AW- Vehicles (non-Drivers)

How do you guys handling giving players vehicles if they aren't drivers? Do you just go ahead and let them drive normal unmodified vehicles?

My party has no driver, but we do have a Savvyhead so I'm worrying that they'll get a car and attach grenade launchers to it without even having a driver.

That doesn't sound like a big worry - I hear tell that as MC, your job is to make Apocalypse World seem real and to make the characters' lives not boring, not to keep them from having interesting things just because they don't have the "right" mix of playbooks in play. ;)
Maybe one of them will choose to take a no shit driver from the Driver playbook when they next get an improvement. Now that they have a car, it's valuable to them, right?

As far as getting a car in the first place is concerned, it might be something they obviously can't just like go buy it like that if they go into a holding's bustling market, depending I suppose on the market. But maybe they can make known that they want the thing and drop jingle to speed it on its way. My last group of players managed to take the NPC warlord's monster truck from him, so maybe yours will be able to seize one by force as well, or maybe they'll get lucky and find an opportunity, with or without a cost.
I think you have lots of options here, is what I'm saying.

Tangentially, I'm about to start a new game of AW tomorrow, and it looks likely we'll have an Apocalypse World where people live on the tops of ruined skyscrapers, unable and unwilling to go below. In which case I fully intend to offer the Driver a helicopter instead of a car. Maybe that's a bad idea, I don't know, but it seems pretty okay to me. Why the heck not, right?

Air balloon > helicopter. I mean, it's kind of up to the Driver, really.

As for the OP, like SeaWyrm said, this is really not a big concern. If your Savvyhead takes the time to build a car and put grenade launchers on it, that sounds sweet -- it's not like they didn't 'earn' it or something, since the Savvyhead can only make things by working through the fiction. How scarce cars are in your apocalypse just depends on what you and the other players have come up with so far in terms of what the world looks like, etc.

But also yes, of course, if their character can drive and there is something to drive, they can drive it. I mean, if you think about a Road Warrior style Apocalypse -- those people aren't all Drivers, but they're sure as hell all driving cars. Cars could be totally ubiquitous and the Driver will still be the Driver, because they have the moves.

So in Apocalypse World, there are two kinds of advancement, descriptive and prescriptive. If you level up and take the "My Other Car is a Tank" move, then you have gained a tank through a prescriptive advance. However, if you get a tank by going out and aquiring a tank, then you have a tank, there's no way the GM can deny that or else they aren't making Apocalypse World seem real. This is descriptive, your fictional positioning has been altered by fictional actions.

Vincent wrote something along these lines in a Blood and Guts post:

You can get followers by descriptive improvement, same as you might get a car or a new gun. Like, you might be this angel you're talking about, and in play you might accumulate a bunch of people around you who are into you and who generally do what you tell them to do. Then, taking fortunes from the hocus playbook would make perfect sense.

Skinners are the only ones who can get followers prescriptively, the only ones who can choose them from a list instead of having to make them happen in play.

-Vincent

Also, I don't know if maybe this is crystal clear to everyone involved, but I haven't seen it mentioned. Every car, even "normal unmodified" cars, have the stats: power, looks, speed and weakness. It's just, you only use them if you have A no shit driver.

You could of course add a custom move, like, when you're in a car chase or something, that reads roll+speed.

Maybe you want to add "when someone else tries to help or interfere with you, add your car's weakness to their roll" for everyone. Otherwise taking A no shit driver means you're suddenly worse at helping others from behind the wheel than you were before (which kind of makes sense if you want it too, I guess?).

But if you don't do either of those, and for as long as no-one takes A no shit driver as an advance, you don't need to actually stat the cars up. But be sure to establish them fictionally: is this car actually a powerhouse, rickety, reliable, really fast, eerily quiet, etc.? And with the savvyhead, if they mount a grenade launcher on the car, then they can drive around and, you know, fire grenade shells from the car! That's awesome. Treat it like you would any player firing grenade shells while in a moving car. There are stats for the grenade launcher, if you need its harm rating.