i reckon you should make it so you can repair the cars around the map but at the cost of a lot of materials (50 metal, 5 repair kits, and 1 car battery emp) but make them a temporary vehicle (leave = damaged again)
Well why not. Then you get blasted rapidly apart by a tank or hordes of hunters attracted to the noise of the car engine.
That sounds indeed interesting.
Like you repair the car, short circuit it to start it, drive, but if you stop it turns off and needs to get repaired and short circuited again.
So if you leave it to refuel it, it’s the same.
I was thinking something more on the lines of: Re-joining the world causes the car to respawn broken at its original point in the map. But your idea works too.
Yes, that would have been my idea, too, for the case of leaving the game and joining back in.
It could be a good idea to limit the number of repairs that can be made per car or to make the repair process take a significant amount of time to complete.