Big Ambitions Private Driver: Onyx Contract Setup in 1.0

Updated 2026-09-08 · Last verified 2026-09-08 · Steam Big Ambitions

The private driver in Big Ambitions is a 1.0 feature run out of Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs, and you start it by picking any vehicle you own, signing a contract with Onyx, and leaving that vehicle in their garage. Once the car is physically parked there you can summon the driver to your position whenever you want a ride, which is the part nobody writes down: the contract alone does nothing until the car is dropped off.

That procedure is not on the community wiki, which has no article for Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs at all. It comes from the developer's own 1.0 changelog, published 14 August 2026 under the misleading title Big Ambitions Full Release is TWO WEEKS AWAY.

How to set up an Onyx private driver contract

The steps below follow the order Hovgaard Games gives. All of it is 1.0 behaviour, dated 28 August 2026; none of it existed in any Early Access build.

Own a vehicle. The changelog is explicit that any vehicle qualifies, naming both ends of the range: "You can use any vehicle, from Uncle Fred's cheap Honza, to the luxury Anselmo." In story mode Uncle Fred hands you a used car early, confirmed independently by GameRant in 2023 and by NoobFeed's 1.0 review, so most players already meet this requirement before they reach Onyx.
Optionally buy the Onyx-exclusive Limo. 1.0 added a limousine tied to Onyx. The changelog frames it as a flourish, not a prerequisite: "Or maybe grab the fancy, new Onyx-exclusive Limo. It's up to you." Hovgaard did not state where it is sold or what it costs, so this page does not guess.
Set up the contract at Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs. The official sequence puts the car first and the paperwork second: "Next, set up a contract with Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs." No qualifying condition of any kind is stated for signing, and no contract fee is published.
Drop the vehicle off in the Onyx garage. This is the load-bearing step. The service does not work off a car parked elsewhere in the city, and it is not an app you call from anywhere. The vehicle has to sit in their garage.
Summon the driver. "Now you can summon your driver to your side whenever you need a quick ride." The summon is to your position, which is what separates this from hailing a taxi at the kerb.

Step 4 is consistent with how the rest of the game treats vehicles. Warehouse deliveries also require a vehicle physically present in the building, with a delivery driver assigned to it and a storage shelf at the receiving store, and both community wiki pages covering that agree on those three conditions. Cars in Big Ambitions are objects in the world, not entries in a menu, so the garage drop-off is the mechanism working the way it does everywhere else.

Cars that qualify

Any of them. The table below lists the vehicle names the dossier can confirm, grouped by dealership, and it deliberately carries no prices and no cargo figures.

Dealership	Vehicles confirmed	Relevance to Onyx
City Cars	Honza Mimic, Vord V150, Vord Tiara Vic	The Honza is the car the 1.0 changelog names as the cheap end of the qualifying range
Manhattan Luxury Cars	Anselmo AF90, Bima 320, Ferdinand 112, Lytte L6, Mersaidi MGA GT, Mersaidi S500, Petrolls Fanton, UMC Nunavut, Vord Pony	The Anselmo is the car the changelog names as the luxury end
General US Trucks	Freight Truck T1, Mersaidi Dash, Vord Courier D500	Freight vehicles are not excluded by any published rule, but nothing confirms they are sensible here
Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs	Onyx-exclusive Limo	Introduced in 1.0; the only vehicle tied to this operator

Why there are no prices in that table. The community wiki's vehicle page is the only place a full price and capacity table exists, and it is contaminated. The same table mixes English and Spanish rows, with Si instead of Yes in the auto-park column, Camion de Carga T1 duplicating Freight Truck T1, one price missing its dollar sign, and the Anselmo misspelled as Anseimo AF90. Hovgaard's own patch notes spell it Anselmo AF 90. A single contaminated source is not a source, so vehicle values here are limited to what the game itself asserts.

The only official numbers attached to car value anywhere are the achievement thresholds. Mad Whip pays out for owning a car worth at least $15,000, $90,000 and $120,000 at bronze, silver and gold. Those are first-party figures read from the Steam achievement list on 8 September 2026, and they bracket the luxury range without pretending to price any individual model.

The achievement ladder, and what it proves

Big Ambitions has 126 achievements, 27 of which were added for 1.0. One set covers the private driver.

Achievement	Requirement	Global unlock rate
They See Me Rollin' - Bronze	Use your private driver at least 10 times	1.4%
They See Me Rollin' - Silver	Use your private driver at least 25 times	1.1%
They See Me Rollin' - Gold	Use your private driver at least 100 times	0.7%

Rates are Steam's global figures pulled on 8 September 2026, eleven days after launch, and they will drift upward over time. Read them against the rest of the transport ladder and the picture is stark.

Achievement	Requirement	Global unlock rate	System age
Carpark - Bronze	Own 2 vehicles	41.4%	Long-standing
Mad Whip - Bronze	Own a car worth $15,000 or more	31.2%	Long-standing
The Passenger - Bronze	Complete 10 taxi rides	23.3%	Long-standing
Mechanic Paradise - Bronze	Spend $10,000 repairing vehicles	21.8%	Long-standing
Crime Rider - Bronze	Receive 10 parking tickets	5.8%	Long-standing
Expensive Drops - Bronze	Spend $1,000 on gasoline	2.6%	Long-standing
They See Me Rollin' - Bronze	Use your private driver 10 times	1.4%	1.0

Roughly one player in 71 has used a private driver ten times, against nearly one in four for taxi rides. The gap is not a verdict on the feature. It is a measure of how new it is, and the same pattern holds across every other piece of 1.0 content: the golf and tennis minigames added with the Hamptons both sit at 0.1 per cent on all three tiers. Treat any confident claim about how the private driver performs in a long-run economy with suspicion, because on this evidence very few people have run one long enough to know.

One caveat on the achievement text itself. The 1.0 patch of 1 September 2026 states that more achievement fixes were still coming, so the wording of these descriptions may change even where the thresholds do not. Everything here is dated for that reason. Full thresholds and rates for all 126 are on the achievements page.

Private driver against the other ways to move

New York has several transport layers, and the private driver does not replace any of them cleanly.

Method	How it starts	Vehicle needed	Confirmed by
Private driver	Contract at Onyx, car left in their garage, then summon	Yes, any vehicle	1.0 changelog, first-party
Taxi	Hail on the street, choose a destination on the map, pay	No	Community wiki plus the The Passenger achievement
Driving yourself	Get in and drive; 1.0 added auto park and toggleable auto steering	Yes	1.0 changelog, first-party
Subway	Enter a station; 1.0 added destination search to it	No	Community wiki, Early Access era, plus a 1.0 patch note
Electric scooter	Rented from the street	No	Community wiki, Early Access era; 1.0 patched scooter bugs

Fares deserve one blunt paragraph. The community wiki lists $3 per subway trip and $20 per day for a scooter, both single-source and both last edited in 2024, which makes them Early Access figures that 1.0 may have changed. Hovgaard has never published a taxi fare, an Onyx contract price, or a per-summon cost. This site does not carry a price list for any of them, and any page that quotes one without saying which build it came from is repeating a number nobody checked.

Two things are worth separating from the private driver because the names collide. The Delivery Driver is an employee you hire and schedule at your warehouse, and it still exists in 1.0, confirmed by the Freightshakers achievement for scheduling 5, 10 and 20 of them in the current achievement list. Speedy Bites, also new in 1.0, is food delivery, and it runs in both directions: you can have food brought to your home or business, or take Speedy Bites jobs yourself for quick cash. Neither has anything to do with your Onyx contract. See staff roles and logistics.

What is still unknown

The changelog gives the flow and stops. These are genuinely open, and the honest answer is that nobody has published one:

What the contract costs, as a one-off, a subscription, or a per-ride fare. Not stated.
Whether the summoned car still needs fuel and repairs. Gasoline and repair costs are confirmed as real mechanics by the Expensive Drops and Mechanic Paradise achievements, but nothing says whether an Onyx-driven car draws on them.
Whether you can be summoned to or from the Hamptons. The seventh neighbourhood is across a long drive, which is exactly where a driver would matter most.
Whether parking tickets can still accrue while Onyx has the car. Crime Rider confirms tickets exist; their interaction with the contract does not appear anywhere.
Where the Onyx-exclusive Limo is sold and what it costs.

Provenance

Claim	Evidence	Independent sources
Feature exists, is called Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs	1.0 changelog; PCGamesN 30 Aug 2026; NoobFeed 29 Aug 2026	Three, one first-party
Contract flow: car, contract, garage drop-off, summon	1.0 changelog only	One, first-party, and no second source describes the flow at all
Any vehicle qualifies	1.0 changelog	One, first-party
Onyx-exclusive Limo exists	1.0 changelog	One, first-party
Achievement tiers 10 / 25 / 100 and unlock rates	Steam achievement list, 8 Sep 2026	One, first-party, cross-checked against the 126 total in the Steam app data
Private driver is 1.0 only	EA 0.11 announcement, 18 Jun 2026, calls it upcoming	One, first-party

Single-sourcing usually weakens a claim. Here it does not, because the single source is the developer describing their own patch, and the alternative is not a better source but no source. What it does mean is that everything above describes intended behaviour as shipped on 28 August 2026, not measured behaviour in a hundred-hour save.

For the rest of what changed at launch, see the 1.0 breakdown. For the neighbourhood the driver most usefully reaches, see the Hamptons.

Change log

8 September 2026: Page created. Contract flow transcribed from the official 1.0 changelog, achievement tiers and unlock rates read from the Steam achievement list the same day, vehicle names listed without prices because the only full price table available is contaminated.

Frequently asked questions

How do you get a private driver in Big Ambitions?

Pick any vehicle you own, set up a contract at Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs, and drop that vehicle off in the Onyx garage. Once the car is sitting in their garage you can summon the driver to your position whenever you want a ride. This is the order Hovgaard Games gives in the 1.0 changelog, and the garage drop-off is the step that is missing from every other write-up.

Which car do you need for the Onyx private driver?

Any vehicle works. The official 1.0 wording spans the whole range, from Uncle Fred's cheap Honza to the luxury Anselmo, so the starter car you are given in story mode already qualifies. There is also an Onyx-exclusive Limo introduced with 1.0, but the changelog presents it as a choice rather than a requirement.

Is the private driver in Early Access or only in 1.0?

Only in 1.0, released 28 August 2026. Hovgaard trailed it in the EA 0.11 announcement of 18 June 2026, which said the 1.0 release with private drivers and the Hamptons was next on the horizon, so no Early Access build shipped it. Any guide that describes Big Ambitions transport without Onyx was written before 28 August 2026.

What is the private driver achievement in Big Ambitions?

They See Me Rollin', a bronze, silver and gold set for using your private driver 10, 25 and 100 times. Global unlock rates on 8 September 2026 were 1.4 per cent, 1.1 per cent and 0.7 per cent, which is why so little has been written about the feature. For comparison, the taxi achievement's bronze tier sits at 23.3 per cent.

Is the private driver better than a taxi?

They solve different problems. A taxi is hailed on the street and needs no vehicle of your own, while the private driver is summoned to your position and uses the car you left at Onyx. Neither fare structure has been published by Hovgaard, so anyone quoting a per-ride cost for either is guessing.

Does the community wiki have a page on Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs?

No. Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs returns no article on the Big Ambitions Fandom wiki, and its employee category was last edited in November 2024, so it lists none of the roles added since. The contract flow on this page comes from the developer's own 1.0 changelog instead.