GTA 6, how to
How do you steal a car in GTA 6?
Short answer
Two ways, and the game asks you to choose. At 6:04.90 in the Extended Look a man leans into the door of a parked coupe and two prompts appear on the car itself: SLIM JIM on triangle and SMASH WINDOW on circle. One is quiet and slow, one is fast and loud. Everything beyond that choice, from alarms to who is watching, is not in the frame.
Sources last checked 23 September 2026
Where the footage shows it
This is the one how-to the footage answers almost by itself. Every earlier Grand Theft Auto turned taking a car into a single contextual action; the Extended Look shows GTA 6 turning it into a choice. The frame is at 6:04, the prompts are legible, and this page is what follows from them and no further.
What the footage shows
A man in a cap and camouflage shorts leans into the window frame of a dark red coupe parked in a marked bay. Over the car’s flank, drawn in world space rather than in a HUD corner, sit two options stacked: a triangle glyph with SLIM JIM, and a circle glyph with SMASH WINDOW. A slim jim is the thin strip a locksmith slides down inside a door to pop the lock: quiet, and slower. Smashing the window is neither. The frame presents them as two methods and, presumably, two consequences; what those consequences are is outside it.
Two other frames say the game notices. The wanted display carries a car icon among the things the police know about you, and it is gone after the getaway car burns. Inside the jewellery store at 18:01 the HUD carries a red disc with a camera icon, which reads as a marker for being watched. Put the three together and the plain reading is that how you take a car, and who sees you do it, feeds what the police hold against you. That is a reading across three frames, and the page says so.
What nobody knows
- What the slim jim costs in time, and whether it can fail.
- Whether cars have alarms, and whether an owner or a passer-by reacts.
- Whether a locked and an unlocked car offer different prompts. The coupe in the frame is parked and, presumably, locked.
- Whether the choice changes the wanted level or the car icon, or only the noise.
- Whether a stolen car can be kept, and whether it can be sold.
How Grand Theft Auto V did it
This is the reference, not a prediction. In Grand Theft Auto V and every game before it, taking a car was one action: walk up, press the button, and the character either opened the door or broke the window, depending on whether the car was locked, without asking you. Being seen doing it in front of the police earned a star. The two prompts in the Extended Look are the first time the series has drawn that decision on the screen and handed it to the player.
What this page becomes on launch day
From 19 November 2026 this guide is rewritten from the release build: what each method does, how long it takes, what triggers alarms and witnesses, and what happens to the car afterwards, each with the date it was tested. Until then the short answer at the top stands.
Where this comes from
Every claim above rests on one of these. Anything marked the platform holder is Sony or Microsoft describing their own store or hardware, not Rockstar. Anything marked reported is somebody else telling us what Rockstar said, and is treated as weaker than Rockstar saying it.