Vehicular assault as a terrorist tactic

A vehicle-ramming attack is a form of attack in which a perpetrator deliberately rams a motor vehicle into a building, crowd of people, or another vehicle. While terrorism is one motive, many similar mass casualty traffic incidents have other or unclear motives or causes. Vehicles can also be used by attackers to breach a building with locked gates, before detonating explosives, as in the Saint-Quentin-Fallavier attack.

The 21st century has seen a rise in vehicle ramming attacks carried out as acts of terrorism by individuals committed to an ideology. In 2014, Canadian columnist Andrew Coyne describes the phenomenon as a form of "micro-terrorism", and argues that Canadians "had better get used to... the baffling phenomenon of the homegrown terrorist ... who for whatever reason takes it into his head to kill any number of his fellow citizens in the service of his cause."

According to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, the tactic has gained popularity because "Vehicle ramming offers terrorists with limited access to explosives or weapons an opportunity to conduct a Homeland attack with minimal prior training or experience." Counterterrorism researcher Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies told Slate that the tactic has been on the rise in Israel because, "the security barrier is fairly effective, which makes it hard to get bombs into the country." In 2010, Inspire, the online, English-language magazine produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula urged jihadis to choose "pedestrian only" locations and make sure to gain speed before ramming their vehicles into the crowd in order to "achieve maximum carnage".

Vehicle attacks can be carried out by lone-wolf terrorists who are inspired by an ideology, but who are not actually working within a specific political movement or group. Writing for The Daily Beast, Jacob Siegel suggests that the perpetrator of the 2014 Couture-Rouleau attack may be "the kind of terrorist the West could be seeing a lot more of in the future", a kind that he describes, following Brian Jenkins of the Rand Corporation, as "stray dogs", rather than lone wolves, characterizing them as "misfits" who are "moved from seething anger to spontaneous deadly action" by exposure to Islamist propaganda. A 2014 propaganda video by ISIL encouraged French sympathizers to use cars to run down civilians.

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