The cars’ internal design resembled ‘beams’, where the team derived the name from, followed by ‘NG’ for New Generation. The latter was better equipped to handle the soft-body physics that were unique to BeamNG.Drive. 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 a few Rigs of Rods developers moved onto a new project.