The cars’ internal design resembled ‘beams,’ which the team derived the name from, followed by ‘NG’ for New Generation. The latter was better equipped to handle the soft-body physics that was unique to the current project.

While they started working on the game with CryEngine 3, it eventually moved over to Torque.

They were looking to build a new drive physics engine that could handle collisions. Development of BeamNG.drive began in 2011 when some Rigs of Rods developers moved onto a new project.