Slow Roads Vehicles: Roadster, Coach and Bike Compared
Three vehicles, not four
This build gives you a Roadster, a Bike and a Coach. That is the whole list. Plenty of pages claim a fourth called the Rover, and there is a reason for the confusion: a Rover entry really does sit in the vehicle table, with wheel dimensions, a 35 m/s top speed and its own body mesh. It is simply never offered to you.
| Roadster | the default; low, light, quick to turn in |
|---|---|
| Bike | fastest top speed, narrowest steering lock, no handbrake |
| Coach | a full-size bus, internally still named Bus |
The picker is built from an object naming exactly those three. The full vehicle table actually holds five entries — Debug, Bike, Bus, Roadster and Rover — and the picker object pulls three of them out by name. Debug and Rover are simply not referenced, so nothing in the interface can reach either.
That distinction kills a tempting shortcut. It would be reasonable to assume the enabled flag is what gates the picker, and that flipping it would give you a Rover. It does not: the Bike's own entry is also flagged disabled, and the Bike is right there in the menu and perfectly playable. Membership in that three-key list is the gate. The flag is vestigial.
This is the November 2022 public build, version 1.0.1, by anslo. The official game at slowroads.io has kept developing since, so if you saw a vehicle in a recent video, check there rather than assuming it is hidden here.
The Roadster
The default, and the vehicle the game is balanced around. Top speed 45 m/s, roughly 100 mph or 162 km/h; acceleration 9, braking 8, steering lock 0.68 radians — just under 39 degrees. Its steering easing constant is 1, the lowest of the three, so it winds on lock faster than anything else here; and it generates real downforce, so it plants itself as speed rises. Its actual weakness is having no weakness sharp enough to teach you anything. If the game feels flat after an hour, the Roadster is usually why, and the fix is a different vehicle or drive layout rather than a new seed.
The Bike
Fastest thing here: 53 m/s, about 119 mph or 191 km/h, with acceleration of 11 against the Roadster's 9. Also the most awkward, deliberately.
Steering lock is 0.4 radians, roughly 23 degrees, barely more than half the Roadster's, and the Bike is slow to reach even that. steerInterval is the constant the steering easing divides by — 1 on the Roadster, 1.8 on the Bike, 2 on the Coach — so the Bike's wheel rolls toward your requested angle at a little over half the Roadster's rate.
The speed penalty on top is where it gets strange. A car's steering delay scales as 1 + 0.5 × speedLerp, at worst 1.5× slower than standing still. The Bike's scales as 1 + speedLerp², up to 2×. Because it is squared, almost nothing happens for the first half of the speed range and then the steering falls away quickly near the top. The Bike is not twitchy at speed. It goes numb, late and all at once, which is far harder to plan around.
The handbrake genuinely does nothing on the Bike. Space is wired to the handbrake everywhere else, but the input line reading it is gated on the vehicle not being a bike, so the flag never gets set and no rear-lock force is applied. Easy to check: get up to speed, hold Space, watch nothing happen. Swap to the Roadster and the back steps out. Any guide listing Space as a bike drift technique has not tried it.
One compensation is buried in the physics: the Bike's tyre friction is doubled every frame relative to a car's. It needs it, with two contact patches instead of four. The result grips hard in a straight line and refuses to change direction quickly. Good for long, open, fast sections where you want the speed record and not the corner — use first person, because the lean animation is the best thing the Bike does and the chase camera hides it.
The Coach
Top speed 32 m/s, about 72 mph or 115 km/h, and slow to get there in a way its acceleration figure does not explain. That figure is 6 against the Roadster's 9, a modest gap. The real difference is jerk: the rate at which drive force ramps toward your requested throttle. Roadster and Bike both use 48. The Coach uses 6. Eight times slower. Pressing W in the Coach does not request speed, it opens negotiations.
Steering is the same story from a different direction. The easing constant is 2, twice the Roadster's, and the underlying steering rate is 0.45 against 1.57 — the Roadster and the Bike share that 1.57, so the Coach is the only vehicle whose wheel physically turns slowly. All of it sits on a 5.47 m wheelbase, exactly double the Roadster's. Braking is 4 against 8. And its aerodynamic factor is zero — the Coach is the only vehicle that generates no downforce at any speed. Whatever grip it has at 70 mph is all it will ever have.
An oddity I went looking for and did not find: the mass figure every vehicle carries (700 for Roadster and Bike, 1400 for the Coach) is declared and then never read anywhere else in the bundle. The Coach does not feel heavy because it is heavy. It feels heavy because throttle ramp, steering rate, brake force and downforce were each dialled down individually.
It also requests a shadow map twice the size of the other two, so on a marginal machine it is a plausible contributor to a frame dip — though the performance guide covers settings that matter far more.
Side by side
| Top speed | Roadster 45 m/s · Bike 53 m/s · Coach 32 m/s |
|---|---|
| Acceleration | 9 · 11 · 6 |
Throttle ramp (jerk) | 48 · 48 · 6 |
| Braking | 8 · 8 · 4 |
Max steering lock (maxSteer) | 0.68 rad · 0.40 rad · 0.65 rad |
Steering ease constant (steerInterval) | 1.0 · 1.8 · 2.0 |
Steering rate (steerSpeed) | 1.57 · 1.57 · 0.45 |
| Wheelbase | 2.75 m · 1.95 m · 5.47 m |
| Track width | 1.36 m · 0 m (single track) · 2.24 m |
Downforce factor (aeroFactor) | 0.4 · 0.4 · 0.0 |
| Drag | 0.001 · 0.001 · 0.002 |
| Rolling resistance | 0.06 · 0.04 · 0.03 |
| Reverse | 5 · 5 · 5 (identical on all three) |
| Shadow map size | 4 · 4 · 8 |
| Handbrake | yes · no · yes |
Each vehicle brings its own cameras
The C key cycles three cameras — chase, far chase and first person. What is easy to miss is that the camera definitions are stored per vehicle, not globally, so the same key gives you a different shot depending on what you are sitting in. A Bonnet camera is also defined, but it is absent from the cycle list, so nothing in the interface reaches it. There is no bumper camera in this build.
| Chase | Roadster 4–4.75 back, 0.8–1 m up, smoothing 1.5 · Bike 3.5–4.5 back, smoothing 0.85 · Coach 9–11 back, 1.6–2.6 m up, smoothing 1.6 |
|---|---|
| Chase far | Roadster and Bike both 6–9 back · Coach 14–16 |
| First person | Roadster eye height 0.7 m · Bike 0.7 m · Coach 1.8 m |
| Camera eases out above | Roadster 45 m/s · Bike 50 m/s · Coach 30 m/s |
Three things follow from that table. The Bike's chase camera is both closer and far less damped than the Roadster's — smoothing 0.85 against 1.5 — so it snaps to the bike's movements instead of trailing them, which is most of why the Bike reads as frantic in chase view and calm in first person. The Coach's camera sits two and a half metres up at its furthest and gives a genuinely different sightline over crests, which is a large part of why it is the sightseeing vehicle. And each vehicle's camera starts pulling back at a speed tuned to that vehicle: 30 m/s on the Coach, which is almost its top speed, so the Coach is effectively always in its near view.
The Bonnet camera is the interesting absence. It is fully defined on the Roadster, sits 0.6 m up at the nose, and is the only camera in the file that sets hideVehicle so you would see nothing but road. It is not in the cycle list, so no key reaches it.
Drive mode: AWD, FWD and RWD
The settings menu has a three-way toggle labelled drive mode: awd, fwd, rwd. It defaults to AWD, applies to whichever vehicle you are driving, and persists to localStorage as config-vehicle-mode. Most players never touch it. It is the largest change to how the game feels that you can make in two clicks.
What it actually changes
Two things, and one thing it pointedly does not. First, which wheels get torque. In AWD all four are driven and each receives half the drive force; in FWD only the front pair, each at full; in RWD only the rear. Multiply it out and total longitudinal force is identical in all three. Drive mode does not make you faster in a straight line. It changes where the push is applied, which matters because the front wheels are also the steering wheels.
Second, the lateral grip calculation while you hold boost on a driven wheel. Each mode gets its own formula, built from two per-vehicle numbers: a base slip value and a slip modifier that scales with speed.
| AWD | grip reduced by 1.25 × slip modifier × speed² — planted at low speed, lets go progressively as you wind up |
|---|---|
| FWD | no slip reduction at all under boost; the most stable, the hardest to rotate |
| RWD | reduced by slip modifier × (0.5 + speed²) — a constant grip penalty even from a standstill |
That constant 0.5 in the RWD line is the whole character of the mode: it is the only layout that will break traction off the line. AWD is composed until suddenly it is not. FWD understeers politely and never surprises you.
Because the terrain is procedurally generated there is an endless supply of new road, but new road is still road. Changing drive mode changes your inputs instead of your scenery. Take the Roadster you have driven for three hours, set it to RWD, hold Left Shift out of a corner, and you have a different car to learn. For fresh terrain too, the seeds guide covers pinning a world you like.
The Bike exception
On the Bike the toggle still applies — FWD drives the front wheel, RWD the rear — but the slip formulas collapse. The Bike's slip modifier is zero, and all three grip equations multiply that modifier by something. Every mode therefore produces identical lateral grip on the Bike; you are only changing which wheel pushes. To feel what drive mode does, do it in a car.
Why they are all electric, and what that removes
Every vehicle here is electric, and the FAQ inside this build gives anslo's reasoning directly: EVs are "quieter and more peaceful", "simpler and more intuitive to gamify (no gears or RPM concerns)", and easier to write physics and audio for. The answer ends with an explicit openness to adding manual transmission later.
The practical consequence is what is missing from the control scheme. No clutch, no shift-up, no shift-down, no rev limiter, no gear display. W is a direct request for drive force, with nothing between the key and the wheels except that jerk ramp — which is why the Coach's value of 6 does so much work. With no gearbox to blame, the ramp rate is the powertrain character.
Left Shift boost is the nearest thing to a performance mode, and more modest than it sounds. It adds acceleration scaled by how far you are from top speed, full bonus at a standstill and nothing at top speed, so it cannot raise your maximum. A quieter always-on assist below 27 m/s adds up to half again your acceleration when pulling away, which is why everything feels punchier from rest than its numbers suggest. A double-tap to boost option sits in the same panel; the full key list is in the controls guide. The simulation runs on three.js in a browser, which is part of why it is shaped this way: fewer moving systems, more attention on the ones that exist.
Cruise control is tied to the vehicle you picked
Cruise control is a widget in the on-screen interface rather than a key, and it behaves in a way that catches people out when they change vehicle. The target speed moves in steps of five in whichever unit you have selected, and it is stored in your browser under cruise-control. Its default is 90 mph or 150 km/h depending on your units setting.
The catch is the clamp. Any target you set is capped at the current vehicle's top speed, and switching vehicle resets the target to the lower of the unit default and that vehicle's maximum. So a cruise target set in the Bike cannot survive a move to the Coach: 53 m/s simply is not available at 32. Set your speed after you have chosen your vehicle, not before.
One more interaction worth knowing, because it looks like a bug. In mouse-steering mode, Left Shift boost only works while cruise control has a value set. With cruise off, mouse mode gives you acceleration on left click and no boost at all.
What to drive when: road complexity, properly explained
Road complexity has three menu settings, stored as config-scene-topography. What they actually contain:
| easy | road width 3.2, noise resolutions [3, 12], height scale 180, smoothing window 7 |
|---|---|
| normal | road width 3.0, noise resolutions [3, 12, 24], height scale 160, smoothing window 7 |
| hard | road width 2.6, noise resolutions [3, 12, 24, 36], height scale 165, smoothing window 5 |
Easy is not gentler terrain. It is bigger terrain. Easy has the widest road, the fewest noise octaves and the tallest height scale of the three. Dropping the 24 and 36 octaves removes small and medium surface detail, leaving huge smooth landforms with a broad road over them. Hard is the opposite: about 20% narrower, an extra fine-detail octave, and a shorter smoothing window that lets the road follow those details more tightly. Most write-ups call easy "flatter" or "calmer". It is neither. It is sparser and larger.
A fourth option, flat, exists in the data with a height scale of zero and a 20-wide road. Like the Rover, it is not in the list the menu builds from, so you cannot select it.
Pairings that work
- Bike on easy. The best combination in the game, and the reason easy is misunderstood: a narrow steering lock is a liability on tight corners and irrelevant on huge sweeping ones. Wide road, long radii, 119 mph, first person.
- Coach on hard. Sounds like punishment, is the most engaging thing you can set up. A 5.47 m wheelbase on a 2.6-wide road with short smoothing means reading corners seconds early and planning around that
jerkof 6. - Roadster on normal, RWD, boost out of corners. The closest this gets to a driving game rather than an ambient one; the constant slip penalty means the rear steps out predictably and you can hold it.
- Roadster on hard, FWD. For distance records rather than fun. FWD takes no grip penalty under boost, so you can lean on the throttle through narrow corners without rotating. Dull, effective.
- Coach on easy. The sightseeing setup: high seat, enormous landforms, nothing demanded of you. Pair it with F autodrive and U to hide the interface.
Vehicle, drive mode and complexity all persist between sessions — as config-vehicle-type, config-vehicle-mode and config-scene-topography — so you can leave a favourite configuration in place and just open the game and drive. Clearing site data for this domain resets all three to Roadster, AWD, normal.
Season and weather layer on top of all of this and change grip as well as colour, which the scenes and seasons guide goes into; if none of the three vehicles here is holding your attention any more, the games like Slow Roads list is the honest next step. Everything else is on the index.
Play Slow Roads → Free in your browser. Desktop or laptop with a keyboard.