Swedish laws allow 15-year-olds to not only ride mopeds but drive converted ‘tractors’
The government has a big road safety bill in the offing. Need we brace for impact? Perhaps not. As part of it, I understand, we’re likely to get lower drink-driving limits and tougher requirements for over-seventies to prove they are still safe on the road.
I’m sure most people would agree that these are overdue – but it’s clearly too simple to suggest that by targeting the youngest and oldest we can transform UK driving standards.
Putting aside fear of change for its own sake, we will be hoping there is more to Labour’s once-in-a-decade reform of licensing than some compulsory eye tests.
Still, I certainly wouldn’t agree with the anonymous UK coroner who claimed our licensing system is “the laxest in Europe”.
We are apparently one of only three European countries that allow drivers to self-report failing eyesight. Dementia and other conditions too. We shouldn’t be – but that sounds like a legislative tweak to me and fairly easily corrected.
Not like Sweden’s ‘A-traktor’ laws. If you don’t know about these, they might well make you feel at least a little better about how younger drivers qualify to be on UK roads.
In Sweden, you can ride a moped at 15 – but also drive a tractor. And, thanks to a modern vestige of laws more than a century old intended to make it easier and cheaper for farmers to put working vehicles into their fields, you can fashion a tractor out of pretty well any old passenger car you fancy.
These ‘A-traktors’ have to be limited to 19mph (although apparently the kids are finding ways to disable the limiters when they choose to). They must have only one row of seats, be fitted with a towbar and display a large orange warning triangle on the rear bumper.
They are allowed on any road on which the posted limit is less than 100kph (62mph), meaning no highways or motorways. And their popularity among young people has rocketed since 2020, when the laws governing their conversion and use were relaxed.
There are now thought to be more than 50,000 operating in Sweden, when five years ago there were only 12,000. On a visit to Gothenburg a couple of months ago, I came across several.
The established approach seems to be to acquire a 40-year-old Volvo 740 or 240; lower it; for some reason paint it with matt emulsion; take the back seats out; put it through the rest of the ‘A-traktor’ conversion process (some go as far as pick-up body conversions); have it certified; and then proudly drive it to school every day, generally holding up the traffic and becoming something of a mobile chicane.
It has become a bit of a thing, in rural areas of the country particularly. You don’t want to be driving past the school gates just after kicking-out time, one local told me, for fear of getting trapped behind a caravan of about 20 A-traktors, all doing 19mph and all but impossible to overtake as a group. ‘Safety car deployed’ wouldn’t even begin to cover it.
Sweden’s Riksdag parliament apparently worries that if it simply legislates against the trend, it will cause real mobility problems in parts of the country – not to mention angering quite a lot of young people who are on the verge of being old enough to vote. So thus far it hasn’t.
Somehow nobody has risked suggesting that allowing 15-year-olds to drive around, at 19mph, on rural country roads on which the prevailing limit allows other cars and trucks to be going as fast as 56mph, in knackered old cars that they have been encouraged to modify themselves, might be a bit dangerous. Only recently have they even insisted that these kids wear seatbelts.
To me, it’s like a Hunger Games-style process of selection by lucky happenstance. If they make it to be old enough to get a licence proper at all, how many young Swedish drivers, you wonder, will have the generous crumple zones of a Volvo estate to thank for it?
