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Swedish A-traktors, vehicles modified to not go above 19mph, became a teenage rite of passage – amid a rise in accidents there are calls for a ban
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- Title
- When is a car not a car? When it's a Swedish A-traktor
- Authors
- Viktor Sunnemark
- Published
- Nov 22 2023
- Word count
- 809 words
For those unaware, the laws regarding A-traktors in Sweden are incredibly loose and make no sense. They really need to be much more strict than they are today.
You can get a full truck modified to meet the requirements to be an A-traktor, here is an example. It makes no sense at all that this vehicle is legal for a 15 year old to drive just because it doesn't go faster than 30 km/h.
I can see where it used to make sense, as kids growing up on the Canadian prairies, most of us were driving actual tractors, combines, grain trucks or pickups long before we had a license. Because of that rural beginning, you can still get your Learner's Permit for driving here at 14, but there wasnt a specific category of vehicles for us - we just ran around in dad's old Ford F150. With no speed restrictions.
I think it must also be pretty easy to disable the governor, because I've seen more than one car with an orange triangle on the back going way over that speed.
Yup and that is part of the problem. To register as an A-traktor you can artificially limit a much stronger engine. But this also mean you can implement a trigger to stop this limitation. Just remove or hide this trigger during service/inspection and they won’t fail your vehicle for it.
The legislation should really change to actually only allow weaker engines in these vehicles.
To add, as far as I understand it, the way compliance currently works is just a signed statement of compliance provided by the owner to the inspectors, who focus on other aspects during the inspection. The penalty for providing false information in that statement is a fine, although I assume that if you actually get caught red-handed operating it in a non-compliant manner, there may be additional repercussions.
The article says the law was modified a few years ago which made it easier to get “full-power” A-traktors, but annoyingly it doesn’t say what the change was. I wonder if just repealing the change would help?
The law changed in 2020 which allowed normal vehicles to be modified to A-traktor specs. Before then cars had to be specifically built to be A-traktors, which meant they were generally smaller and had weaker engines. The law change is what allowed the truck in my example to be an A-traktor.
Stupidest change ever if you ask me.
Very minor nitpick, but it was a change in regulations (föreskrifter) not in law.
Transportstyrelsen (eng: The Transport Agency (wiki; English)) published TSFS 2020:52 (pdf; Swedish) which changed Vägverkets (eng: the Road Administration's (wiki; English)) regulations VVFS 2003:19 (pdf; Swedish) "on cars modified to tractors as well as cars modified to motorized equipment class II" (my translation).
For additional information, if anyone is interested, they specifically modified the paragraph on the vehicle's speed limitations.
The original, unamended, Swedish version:
My translation:
"Constructive speed" here means the speed which the vehicle is constructed not to exceed.
The change was to remove the latter (grammatical) paragraph regarding the speed restriction in the lowest gear.
I'm not savvy enough to intuit how this regulatory change resulted in the changes we see in A-tractors now, and this is as far as I'm digging at the moment. Anyway, do note that the above quoted 33 § is only a small part of the regulations, which are 49 pages long (excluding the table of contents). That is to say it is only a small part of the picture.
I can see how one might adjust legislation to accommodate electric vehicles (e.g. ones that only have one gear) so removing that part could've been to make way for future vehicles.
The fact that it 'made it easier' doesn't change the fact that people are wildly abusing the existence of the law, in my opinion, but the answer would obviously be stricter regulation or outright removal of the provision.
I think it's an interesting crossover with this discussion of bikes vs. cars. I'll note that limiting the speed of cars was a prominent feature of that discussion, but this shows a different side of how that strategy would work in practice. Although driver age is certainly a factor in this discussion, I doubt that many adult drivers would be any more well-behaved.