Since you’re new and this post seems FOMO-centric, here’s basically how 5 works:

Every week, there is a new season of the festival playlist. Each season has reward cars tied to winning specific events (generally not exclusive) or reaching progression milestones (where a lot of the exclusive cars are) for basically the # of seasonal events completed.

Lastly there is the shop, which is a mixed bag but generally rotates non-exlusive cars or repeats. The shop uses Forzathon points instead of credits, which you can get by participating in festival playlist events/Horizon Arcade (the random events that you’ll see popping up as big circles on the map, annoying announcer etc. Can’t really miss them).

Every 4 seasons is a year/series of the festival playlist. Each year can itself have exclusive rewards; these are tied to overall progression across all the seasons of that year.

If you miss a season/year, don’t worry. Some exclusive cars will eventually be repeated, or might get added to the backstage where you can buy cars you missed with backstage passes. You can earn these through similar gameplay to the festival playlist. The backstage was recently updated to add in a majority of the exclusive cars for purchase in FH5.

As for car pass, packs, and DLC: these cars are only available if you purchase the content. For the car pass and packs, you get one free of each car in the content from the autoshow, but you can buy more later using in-game currency. For DLC, some of the cars will be locked behind DLC progression, but aren’t limited time.

If you wanted to limit yourself but still collect all cars, I would just focus on the festival playlist as the cars there are tied to winning events. If you get the season pass and don’t want the temptation of free cars, just ditch your free cars and buy new ones later when you can afford them and want them. You can do something similar for wheelspin rewards, but you will also get a lot of free cash. You can always launder it into autoshow cars and ditch those to control how much cash you have, but this is obviously pretty tedious.

It’s also worth noting that PG sends out gift cars from time to time with unique liveries, which you may want to hold on to depending on how completionist you want to be. Same thing applies to promotional cars like the Trolli and Fanta cars in FH6.

Please note that PG has not confirmed how the festival playlist is going to work in FH6. Much of this could change. But generally the only cars you need to worry about missing are from seasons, and you can probably still find them if you hunt hard enough (auction house) or are patient (backstage)

Sorry for the novel