- Primary Subject: Need for Speed / Forza Horizon (Automotive Licensing Analysis)
- Key Update: An analysis of why major car manufacturers like Honda and Toyota historically avoided street racing video games and how licensing policies have shifted over time.
- Status: Confirmed
- Last Verified: July 30, 2026
- Quick Answer: Automakers avoid street racing games due to concerns over illegal themes, police chases, and car damage models, though Toyota eventually returned to sim racers.
I have spent a stupid number of hours outrunning cops in cars I will never afford, and for most of that time I never questioned the garage.
You take what the game gives you. It was only when I went hunting for one specific car and could not find it anywhere in the list that I started paying attention to the gaps.
A racing game's roster gets settled in a licensing meeting long before it reaches the design team, and the two most famous holes in that roster belong to Honda and Toyota.
The Honda Gap Is Real, But Not the Way Fans Tell It
If you grew up on the Need for Speed tuner era, you remember the moment you realized there was no Civic to build. That absence hardened into folklore over the years: Honda hates street racing games and always has.
The actual record is messier. Honda and Acura have appeared across the series for decades, just unevenly. The NA1 Acura NSX was in the original The Need for Speed back in 1994, disappeared, then came back as the NA2 in ProStreet in 2007.
The second-generation NSX turned up in Payback in 2017.
When EA rebooted the franchise as plain Need for Speed in 2015, Honda arrived in force, with the Civic and the NSX both drivable in a game built entirely around night racing and police pursuits.
The Civic Type R is in Unbound right now.
What fans were actually reacting to was a specific stretch in the mid-2000s when Honda's road cars kept missing from the pursuit-heavy entries while showing up freely in circuit games.
The explanation that gets repeated in community threads is that Honda did not want its cars shown being chased by police.
It fits the pattern of which games had Hondas and which did not, though I could not find any formal Honda statement confirming it. Treat that one as the popular theory rather than corporate policy.
Everywhere outside illegal street racing, Honda is unambiguous.
It is one of the most heavily represented Japanese marques in Forza Horizon 6, with more than twenty models covering the Civic Type R lineage, the NSX, the S2000 and a pile of kei cars.
Honda has been in essentially every Gran Turismo. The gap was always about theme.
Toyota's Twitter Account Told On Itself
Toyota is the cleaner case, and the way the reason came out is my favorite piece of accidental corporate honesty in this whole genre.
Toyota's roots here run deep. A Mark IV Supra was in the 1994 original The Need for Speed. Vic’s Supra was a memorable opponent in 2005’s Most Wanted.
The 2015 reboot shipped with three Toyotas, including the AE86 Sprinter Trueno. Then, from mid-2017, the brand's road cars vanished almost everywhere.
No Toyotas in Forza Motorsport 7, none in Payback. The one exception was Sony's Gran Turismo Sport, which kept its Toyotas and kept adding more, which had everyone assuming Polyphony had locked down an exclusive.
The mask slipped in August 2019. After Need for Speed Heat revealed a 127-car list with no Toyotas in it, a GTPlanet member asked Toyota's UK account why.
The reply, since deleted but screenshotted by half the internet, was blunt: "Not there. You can find our cars in GT Sport, which doesn't promote illegal street racing." The Need for Speed account fired back with "pfft nerds."
Toyota's PR team spent the following day cleaning it up. On August 21, the @ToyotaUK account posted a walk-back thread that opened with a line about how most of the social team fell in love with cars through games like TOCA, Daytona and Gran Turismo.
Then came the reframe, with Toyota saying it had no concrete plans to license its range to any game besides GT Sport "at the moment." That last bit turned out to be load-bearing.
The Comeback That Skipped Need for Speed
Toyota did come back. On November 19, 2019, the official Forza account announced the 1998 Supra RZ for Forza Horizon 4.
Arriving in the Series 17 update that December, community manager Brian Ekberg confirmed more Toyota, Lexus and Scion models would follow across the brand for years.
Toyota never left Gran Turismo and even ran an official Gazoo Racing esports cup inside it. The AE86 keeps reappearing across the Assetto Corsa family.
What never happened is a Toyota return to Need for Speed. No Supra in Payback, none in Heat, none in Unbound, and none across any of Unbound's Volume updates through the game's end of life in early 2025.
The live team went to the effort of bringing Audi back in a 2024 update and still could not land Toyota. So the brand loosened up almost everywhere except the one sub-genre its own tweet had named.
The timing of that thaw lines up with Toyota's cultural turn under Akio Toyoda, the chairman who built Gazoo Racing out of a rejected amateur Nurburgring effort and pushed a "no more boring cars" line that produced the GR Supra, GR86 and GR Corolla.
That connection is speculation on my part, and nobody at Toyota has gone on record linking the two. What is documented is the distance traveled.
Back in 2009, a Toyota executive told a Japanese newspaper columnist that realistic home console games made the need for real cars disappear. Ten years later, the company handed Polyphony its new halo Supra.
The Brands That Never Blink, and the Ones That Never Show
Plenty of manufacturers treat these games as free advertising and sign off on cop chases and neon underglow without fuss.
Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Ford and BMW have anchored the illegal-racing entries for years, which is exactly why the Underground fantasy leaned so hard on those badges.
Lamborghini, Koenigsegg and Dodge show up without drama. Those companies decided a teenager building their car in a game is a future customer.
At the other end, Tesla is conspicuously scarce, and the community points at the company's licensing reluctance and its allergy to conventional advertising.
Rolls-Royce has been described by developers as unwilling to put its cars in anything where you drive around smashing things. Neither objection is about street racing specifically. Both keep the cars off the roster anyway.
Why the Theme Decides the Deal
Underneath all of this sits a simple checklist.
A licensing consultant who brokers these deals has laid out what manufacturers ask before signing: how the brand gets displayed, whether the project features violence, whether there is a damage model on the car.
A street racing game answers all three in the way a cautious legal department least wants to hear. Even the willing brands cap what you can do to their metal.
The Wreckfest developers have talked openly about manufacturers limiting how badly a car can deform, because a folded fender is not how anyone wants their engineering represented.
Licenses also expire, which is why cars quietly vanish from live-service games mid-life and why a roster is never final.
Every empty slot you notice is a negotiation that failed, lapsed, or never started. Honda's reputation came out of a theme problem rather than a boycott.
Toyota's absence was a posture that softened everywhere except the genre it publicly objected to. The next time you scroll a car list and feel that small pang at what is missing, that gap is a company telling you exactly how it wants to be seen.
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