Yep. The same with the boat. It serves no other purpose than a five second ride, never to be seen again. I think the developers of the original game initially made these features for later use, but didn't have either time or interest to properly incorporate them into actual gameplay, so they basically left them in the game just to show they had these cool ideas. I think I'll try to add some gameplay so these features will be actually useful. Either that, or will replace them with something different.