Grand Theft Auto III/Vehicles

This is a sub-page of Grand Theft Auto III.

To do:
*Find old text

Make a video showing these cars in-game

There is a file called vehicles.dff left in the Android and iOS releases which contains very old vehicle models, many of which have wildly different internal names from the final game. They seem to match the oldest screenshots of the game and look quite similar to the earliest renders released. To sum up:

Besides the Buggy, none of these models have accompanying collision or handling data.
These older versions of the car models have different origin points, are mostly smaller, and have some have their damaged parts set up differently so the final game's collision data isn't compatible.
All of these models have extra parts labeled with the suffix _lo, indicating that an extra LOD stage between _hi (full detail geometry) and _vlo (distance LODs) was planned. However, these are all duplicates of the _hi parts, and the final game's code simply deletes these upon loading a model in.
No body textures are used anywhere — they wouldn't be implemented until the game was nearly complete.
Speaking of textures, most of these vehicles use generic split textures instead of having a specialized sheet. Thankfully, some of these are used elsewhere in the game so we at least have something to the look at.
Unless otherwise mentioned/shown, the damaged parts on these cars are usually duplicates of the undamaged geometry.
Naturally, these models are very unfinished. Underneath the split parts used for the game's damage system, you are likely to find gaping holes in the geometry.
Vehicle reflections wouldn't be implemented until right before launch, so these are meant to look completely matte. There's no specularity value set in their materials so loading these in-game results in it defaulting to the max, meaning very shiny vehicles.
Many of the cars don't support custom colors, as you'll see below. If they're any color other than green then they will only be that color in-game.

Unlike the final game, these are all stored as "chunks" in one .dff file (the game's model format) and would've all been loaded at the same time instead of being streamed individually from the disc. They can still be activated (partially, namely ambulan, armytruk, bus, cabbie, chopper, coach, dodo, firetruk, police, and taxi) by inserting this line into gta3.dat: