Conveyances are the 26 stealable vehicles of the realm, from mangy mules to royal carriages. They are worth understanding as an economy in their own right, because they are the one asset class in the game that is consumed by the activity that needs it most.
Conveyances are stolen from 4 stable grounds, each gated behind a character rank and each holding progressively more valuable stock. Note that this gate reads your LIVE rank, so it re-locks after an Ascension.
The higher grounds are not simply better. The vehicles there are worth far more, but they are also what you will be feeding into heists, so a ground that only produces expensive rigs can be an awkward place to shop when what a heist needs is a cheap cart.
A stolen conveyance usually arrives damaged, and damage matters: it reduces what the vehicle is worth when fenced and what it contributes as heist crew quality. You can repair it, but repair is priced as a multiple of the underlying value, at 1.4x, so repairing an expensive vehicle is itself an expensive decision.
The rule of thumb: repair a vehicle you intend to USE, and fence a vehicle you intend to sell. Paying to repair something purely to increase its fence price is usually a net loss once the multiplier is accounted for.
Every conveyance you own is one of four things: gold, materials, heist fuel, or a way out of town. Fencing turns it straight into gold at a price driven by its value and its damage. Salvaging breaks it into crafting materials instead, and a heavily damaged vehicle salvages for less than a clean one, so a wreck is often better fenced than broken down.
Keeping it means committing it to a heist, which is where the real value lives and also where it usually dies.
The fourth use is the road. Burning a conveyance skips the 15-minute travel cooldown outright, which is reason enough to keep one clean vehicle stabled if you move between cities often. It has to be undamaged, though, so a battered cart is no use on the road until it has been repaired, and it has to be valuable: the shortest road asks 1,500 gold, which rules out the humblest nag in the realm. The destination sets the rest of the standard: reaching The Dark Citadel demands something out of The Royal Mews worth at least 30,000 gold. See Cities of the Realm for the full comparison against the gold toll.
Every conveyance a crew commits to a heist is normally consumed, win or lose. On a SUCCESSFUL run each committed vehicle gets an independent salvage roll back to its owner, from 5% for the priciest vehicles up to 50% for the cheapest, deliberately inverse to what the vehicle is worth. A failed heist consumes everything with no salvage roll at all.
That inversion is the key planning fact. Expensive rigs raise crew quality most and are least likely to come back, so a heist crew is genuinely spending capital, not just risking it. Budget conveyances as a consumable running cost of heisting rather than as a collection.