Hatches and trunks are both MULTISQUARE, so you can open multiple hatches at once. Hatches include a covered and lockable cargo area, unlike doors (have cargo, but neither lockable nor covered) or trunk doors (no cargo).
It looks like the best use of a hatch is when you’re trying to optimize your cargo capacity and you don’t want NPCs to steal your stuff. Note that NPCs can still open your vehicle’s doors and steal your stuff from other places in your vehicle. All a cargo lock does it stop them from stealing from that particular cargo location.
Hmm, is NPC’s stealing stuff a thing to worry about? I have 1 NPC, but it seems like she doesn’t steal anything. At least i’m not missing anything (yet).
How do you lock a cargo area? Or is it locked automatically?
I tend to have at least 1 NPC try to steal everything in my vehicle and walk off. I have to either run him over or shoot him and it annoys me greatly, for the reason I get a morale debuff. So locking anything is a good idea, as you won’t be able to craft with a low morale. Which can be a serious problem.
I might not be playing long enough yet but only found 1 NPC so far (apart from the starting one that died to a zombie horde in the first 5 minutes). To me NPC seem to be very rare, so not really a thing to worry about yet.
I think if NPCs were made better it wouldn’t be such a problem though. If you watched someone walking around with a sawn off and you see he has lotsa good gear. Chances are, you irl wouldn’t run over in front of the guy and grab all his stuff. So I’d enjoy locks when I get around to a new version. But I hate seeing so many trade off glitches. So it maybe a while.