Would make sense some factions would want usable vehicles. Could provide a massive source of income if you can manage to get a player camp with a bunch of skilled mechanics.
I agree that many factions ought to have a use for vehicles, but the question is whether they actually have anything of interest to pay with. I can certainly see the refugee center of the Tacoma farm getting quests to get them vehicles, but I also can see that the payment would be garbage: you’d be lucky if it even cover the materials it would take to patch a vehicle up, so any such quests would probably mostly be done because you want to be a good guy, rather than because you actually get anything useful out of it.
The factions that actually have interesting stuff probably also have the capability of producing/acquiring what they need without the player’s involvement.
I agree, it just makes me sad to see a parking lot full of working cars and have no real use for them apart from siphoning the fuel and scavenging parts.
Most groups don’t need that many vehicles, compared to the need for spare parts and fuel. The player is an anomaly in our habit of travelling the map far and wide to kill every last zombie in hopes of finding a single can of corn. For most of these survivor communities, just a bare handful of vehicles is needed, for small parties/sorties/trade groups. Mobilizing ten box vans for bulk cargo is just gonna be loud enough to drag nightmares outta the forest onto the road and ruin your day. And these communities really should be spending most of their time and manpower working on immediate needs, like shelter and food. If they need something from far away, they’ll ask wanderers like the player if they can trade for it.
I’m not even sure they’d want to buy a whole vehicle to strip it for parts - aside from doing so being loud and labor intensive, it also leaves them with a lot of material they probably don’t want/need. You’d either get awful scrap value for it just based on the things they do want, or they’d turn it down and tell you they’d buy the alternator if you ripped it out for them.
Perhaps other survivor communities in the future may have different concerns - Throwing hypotheticals out there but if you had an Old Guard expansion in which they try an ill fated reclamation of an area from the cataclysm, they would probably be extremely interested in a lot of vehicles for logistics and movement purposes - not a lot of cars aboard the Atlantic fleet. Or maybe a mad max inspired motorhead group, preparing a grand convoy to try and drive to Brazil to escape all this.
Just none of those groups exist right now. Everyone we got right now is content to let the player do the adventures that need cars.
Well, the Free Merchants run “caravans”, and they ought to have more than one set of “caravans” (I use the quotes because I don’t think these contain large convoys of vehicles, but rather a small number of them in each “convoy”).
Tacoma uses broken vehicles for walls (which I find questionable), and they’re also running a chop shop based on the facilities on the built up farm.
Consider the following: selling vehicle allows a faction to provide you some service.
For example, sell merchants a bunch of vehicles and fuel and they can deliver you stuff right to your faction camp for the next several months (I’m assuming vehicle gets destroyed by something afterwards) and you need to keep selling them more vehicles to maintain service.
If you sell them vehicles with guns they might start patrolling the roads and clearing up hostiles by themselves, again for some time. More vehicles, better vehicles = more area patrolled, less civilian vehicle losses, which means more time service is provided and at bigger range. Want deliveries of fresh tomatoes for your pizzeria? Need to sell them a freezer van every several months. Or one van and one tank every year.
Sold them a helicopter? Get a free medevac service for that, just keep flares and radio on you. Sold a boat? Build a dock and you can now order construction materials in bulk, or fresh seafood from a trawler or whatever.
Selling futuristic tanks to old guard? As a thank you you get a laser designator and a promise to strike several targets of your choice from carrier-based jets.
Something along those lines.
I like the idea of a medivac. I decided to cheese things and teleport myself back to my base after getting my legs broke during a portal storm. The storm ended and I was on the road not too far from base. It would have been very easy for one of my 11 companions to use one of the vehicles parked outside to come pick me up. Which should also be an option. Call in homie support like it’s Saint’s Row xD
All of these would be pretty awesome to have, but I’ve already suggested things that would involve a similar use for vehicles (one being allowing followers to use vehicles for faction missions), and just the task of calculating the effect that the vehicle would have on the mission (based on things like speed, cargo capacity, turrets/armor, etc.) would be far too much work on its own - and that’s not even getting into how terrain would impact things such as routes and the like.
I’d think a better idea would be to have missions to assist factions in the building of their own vehicles, and once those missions are complete, their vehicles would be built, and the handling of all of those logistics would be be something that the other factions would handle on their own (maybe they’d require extra payments for deliveries to offset the cost of maintaining/fueling their vehicles?). Maybe there could be further missions to deliver parts for upgrading the vehicles, which would give some improvement to whatever profit you would get from however the other faction uses its vehicles.
I’ve also suggested that maybe storehouse expansions could be given an actual use that would justify their construction (since you can just build storage space on your own without using up an expansion slot) by allowing followers to be sent on trade missions to various factions, with a zone that would allow you to designate items to sell, in the same way you’d designate food to distribute to your faction camp’s larder, which would make those items disappear and convert their barter value to the total amount of value your faction has in trade goods, which would be used up like calories while followers are on trade missions. I don’t remember what, if anything, was said about that.