How to make a working car without rigging?

Hello. I am currently working on a retro-styled driving game based loosely on GTA 1 and 2. Since the game will be in a top-down perspective. Since that is the case, I do not want to animate wheels you will not even see properly.

Can my question be answered? Is it possible? idk but i’d like to see what you guys come up with

you are correct in that you definitely don’t need an skeleton and control rig for this.

But you probably would want to animate the wheels spinning and turning. This could be done by separating the wheel from the rest of the mesh and simply applying rotation to it, or you could use a shader to make it look as if it was spinning.

For wheel turning I suppose you could use a shader but I think just applying some rotation would be a lot simpler.