Into the Crowd: The Evolution of Vehicular Attacks and Prevention Efforts

in April (five killed),³⁰ Barcelona in August (13 killed),³¹ and New York in October (eight killed).³²

It is noteworthy that there was a surge in vehicular terrorist attacks following the two deadliest attacks (Nice and Berlin). The authors assess that this created a demonstration effect in which the high casualties and significant media coverage of those attacks showed the effectiveness of this terror tactic and in turn produced a copycat effect. This suggests that the demonstration effect is a more powerful indicator of future attacks than calls by terrorist leaders such as the late Abu Muhammad al-Adnani for the tactic to be used.

The surge in vehicular attacks during this period was also seen in the developed world as a whole, to include Palestinian terrorism targeting Israel. Writing in 2019, Brian Michael Jenkins stated, “because there are relatively few events over a long period of time (more than 45 years), the trend lines can be misleading. However, the recent increase is obvious. There were 16 attacks between 1973 and 2007 and 62 attacks between 2008 and the end of April 2018. Thirty of these occurred in 2017 and the first four months of 2018 alone.”³³ According to Brian Michael Jenkins and Bruce Butterworth, the use of vehicles as weapons of terror in developed countries increased from two in the years 1994-1997 to 68 in the period from 2014-2019.^34 b

These tactics soon extended beyond the jihadi ecosystem to include attacks perpetrated by non-ideological attackers in Melbourne, Australia, in 2017 (six killed, 27 injured);³⁵ Munster, Germany, in 2018 (four killed, 20 injured);³⁶ Trier, Germany, in 2020 (five killed, 23 injured);³⁷ and Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 2021 (six killed, 62 injured). Far-right terrorists also applied the same tactics, in London, United Kingdom, in front of the Finsbury Park Mosque where one person was killed and 12 others were injured by Darren Osborne in 2017³⁸ and London, Canada, where a 20-year-old killed four members of a Pakistani family with his car in 2021.³⁹

According to the authors’ database, there were 18 terrorist vehicular ramming attacks between January 2014 and March 2025 in the West. The large majority of attacks were carried out by jihadis, many of whom were inspired by the Islamic State. Fifteen (83%) of the terrorist attacks were carried out by jihadis and three (17%) by right-wing extremists. Five of the attacks (28%) targeted the military, police, and security services.

Cars were most often