Purchaseable Houses, More Asian Cars Coming To TDU Solar Crown In 2026

Time flies when you’re having fun. Or, in the case of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, occasionally having fun in between dealing with server issues or grinding through an unbalanced career mode.

We’re perhaps being a little cruel – it’s been nearly a year since Solar Crown launched, and while it has seen steady improvements to address lots of those early issues that afflicted the game, it’s still not exactly the Forza Horizon fighter it promised to be, or even a real match for The Crew Motorfest.

To the credit of developer KT Racing, though, it’s still plugging away with improving the title as it enters its second year, something it recently explained to Car Throttle in an online conference detailing its year two plans. Before that, there’s the Season 4 update, set to arrive later this month and bring five new cars, an in-game casino, graphical improvements and new stock car races (that’s ‘stock car’ as in unmodified, not NASCAR).

The year two updates, meanwhile, will kick off with Season 5 in October. The headline arrival there will be Taxi Missions, which are fairly self-explanatory – they’ll see you driving NPCs from point to point on the map. For an extra layer of depth, passengers might ask you to dress a certain way, or do things like lower the window or change the radio station. You’ll be expected to follow the rules of the road, too, unless otherwise requested.

Season 5 will also bring changes to the game engine, with an overhauled day/night cycle for the Hong Kong map and revisions to water, reflection, shadow and lighting effects.

Season 6 is scheduled to land in January 2026, bringing a new mission type that’ll be voted for by the community. KT is currently proposing four choices, tentatively titled Detective, Package Delivery, Photography and Adrenaline. They’ll be outlined in more detail shortly in a dev diary video, with players then able to vote for their favourite. The result will be announced next month. From a content point of view, meanwhile, Season 6 will see the return of a much-missed manufacturer to the series – Pagani.

On the subject of new cars, Season 7 will bring some very welcome ones in April 2026. A big sore point with the game has been its lack of Japanese cars, the nation currently represented only by the Nissan GT-R and 370Z. KT promises that more ‘Asian cars’ will finally arrive with this update, and while the team wouldn’t be led on exactly what, it strongly hinted at them being fan-favourite JDM vehicles.

The other big addition for Season 7 will be the Official Racing Centre, a new location in Solar Crown’s Hong Kong map from which ranked or regular online races can be launched.

Finally, Season 8 is set to arrive in July 2026, and bring one of the most requested, longest-promised features of all to the game. One of the things that set the first two TDU games apart was the ability to buy houses, and while they didn’t serve much purpose beyond acting as spawn points and car display opportunities, they added an extra layer to the games’ whole ‘luxury lifestyle’ vibe.

This feature will finally make its return roughly a year from now, with the ability to customise the decorations and furniture and display cars in the garage or garden. You’ll be able to invite friends over online, too.

Throughout year two, KT also promises regular quality-of-life improvements, as well as regular new live events and Solar Passes. Even longer-term, the developer says it still plans to add motorbikes to the game, but this could happen beyond year two.

With a new Forza Horizon likely arriving in 2026, The Crew Motorfest still receiving updates and two separate big-budget projects in the works from former Playground Games staffers, the open-world racing genre is showing no signs of slowing down over the next couple of years – among all that, reckon these changes will be enough to get you to give Solar Crown another look?