Vehicular Terrorism or ramming attacks require new technologies including directed energy weapons

Recently in Toronto a rental van was deliberately driven into a crowd of people, killing 10 and injuring 14. Police arrested and charged 25-year-old Alek Minassian in connection with the attack. Though this attack was later found to be caused by the driver’s psychiatric disorder. Deliberate vehicle-ramming incidents have also sometimes been favorite tactic for terrorists. Before this Quebec. Jerusalem. Nice. Berlin. Columbus. Stockholm and London and London have been earlier targets.

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. The earliest known use of a vehicle-ramming attack took place in 1973 in Prague, former Czechoslovakia, when Olga Hepnarová killed 8 people. According to Stratfor Global Intelligence analysts, this attack represented a new militant tactic which is less lethal but could prove more difficult to prevent than suicide bombings.

Deliberate vehicle-ramming into crowd of people is a tactic used by terrorists, becoming a major terrorist tactic in the 2010s because it requires little skill to perpetrate and has the potential to cause significant casualties. Following the attack in Nice that killed 86 people in July 2016, the Islamic State published a guide for would-be attackers, noting that vehicles are “extremely easy to acquire” and unlikely to arouse the suspicions of citizens or authorities. Indeed, as a recent Transportation Security Administration report warns: “No community, large or small, rural or urban, is immune to attacks of this kind.”

Deliberate vehicle-ramming has also been carried out in the course of other types of crimes, including road rage incidents. From 2014 through 2017, terrorists carried out 21 known vehicle ramming attacks worldwide, resulting in over 220 fatalities and 800 injuries, including cities such as London, Stockholm, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Barcelona.

Vehicles have also been used by attackers to breach buildings with locked gates, before detonating explosives, as in the Saint-Quentin-Fallavier attack.