Low Poly Cars for Games: Triangle Counts, Wheels and Setup

Short answer: a game-ready low poly car usually needs about 1,750 to 2,000 triangles, wheels included. Motorbikes and bicycles sit around 450 to 900, and a large motorhome around 2,500. Those are measured counts from the 65 vehicles in our Road Vehicles collection, 28 of them cars. Below is what each vehicle class costs, where the triangles go, and what else a car needs before it works in a game.

Every number here comes from the delivered files of Road Vehicles and the live product pages of our vehicle collections, checked in October 2026. For triangle budgets across props, buildings and nature, see How many triangles is low poly?

Low poly car triangle counts by vehicle class

We grouped all 65 road vehicles by the folders they ship in. The range is the lightest to the heaviest vehicle in each group, counted on the full-detail mesh (LOD0) including wheels and steering parts. The LOD1 column shows how large the lighter mesh is compared with LOD0.

Source: measured from the delivered Road Vehicles files, October 2026. The 65 counts add up to the 89,306 triangles listed on the product page.

The cars cluster tightly because we built them to a ceiling: 2,000 triangles for a car, 900 for a motorbike, scooter or bicycle, and 4,000 for the largest vehicles. A ceiling like this is more useful than an average when you plan a game. It tells you the worst case when twenty cars are on screen at once.

Where the triangles go in a low poly car

Take the Five-Door Supermini from the City Cars folder. It has 1,944 triangles in total:

• Body: 1,512 triangles for the shell, glazing, lights, bumpers and mirrors.
• Four wheels: 92 triangles each, 368 in total. Each tyre has 12 sides, enough to read as round at game camera distances.
• Two steering hubs: 32 triangles each, 64 in total.

So roughly a fifth of a low poly car is wheels. That is the part players look at most when a car moves, and it is the easiest place to overspend. A 24-sided tyre doubles the wheel cost without changing the silhouette much from a top-down or chase camera. If you are modelling your own car, decide the tyre side count before anything else, then spend what is left on the body outline: roofline, window line and wheel arches. Those three shapes are what make a hatchback read differently from a saloon at a distance.

What makes a low poly car game-ready

A low triangle count is the easy part. These are the things that decide whether a car drops into a game cleanly or needs an afternoon of fixing. The figures are the Five-Door Supermini again.

Wheels carry no collision mesh on purpose. Physics setups that use wheel colliders build them from each wheel's radius and width, so a mesh collider on the tyre would only fight them. Every vehicle in Road Vehicles ships with a vehicle.json file next to its BLEND, GLB, FBX and OBJ files. It records wheel radius and width (0.32 m and 0.195 m on the supermini), pivot positions, part rotation ranges, marker locations and a suggested mass and axle load split (1,250 kg, 60% front). These are labelled as suggestions for a physics setup, not a tuned car: you still set suspension and handling in your own controller.

Paint is handled without extra textures. The supermini comes in eight paint variants plus a lit variant with glowing head and tail lights, and all of them share one 512 px gradient atlas with a glow mask. One material for the whole fleet keeps draw calls low when a street fills with traffic. Our guide to checking Blender models before you download or buy covers scale, formats and textures in more general terms.

Low poly versus realistic vehicles

The gap between a stylized and a realistic vehicle is bigger than most people expect. Compare two bicycles from our catalog:

The realtime photoreal bicycle costs about 32 times the low poly one. That buys spokes, cables and readable materials up close, which matters in architectural visualization or close street-level shots. For a city builder, racing game or top-down game where vehicles are small on screen and numerous, the low poly version lets you place dozens for the cost of one realistic model.

Style also changes the budget. The Cargo Rover from Kestrel Station is a hard-surface stylized sci-fi vehicle at 8,986 triangles and 2.72 x 4.38 x 3.17 m. Hard-surface stylized assets like this spend more triangles on panel detail, while still using one palette material.

Beyond cars: trucks, buses and tractors

Larger vehicles cost more on average because they have more wheels, more axles and more working parts. These are the totals from the live product pages:

All four use the same soft low-poly gradient style, so a farm tractor, a city bus and a family hatchback sit together in one scene without a style clash. The 21 Haul trailers all couple at one fifth-wheel height.

Budgeting traffic in a scene

A quick way to plan: multiply the vehicle count by the ceiling, then by the LOD ratio for the ones far from the camera. Twenty cars at 2,000 triangles is 40,000 triangles in the worst case. If fifteen of them are distant and switch to LOD1 at about 43%, the street drops to roughly 23,000. Add the scenery from your trees, rocks and nature props and you have a full frame budget you can check before you build the level.

Road Vehicles also includes three ready-made scenes (Town Crossroads, Retail Car Park and Campsite, and Race Paddock) with a sun and sky rig, hero and chase cameras, an isometric or top-down camera, spawn markers and a night atlas pair. They are a useful reference for vehicle density at a real street scale.

Common questions

What is a low poly 3D model?

A low poly model uses a small number of polygons, so it renders quickly in real time. For a car that means a few thousand triangles or fewer, against tens or hundreds of thousands for a realistic model.

How many polygons should a low poly car have?

For a stylized game car, 1,750 to 2,000 triangles including wheels is enough for a clean silhouette, separate spinning wheels and steering. Mobile games with many cars on screen can go lower, and a lighter LOD at around 40% of the full mesh helps at a distance.

Should the wheels be separate objects?

Yes, if the car will move. Separate wheels with pivots on the hub can spin and steer, and physics setups can build wheel colliders from their radius and width.

Can I use these vehicles in a game I sell?

Yes. The Premade3D Standard License covers unlimited personal and commercial projects with no attribution, including shipping the models inside a finished game. Reselling or sharing the source files on their own is not allowed.