confirms the wrong crop. So the first step now is the whole master frame with the rectangle drawn on it: does the crop hold the subject, not cut, not shifted, not mostly empty? Only then do we look at what the page claims. The verdict is stored with the check, and a check without one does not count as done. On 19 September 2026 we put all fifty-two already-checked pages back through that single question: fifty passed, one crop had to be widened, and one page had to be written again from scratch.
Colour gets measured, not named. A frame shot into a low sun is orange all over, and the eye compensates without asking. A car on this site was called light blue in one place and pale turquoise in another; the raw pixels said olive. Taking the road surface in the same frame as a neutral reference and correcting the cast put it between hue 141 and 160 — seafoam to turquoise, and in no reading blue, because green is the strongest channel before and after. Where the colour carries any weight we now do that: sample the body, sample something in the same light that ought to be grey, correct, and print the numbers. It is duller than an adjective and it is the only part of a colour claim anyone else can check.
We read the interface as well as the world. A screenshot of a car is also a screenshot of whatever the game was showing at that moment, and until 18 September 2026 we were throwing that half away: a page here described a coupe as drifting while the lap counter in the corner of the same picture read LAP 1/2, position 11 of 16. So the check now covers the heads-up display too — the minimap, counters, the weapon wheel, money, wanted stars — on every frame we look at. What is legible goes in the record; what is not is left out, and a frame with no interface on it says so. It is some of the most useful material there is, because it is the game telling you how it works rather than us guessing.
We audit ourselves, and we publish what it found
The measurements have been re-checked in full at least once. Of 205 crops from the trailers and the Extended Look, 193 were correct: 8 were mismeasured, one of which recorded something that was not in the frame at all, and 4 were named wrongly. The second audit, a day later and over the text of every vehicle page, found the worst single case: a helicopter filed as a boat.
All of it was fixed, and the audit is written up in the repository rather than quietly absorbed. A site that never reports finding its own mistakes is either not looking or not telling.
Numbers after launch
Before 19 November there are no performance figures on this site, because none exist. After it, there are three kinds and they are never mixed in one column: a timed run on a fixed stretch of road, a speedometer reading, and an in-game stat. Every figure carries the tester, the video, the timecode and the method, and is checked here against that video before it goes on a page: that the car was stock, that the road was the same, that the reading matches the footage. Where two testers disagree, both numbers stand next to each other with the gap. The super class we drive ourselves on a PlayStation 5, with the run recorded so anybody with the game can check it. A number without a source does not appear here.
Dates and corrections
Every page carries the date it was last checked. When something changes — a name confirmed, a crop corrected, a claim withdrawn — the page is updated and re-dated rather than silently edited.
If you can show us that something here is wrong, send it over. Evidence beats seniority; if your frame is better than our frame, your frame wins.
What we will not do
- publish a name we guessed
- use AI-generated imagery, or present a render as a screenshot
- fill a gap with plausible text because the page looks thin without it
- repeat a claim because other sites are repeating it
- state a release-window rumour as fact
Pages on this site are often shorter than the competition’s because of that last group. That is the trade, and we would make it again.