GTA 5 driving test: is your throttle hand steering?
Your right index finger is steering the car
The throttle is a trigger, the steering is a stick, and they sit on opposite sides of the
pad. Squeezing a trigger tightens a whole hand — the shell turns, and the thumb on the left
stick goes with it. Nobody has measured that. Your controller can, right now.
Steam
Hold a turn, then squeeze the throttle
Push the left stick as if you were steering through a long corner and hold it, then
pull the right trigger the way you would accelerate out of it. The pad below is
yours: it leans where you lean, the trigger presses as you press, and the shell
twists by the disturbance the bench measures.
Waiting for a controller
Median disturbance—Hold a turn, then squeeze
Counted—
Worst—
From centre—
Hold the stick, then pull the trigger
The page measures how far your steering thumb moves at the moment the throttle goes down.
Against last time
—
Why degrees, and why a lane. Rockstar does not publish GTA V's steering model, so
a number built on a guess about it would be decoration. Degrees of stick movement is a
property of your hand and is measurable today. As plain trigonometry, 6°
held over 100 m is 10.5 m across — 2.9 lanes of 3.66 m.
Geometry, not a prediction about how a car behaves.
Let go of the stick. Does the car keep steering?
Take your thumb off the left stick and leave it alone. Whatever reads now is a
steering input GTA V receives every second you are not correcting it. Two faults look
alike here and the plot separates them: a stick that leans is worn, a stick that
wobbles evenly around centre is noisy but straight.
Resting offset
—
Leaning
—
Wander
—
Range left on the far side
—
Take your hand off the stick
Let go completely and wait three seconds. The cloud is every sample; the filled dot is their average.
About that inner ring. It is drawn at 10%, and that is this page's
assumption rather than GTA V's — games do not publish their deadzones. 10%
is the common floor across the pads this site has measured, so a stick resting outside it
steers under almost any deadzone a game is likely to use. Inside it may still be worn; it
is simply below the point where this page will claim anything.
GTA V's keyboard is a console pad in disguise
Each console input was mapped to whatever key was free, so a two-stick click became
Caps Lock and a bumper became a key you hold while steering with WASD. Several keys do
two jobs, decided by whether you are standing or driving. Press one — the real key —
and the pair lights.
Press one of these keys — or click it — to light the pair.
Special abilityL3 + R3→Caps Lock
Clicking both sticks had no keyboard equivalent, so it landed on the one key nobody else uses — and the one push-to-talk software often claims
PhoneD-pad Up→Up arrow
A thumb direction became an arrow key at the far right, so answering a call means letting go of movement
Character wheelD-pad Down, held→Left Alt, held
A held key that Windows also wants; releasing it over the wrong slice switches you to Trevor mid-mission
Weapon wheelL1, held→Tab, held
A bumper your finger rests on became a key your left hand must hold while still steering with WASD
Melee and reloadCircle and R2 — two separate buttons→R for both
Two console buttons collapsed into one PC key, decided by whether a gun is equipped
HornL3 press→E
Shares interact and talk, which is why you sound the horn when you meant to speak to someone
HandbrakeR1→Space
Jump and handbrake on one key, separated only by whether you are in a car
Read from the verified controls entry rather than typed here, so the two pages cannot
drift apart: the full GTA V control reference
Four fingers. Thirty-odd jobs.
This page began by measuring one hand interfering with the other, so it ends by asking
which finger is carrying the game. Every binding is placed on the finger that reaches
it, and the three moments where one finger is asked for two things at once are named.
Left thumb6
MoveL3
Special abilityL3 + R3
Character wheelD-pad Down (hold)
HornL3 (press)
RadioD-pad Left / Right
PhoneD-pad Up
Left index3
AimL2
Weapon wheelL1 (hold)
Accelerate / brakeR2 / L2
A drive-by, the other hand
Brake / reverse — L2 / LTand at the same timeAim — L1 / LB, held
The mirror image, and slightly worse: the aim is a HOLD, not a tap, so the left index finger is committed to the bumper for as long as you are shooting. Braking mid-drive-by means letting go of the aim.
Right index3
Take coverR1
FireR2
HandbrakeR1
A drive-by
Accelerate — R2 / RT, heldand at the same timeFire — R1 / RB, tapped
Rockstar moved drive-by shooting onto the bumpers so it would not fight the throttle for the same trigger, and on a pad the bumper sits directly above that trigger. One index finger now holds the accelerator down and taps the button above it. This is why almost everybody slows down the moment they start shooting from a car.
Right thumb7
SprintCross (tap)
Jump / climbSquare
Enter / exit vehicleTriangle
Special abilityL3 + R3
Look behindR3 (press)
Change cameraTouchpad
Interaction menu (Online)Touchpad (hold)
Any fight on foot
Camera — right stickand at the same timeJump, enter a vehicle, quick actions — face buttons
The oldest collision on a console pad and the one GTA V never solved: the thumb that looks around is the thumb that presses every face button. You cannot turn the camera while you are jumping, which is why cover-to-cover movement in a firefight reads as a series of blind hops.
Every GTA V cheat, and it plays itself
Thirty-five cheats, four ways in: a sequence on PlayStation, the same in Xbox buttons,
a word typed into the PC console, and a phone number that works everywhere including
PC. Pick one and it plays through button by button — ten letters is a code, ten buttons
lighting in order is an instruction.
Invincibility10 presses
Five minutes of god mode. It runs out — it does not toggle off.
No cheat matches that. Clear the search to see all thirty-five.
What turning one on costs you. Rockstar states this part plainly: you can still
save with a cheat active, but achievements and trophies are disabled while one runs, and
entering the same cheat again usually — not always — turns it off. Invincibility expires
after about five minutes rather than toggling.
Not every task is worth the same
Every checklist prints these flat, implying the items are equal. Sixteen Miscellaneous
objectives carry a fifth of the game at 1.25% each; forty-two Hobbies share a
tenth at 0.24% apiece. One Miscellaneous item is worth more than five hobbies.
Miscellaneous1.25%
20%
/ 16
The category everybody underestimates. Sixteen items for a fifth of the game, which makes each one worth 1.25% — more than a story mission and five times a hobby. Half of them take under a minute.
Story missions0.80%
55%
/ 69
The spine of the game. They are the only category you cannot reorder — each one unlocks the next — and at 0.80% apiece they are also the most percentage per hour if you are playing the game rather than farming it.
Strangers & Freaks0.50%
10%
/ 20
The question-mark icons on the map. They appear as you progress the story, so they cannot all be done early, and several are multi-part chains that count once.
Random events0.36%
5%
/ 14
The only category where you choose which ones count. Fourteen successful encounters out of the many that spawn around Los Santos and Blaine County, so there is no fixed list to hunt.
Hobbies & Pastimes0.24%
10%
/ 42
The longest list and the thinnest reward: forty-two entries for a tenth of the game, 0.24% each. Bronze is enough for every one of them — going for gold earns nothing towards completion.
One thing this ranking is not. It is not advice about how to play. Ordering by
percentage per task is the fastest route to a number, and the number is not the reason
the game exists — the story carries 55% precisely because it is the game.
Half of what you are collecting does not count
No collectible guide leads with this. Of the ten hunts in GTA V, only 5
carry any completion percentage — 6.25% between them — and two of
the most-farmed, peyote plants and nuclear waste, carry none at all. The board
separates them, tracks what you have found, and says what each one actually pays.
Spaceship parts1.25% of the game
/ 50
All fifty are required — this is one of the sixteen Miscellaneous objectives, so the whole hunt is worth 1.25%. Finishing it also unlocks a mission, which is the only collectible hunt in the game that does.
Los SantosVinewood HillsBlaine CountyPaleto Bay & ChiliadThe sea floor
Letter scraps1.25% of the game
/ 50
The other fifty-piece hunt, and the other 1.25%. Same shape of job: all fifty, spread over the whole map, and they read as a murder confession once assembled.
Los SantosVinewood HillsBlaine CountyPaleto Bay & Chiliad
Stunt jumps1.25% of the game
/ 25 of 50
Half of them, not all: twenty-five of the fifty is the requirement. Several sit within a minute of each other along the freeways, so the first fifteen are much faster than the last ten.
Los SantosVinewood HillsBlaine County
Under the bridges1.25% of the game
/ 25 of 50
Fly under twenty-five of the fifty. Best done as one continuous helicopter run along the river and the coast rather than as fifty separate trips.
Los SantosBlaine CountyThe sea floor
Knife flights1.25% of the game
/ 8 of 15
Fly a plane sideways through a narrow gap, eight times out of the fifteen available. The bar is eight, and picking the eight easiest is a legitimate strategy.
Los SantosBlaine County
Peyote plantspays nothing
/ 27
Twenty-seven plants that turn you into an animal for a few minutes. Genuinely one of the best things in the game and worth exactly zero per cent — it is not in the requirements at all.
Vinewood HillsBlaine CountyPaleto Bay & ChiliadThe sea floor
Nuclear wastepays nothing
/ 30
Thirty barrels on the sea floor, collected in a submarine. It pays money and unlocks a discount, and it moves the completion number by nothing.
The sea floor
Submarine partspays nothing
/ 30
A second underwater hunt, also outside the requirements. It is a Stranger chain reward rather than a completion item.
The sea floor
Epsilon tractspays nothing
/ 10
Ten scattered pages for the Epsilon Program chain. The chain itself is a Stranger mission that counts; the tracts are not separately required.
Los SantosVinewood HillsBlaine County
Hidden packagespays nothing
/ 12
Floating briefcases of cash at sea. They respawn, so there is no fixed set to finish — and no percentage attached to any of them.
The sea floor
Where the hunts live
Los Santos6 hunts
The city itself. Dense, quick to cover on foot or by car, and where most of the stunt jumps and a third of both fifty-piece hunts sit.
Vinewood Hills5 hunts
The ridge above the city. Awkward on wheels and fast in a helicopter, which is why most routes do it as one air leg.
Blaine County7 hunts
The desert, Sandy Shores and the Alamo Sea. The longest driving between items anywhere on the map.
Paleto Bay & Chiliad3 hunts
The north coast and the mountain. Few items, far apart, and usually the leg people leave until last.
The sea floor6 hunts
Everything underwater. Needs a submarine or a dive suit, and — apart from the bridges run — almost nothing down here counts towards completion.
Why regions and not pins, for now. A map with a marker in the wrong place is worse
than no map — somebody drives across Blaine County on it. What is here comes from the
same verified reading as the rest of the page. Exact coordinates, and the thing worth
building on them, are the next layer, and they are not going up until each set has been
checked.
The rest of Grand Theft Auto, drawn
Five pages and they are not interchangeable: two measure the pad in your hands, two are the reference you look a binding up in, one is the launch record. Every figure is counted from what the page holds.
Two different faults produce that, and they need different repairs. The first is a left stick that no longer returns to centre: it rests off-centre, and every second you are not correcting it the game receives a steering input you never gave. The second is your own grip — squeezing the right trigger tightens the whole hand, rotates the pad slightly and drags the steering thumb with it, so the car turns a little every time you accelerate. The two panels on this page separate them: the hands-off plot shows where your stick sits with nobody holding it, and the throttle bench measures how far your thumb travels when you squeeze.
Does squeezing the trigger really move the stick?
For a lot of hands, yes, and it is measurable on any controller in a browser. The page samples your left stick in the frames before the right trigger crosses its press point and again while it is down, then reports how far the stick turned. Under two degrees is your thumb holding its line. Past six degrees, acceleration and steering have effectively become one input — usually a grip that squeezes the shell rather than supporting it, which is a thing you can change without buying anything.
How much stick drift is too much for GTA 5?
The honest answer is that Rockstar does not publish GTA V’s deadzone, so nobody can tell you the exact point where the game starts listening. What can be said without guessing is arithmetic about the stick itself. This page draws a ring at 10%, the common floor across the pads it has measured, and a stick resting outside that ring is one that steers under almost any deadzone a game is likely to use. It also costs you travel: a stick resting 14% to the left has only 86% of its range left going right.
Why is Q the cover key on foot and the radio in a car?
Because GTA V’s PC controls are a console pad in disguise. Each console input was mapped to whatever keyboard key was free, and the console pad reuses the same button in both contexts — so the keyboard inherited the reuse. Q, Space, R, E and F all do two jobs, decided by whether you are standing or driving. The panel on this page lights the pair when you press the real key, and the table under it says what each one cost.
Should I play GTA 5 on controller or keyboard and mouse?
The split most players land on is not a compromise, it is the correct answer: a pad for driving and flying, mouse and keyboard for shooting on foot. GTA V switches between them instantly, with no menu, so you can genuinely change mid-mission. The reason is that driving wants an analogue steering axis and a trigger with travel, and neither exists on a keyboard; aiming wants a pointing device, and a stick is not one. What this page measures — whether your throttle hand disturbs your steering hand — only applies to the pad half.
New: ask me anything about this siteWhich test to run, a game's default keybinds, what a result means.
KayeeKeymap Labs assistant
I answer from this site only — the 28 browser tests, the controls library for 46 games, the sensitivity converters and the two games. I can tell you which page to open, how a tool works and what its result means.
I will not guess. If something is not on the site, I will say so.
