It's time to ban the Chelsea tractor

Spectator

21-06-2025

City dwellers across Europe will have noticed an ominous and growing presence on our streets, nudging cyclists onto pavements, looming over pedestrians crossing the road, and generally spoiling the view. It is gratifying to learn that we are neither going mad nor shrinking in the wash: cars really are becoming huge.
The bonnets of newly-sold cars across Europe now average 83.8cm in height, up from 76.9cm in 2010 – coincidentally the perfect height for caving in a toddler's head. That's according to a new report from Transport & Environment (T&E), an advocacy group for clean transport and energy that is campaigning against what it calls 'carspreading'.
A resident of Zone 3 has no business owning a car that can trace its lineage to the Jeep
Ironically for a vehicle so closely associated with mums doing the school run, the Chelsea tractor is a clear danger to primary-aged children, making it much likelier that the driver will squish them into the tarmac. A similar fate awaits adults, though the lucky ones will merely absorb the impact in their torso, where they keep their vital organs. This shows there's only one thing for it: it's time to ban four-wheel drives from Britain's cities.
Bluntly put, a resident of Zone 3 has no business owning a car that can trace its lineage to the Jeep, a vehicle literally built to fight Nazis. Whatever the shortcomings of Sadiq Khan, no London street is sufficiently dangerous that you need a light utility vehicle to navigate it – or at least, no street that a man who could afford a Land Rover might live in. The yummy mummies of Clapham, the financial bros of Hampstead, or the international wealth treating Chelsea as their playground – none of them should be allowed a four-wheel drive.
The growing height of car bonnets is partly down to an increasing number of SUVs, to use the American term for a four-wheel drive. T&E reckon they account for a little over half of new cars sold in Europe, with many 4×4 bonnets sitting more than a metre off the ground.
Four-wheel drives are therefore likely to account for a growing proportion of the nearly 30,000 people killed or seriously injured in Great Britain each year in road collisions. While the bulk of the roughly 1,600 deaths are car or motorcycle users, about a quarter are pedestrians.
Such incidents are sufficiently commonplace that we don't normally read about them. One noteworthy exception, however, did catch public attention in July 2023. Driving through Wimbledon, Claire Freemantle lost control of her Land Rover Defender and ploughed through the fence at The Study Prep school, killing eight-year-old Nuria Sajjad and Selena Lau.
Initially arrested for dangerous driving, Freemantle was eventually let off without charge on the grounds she had suffered a seizure. The case has since been reopened.
Unsurprisingly, Europeans have alighted on the old standby to any problem: more regulation. The heads of various worthy causes have written to the European Commission urging them to commit to months of fruitful work to create limits on how big new cars can be. Their suggested implementation date is a decade hence, by which point we will presumably all be driving SUVs.
The response from Brussels has been wholly inadequate, a predictably timid European disappointment. But free from the EU's clutches, the British should act decisively: we should outlaw the Chelsea tractor on our own.
Four-wheel drives are no doubt safer for their passengers. Analysis by The Economist of American road accidents last year concluded that the fatality rate of occupants in a Ford F-350 Super Duty pickup truck was about half that of those travelling in a Honda Civic.
But such safety comes at the expense of everyone else. As cited in the same report, a 2004 paper by Michelle White of the University of California estimated that for every deadly crash a 4×4 avoids, there are 4.3 more among other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists.
The negative externalities pile up from there. Larger vehicles generally pollute more, consuming more fuel to move more weight and emit more CO2. Their tyres leave more particles in the air, water and soil. They also create more potholes in the roads, such damage often being cited as a reason to own a 4×4 in the first place.
That's alongside the sheer intimidation of a small tank driving down streets built for horses and carts, as well as the inconvenience to others when you try to park. When they aren't running you over or polluting your lungs, Chelsea tractors make cities uglier and unpleasant for everybody else.
Yes, there should be exemptions. Any man in possession of an actual tractor may legitimately be in want of a SUV. Just as we allow farmers to shoot vermin, we should allow them to haul equipment in a four-wheel drive. Jeremy Clarkson need not return to the barricades over this policy. But as for the rest of us, there is simply no need. Get the urbanites off their tractors and back in their hatchbacks.