American Truck Simulator lets you park the truck, and immediately sets a player record

American Truck Simulator has spent a decade being exactly what its name says. On September 29, SCS Software released a DLC that quietly undoes that: Road Trip: Ford swaps the 18-wheeler for a normal car and lets you drive around America without hauling anything at all.

What's in it

The pack includes four licensed Ford vehicles - a 1967 Mustang Fastback, a 2023 F-150, a 2023 Bronco and a 1998-2012 Crown Victoria - and unlocks Car Mode along with its related features. Cars can be customised with accessories and paint, and they can be used for smaller work: Quick Jobs and the Dispatch Market let you build a courier reputation instead of a trucking one. Convoy mode now mixes trucks and cars on the same highway.

The other addition is Atlas, a discovery system that marks out real landmarks for you to visit and collects postcards as you go. SCS says Atlas and its Tourist Boards are live in California and in the Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota DLCs at launch, with the remaining states added gradually. If you own Road Trip, Atlas works from the cab of a truck too.

SCS describes this as the first release from the wider Road Trip project it announced in April 2025, built by a dedicated team working alongside its vehicle department, and credits a partnership with Ford for the licensed cars. The studio's post does not list a price; GamesRadar+ pegs the pack at around $8.

A ten-year-old game's best day

The response was immediate. "American Truck Simulator's all time concurrent player record has been broken," SCS wrote on Bluesky, saying over 20,000 players were in-game "either behind the wheel of a truck or hitting the road with our Road Trip: Ford DLC." GamesRadar+, citing SteamDB, puts the new peak at 21,318 - past the 19,138 the game managed at its 2016 launch, which had stood as its high point ever since.

It arrives five days after the South Dakota map expansion, which added 13 cities, so some of that spike belongs to the state DLC rather than the cars.

Why it matters

Truck sims live or die on the long-term goodwill of their communities, and SCS has just proved there is appetite for something other than freight. Road Trip is framed as a project, not a one-off pack, which suggests more non-truck content is coming.