Cars are coming to Fortnite this week. The new vehicles, or at least some of them, will be added in a patch on Wednesday, August 5, according to a tweet from the official account.
We’ve known for a while that Fortnite is getting cars, and there are already some on the map, although they can’t yet be driven. In posters scattered around the island, we’ve seen a pickup truck, a big rig, a sedan, and the car featured in the tweet embedded below, the Whiplash. According to the tweet, the name Whiplash is “a warning.”
It’s not just a name. It’s a warning. Experience the #FortniteJoyRide Update on 8.5.2020 pic.twitter.com/fxgCgAMpYkAugust 3, 2020
It’s hard to imagine that cars won’t fundamentally reconfigure Fortnite’s meta, upending match pacing and tactics. Back in 2018, bugged shopping carts were a massive deal. This is a whole fleet of vehicles, one of which is apparently so fast we should fear it.
Initially, the absence of cars in Fortnite set it apart from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds almost as much as its fort building did. Ground vehicles were an essential part of PUBG from the start and contributed to its popularity—early highlight clips frequently featured stupidly bouncing Soviet cars wiping squads. Their addition to Fortnite now feels a little odd. I had assumed that Epic thought about it and decided against it. It’s not as if Epic has been shy about including vehicles in general. There were airplanes, for a while. Oh, and giant hamster balls.
However it all played out behind the scenes, cars will be added this Wednesday when the “Joy Ride” update goes live—at least, it’s hard to read that tweet any other way. For more on what to expect, we’ve collected all the Fortnite car teases and rumors in one place.
I look forward to watching clips of the horrible banana guy driving around.