The Mineta Transportation Institute’s analysis of 78 vehicle ramming attacks between 1973-2018, for example, reveals a clear tactical progression foreshadowing the New Orleans tragedy.
The attacker drove around barricades and up onto the sidewalk of Bourbon Street, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said, avoiding barriers that had been placed by police. Kirkpatrick said the man “was trying to run over as many people as he could. We had a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there, and he still got around.”
Vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) represented the early apex, requiring extensive knowledge and complex logistics. Their sophistication proved their weakness – the 2010 Times Square bombing failed when the device malfunctioned, while in 2007, two separate VBIEDs in Britain failed to detonate, one even towed away for illegal parking before discovery.
Everything changed on Bastille Day, 2016, in Nice, France. The attack that killed 86 people stripped away complexity, requiring only a truck and a driver. This brutal simplification of attack echoes the natural pattern of mechanized violence evolution – wherever vulnerabilities are made more complex attackers tend to pivot towards opportunities of least resistance. The Nice attack marked one such tactical regression of deadly consequence, where an average of 3.6 fatalities per vehicle incident abruptly rose to 22.0 in crowded zones.
The American “car culture” response to the shift in attacks proved particularly telling. Within months of Nice, while counter-terrorism experts were still analyzing implications, seven U.S. states saw legislation introduced to grant legal immunity for driving into groups of people.
The language in these bills is remarkably similar from state to state, and in some cases, nearly identical.
North Dakota’s HB 1203 explicitly protected drivers “exercising reasonable care” when using their vehicles as weapons.
…the bill got introduced for people to be able to drive down the roads without fear of running into somebody and having to be liable for them.
Florida’s SB 1096 went even further with logic reversal, shifting burden of proof to American victims of terrorist attacks.
…the bill would have put the burden of proof on the injured person, not the driver, to prove that the driver’s actions were intended to cause injury or death.
The bills were written with cynical claims about protecting vulnerable drivers despite a reality of non-violent groups of unarmed people in the street. It was an obviously false victim construction with zero logical basis.
…existing laws already protect drivers who need to flee from a riot to defend themselves and their families. In both the criminal and civil contexts, self-defense laws provide justifications for a driver to use force to protect himself. A driver is further protected by either prosecutorial discretion in a criminal lawsuit or by comparative negligence law in a civil lawsuit. Because of these existing mechanisms, the statute is unnecessary to protect drivers from liability…
Thus, the new bills acted as a coordinated push to codify private vehicular force as state-sanctioned crowd control; the car as political power to undermine safety necessary for people to assemble or even move in public. The normalization of cars hitting people as an offensive action, as rooted in 1930s racist jaywalking laws and forced “side walks” (versus British word “pavement”), created a permissive atmosphere where boundaries between accident and attack, between self-defense and aggression, became deliberately blurred. Use of vehicles as an asymmetric weapon was surreptitiously promoted into common thought.
Media outlets played a crucial role in this normalization immediately following the horrifying Nice terror attack. Major platforms including Fox News and The Daily Caller published, then quietly deleted, articles in 2017 encouraging drivers to dehumanize and assault people as a form of political action.
Here’s a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the way by cars and trucks. Study the technique; it may prove useful in the next four years.
Social media likewise was filled with information warfare campaigns systematically promoting vehicular violence as white supremacist political action.
St. Paul police have placed a sergeant on leave as they investigate a report that he posted on Facebook, “Run them over,” in response to an article about an upcoming… protest. The comment detailed what people could do to avoid being charged with a crime if they struck someone [using their vehicle intentionally to cause harm].
While legislators and media normalized intentional vehicular violence, a parallel development was emerging from a notoriously racist car company: the automation of vehicle control systems. This shift would prove significant, as it removed even the psychological barriers that might give human attackers pause. Instead of requiring radicalization or intent, demonstrated within Minnesota police themselves, automated systems could now cause widespread harm through a programmatic indifference to (race-based) pedestrian safety.
A permissive framework would prove prophetic when autonomous systems began demonstrating systematic failures. Tesla’s Autopilot system has primarily revealed how automated control can inflict widespread damage globally without accountability. Between 2020-2024, over 900 “phantom braking” incidents and 273 documented crashes demonstrated how mechanical systems could exceed human actors in efficiency – a single software update affecting hundreds of thousands of vehicles simultaneously.
The contrast is stark:
- New Orleans attack (2025): 15 deaths, massive response with claims of ISIS links
- Waukesha parade (2021): 6 deaths, national crisis
- Tesla Autopilot (2020-2024): 273+ documented crashes, treated as acceptable business risk
- “Phantom braking” incidents: 900+ cases risking chain collisions and dozens killed
- Monthly Tesla fatalities surpass historic terrorist vehicle ramming attacks
To put it another way, when three students in Oakland, California were killed by an electric fire in their Cybertruck, Tesla said nothing about the unexplained tragedy and the CEO was uncharacteristically silent even as regulators announced their investigation. However, when one person was then killed by a fire in their Cybertruck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, the Tesla CEO immediately promoted the concept of a truck firework and camping fuel fire being an unknown concept worthy of his entire senior team’s commitment to a full investigation.
Fireworks started an estimated 31,302 fires in 2022, including 3,504 structure fires, 887 vehicle fires…
And yet:
Likewise, within hours of the New Orleans attack, officials announced the discovery of an ISIS flag in the vehicle, prompting immediate calls for particularly targeted surveillance and control systems. This familiar pattern – using terrorism as justification for increased mechanization of particular control – obscures a crucial shift: while earlier attacks required human ideological motivation, automated systems can now inflict similar damage through simple errors or intentional manipulation. The flag, whether planted or authentic, serves primarily to maintain older narratives about vehicle violence while missing the much more pressing and broader systematic vulnerabilities (flags flown in Tesla factories).
The response to New Orleans illustrates this misdirection perfectly. While media is dragged by racist politicians into reporting a single flag in a single vehicle, twisting the narrative to serve their selfish nativist/xenophobic agenda, the more significant threat comes from concentrated private autonomous vehicle networks designed to exploit loopholes in urban safety. The same politicians who cited the ISIS flag as a cause for action simultaneously have discussed removing regulations and fast-tracking permits for Tesla to deploy even larger unrestricted fleets – effectively increasing the very vulnerability they claimed to be fighting. The cynical manipulation of terrorist narratives more fundamentally will be about control of emergent technology for urban warfare. As politicians stoke fears about individual attackers using one vehicle, they’re simultaneously enabling deployment of massive autonomous networks that weaponize thousands of vehicles via simple software changes. We’ve moved from isolated incidents requiring human intent to infrastructure-scale vulnerabilities that will be triggered remotely.
The Grünheide Tesla facility near Berlin exemplifies this blind spot in urban security. America has demonstrated how quickly societies normalize mechanized violence – first through social media campaigns promoting vehicle attacks, then through weak regulation of autonomous systems, and now through massive concentration of networked vehicles near population centers. Each step made the violence more efficient while reducing accountability. Export of these weapons systems to other countries is yet another predictable outcome.
When future historians analyze this progression, they’ll note how “dual-use capability concentrations” were hidden behind marketing promises of hands-free driving and cheap taxi rides. The evolution from Nice to New Orleans shows how vehicular violence became systematized – from complex terrorist operations to simple ramming attacks, then to legally-protected tactics, and finally to automated networks that could be weaponized through existing command infrastructure.
The critical question isn’t whether such systems will be deployed; they already exist in cities worldwide and are being quietly tested. Charlottesville saw a rare exception where a terrorist using the heavily-promoted “run them over” tactic was convicted of a hate crime. Would he have gotten away with it if he had used remote control instead and wasn’t in the car?
The question is whether we’ll recognize this pattern of weaponized vehicles for asymmetric attacks before the next wave of manufactured crises further normalizes urban population terrorism.
References:
- Police Chief Magazine, “Low-Tech Terrorism: The Threat of Vehicles and Vehicle-Assisted Attacks,” International Association of Chiefs of Police.
- Dakin Andone, “These states have introduced bills to protect drivers who run over protesters,” CNN, August 19, 2017.
- Jenkins, Brian Michael and Bruce R. Butterworth, “An Analysis of Vehicle Ramming as a Terrorist Tactic,” Mineta Transportation Institute, 2018.
- Wamsley, Laurel, “Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters,” NPR, June 21, 2020.
- National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “Standing General Order on Crash Reporting for Automated Driving Systems,” 2024.
