The second official trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, released by Rockstar Games on 6 May 2025, did far more than re-introduce its romantic-criminal protagonists Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos and the neon-soaked sprawl of Vice City; it acted as an extended showcase for the vehicular variety that will define traversal across the fictional US state of Leonida. Where the December 2023 reveal focused largely on tone, characters, and broad environmental flavour, Trailer 2 dwelled noticeably on what players will actually drive, ride, fly, and steer through the swamps, freeways, beaches, and back-country highways of Rockstar's Florida pastiche (Collins and Richardson, 2025; Rockstar Games, 2025). The breadth of vehicles on display — from low-slung supercars to airboats throwing rooster-tails of Everglades muck — signals that GTA VI intends to expand the franchise's already considerable transportation sandbox rather than retread the streets of Los Santos.
The most fan-discussed vehicle in Trailer 2 is a low, wedge-nosed sports car widely interpreted as the next-generation Cheetah, Grand Theft Auto's long-running parody of Italian exotics such as the Ferrari Testarossa and modern hypercars. Several frames depict the car parked outside a coastal mansion and again being driven on a palm-lined Vice City causeway, its silhouette evoking the 1980s Cheetah that became iconic in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Harte, 2025). The recurrence of this nameplate is not incidental: the original Cheetah was, alongside the Infernus, the visual shorthand for Vice City excess, and its reappearance in a contemporary 2020s-set Vice City reinforces Rockstar's clear thesis that GTA VI is a generational, satirical sequel to its 2002 predecessor as much as it is a successor to GTA V (Wikipedia, 2025a). Alongside the Cheetah-style coupe, the trailer briefly features other performance vehicles consistent with the Pegassi, Grotti, and Ocelot brand silhouettes that have populated the series since 2008.
A standout sequence shows Jason and Lucia tearing across marshland aboard a flat-bottomed airboat, its caged pusher-fan spinning visibly behind the operator's seat. This is the first time an airboat has been confirmed as a player vehicle in mainline GTA, and it directly ties into Trailer 2's reveal of Grassrivers — the in-game analogue of the Everglades — as one of six major regions of Leonida (Harte, 2025). Game Informer's reporting emphasised that the Everglades-style swamp will be a genuinely traversable biome rather than scenery, and the airboat is the natural locomotion for it, allowing players to cross shallow water, sawgrass, and mudflats that would defeat conventional boats or wheeled vehicles (Wikipedia, 2025a). Functionally, the airboat slots into a gap in the series's water-traffic roster, sitting between speedboats and jet skis while opening entirely new mission and pursuit geographies.
Trailer 2 also lingers on quad-bike-style all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) cutting through dirt trails and rural backroads — almost certainly in or around Mount Kalaga National Park and the Ambrosia farmland region (Collins and Richardson, 2025). Quad bikes have appeared previously as the Blazer line in GTA V, but the trailer's framing suggests they will be more central here, supporting the broader rural ecology Rockstar has built around Leonida's interior. Pickup trucks with raised suspensions, mud-spattered SUVs, and what appear to be lifted off-roaders also feature, underscoring an emphasis on rural traversal that mirrors Red Dead Redemption 2's interior wilderness philosophy applied to a modern setting.
Multiple motorcycles appear in Trailer 2, including a sportbike ridden along an elevated highway and what appears to be a cruiser-style bike consistent with the Western Daemon. A small but heavily memed detail is the audible and visible exhaust system — the "mufflers" — on several vehicles, with fans noting that exhaust pipes now produce visible heat haze and individualised audio signatures. This dovetails with reporting that Rockstar's revised RAGE engine implementation is targeting much finer mechanical detail than GTA V's 2013 baseline (Wikipedia, 2025a). Motorcycles, historically a player favourite for high-speed traffic weaving, appear to retain their role and gain a level of acoustic and visual fidelity not previously seen in the series.
Game Informer's coverage of the trailer, authored by Charles Harte (2025), foregrounded the regional structure of Vice City and Leonida and used the vehicles as evidence of how each region is functionally distinct: Cheetah-style sports cars belong to the Vice City core and Ocean View strip; airboats belong to Grassrivers; ATVs and trucks belong to Ambrosia and Mount Kalaga; speedboats and personal watercraft belong to the Leonida Keys; and a more conventional urban mix appears in Port Gellhorn (Harte, 2025). Game Informer's framing was that vehicle diversity is being used as worldbuilding shorthand — each transport option implicitly advertises a different gameplay biome. This reading was echoed in BBC and Eurogamer coverage, both of which singled out the airboat as the single most novel vehicle reveal (Collins and Richardson, 2025).
Taken together, the vehicle showcase in Trailer 2 suggests that GTA VI is treating transportation as a primary axis of differentiation from GTA V. Rather than a fleet of variants on the same urban template, players will move between ecological zones using zone-appropriate vehicles, with the Cheetah symbolising urban excess, the airboat symbolising swamp traversal, the ATV symbolising backcountry exploration, and the motorcycle symbolising the connective tissue between them all. For a franchise whose identity is built on driving, this is a meaningful expansion of the design vocabulary.
Collins, R. and Richardson, T. (2025) 'What have we learned from Grand Theft Auto 6's second trailer?', BBC News, 6 May. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g2grmrx4po (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Harte, C. (2025) 'Rockstar Shows Off Six Major Areas Of Vice City In Grand Theft Auto VI', Game Informer, 6 May. Available at: https://www.gameinformer.com/2025/05/06/rockstar-shows-off-six-major-areas-of-vice-city-in-grand-theft-auto-vi (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Rockstar Games (2025) Grand Theft Auto VI — Official Site. Available at: https://www.rockstargames.com/VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025a) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).