So on the third time we saw him do it, we stopped him and seized the vehicle.” The car has a top speed of 217mph (350kmh), but the limit on these London streets is 20mph. Over the same weekend, the Metropolitan police seized about 90 more cars with a combined value of more than £8m, an increase on last year’s tally of 72 cars. They were seized for various offences: driving without insurance, driving with incorrect licences or antisocial behaviour.
Previously, the Met would have had to let such drivers off with a warning, but the law – section 59 of the Police Reform Act – was strengthened this year to enable the immediate confiscation of vehicles. The seized cars also included a Ferrari Monza worth about £3.4m (the driver only had a provisional UK licence). They were all put on display at Marble Arch, attracting a throng of camera-wielding onlookers (one attender did a seven-hour live blog of the occasion).
Many of the supercars apprehended by the Met in August bore Middle Eastern number plates. It has been a growing trend for car owners from the region to spend summer in London, bringing their cars with them (at a cost of £25,000 upwards). The orange Lamborghini that Tatman seized had Dubai plates.
Most of the vehicle owners retrieved their cars the next day after paying fines and presenting the correct paperwork. The Lamborghini driver was subsequently seen driving respectfully and not revving his engine. Lessons were learned, although the question remains: why ship a 200mph car to London to drive in a 20mph zone?
Supercars have become the fantasy status symbol of our times: eye-catchingly conspicuous, ear-splittingly loud, priced well beyond most people’s means while being driven by the stars, the uber-wealthy and anyone with pretensions to elite status, which seems to be a lot of people these days. Despite being custom-built for exclusivity, supercars appear to be everywhere. They’re all over social media, of course.
They’re all over old-school media, too: on television (a new season of Amazon’s Top Gear spin-off The Grand Tour just launched), in movies, music videos, video games. And they’re increasingly visible on our roads – where they can rapidly progress from a curiosity to an irritant or a danger. As much as they’re objects of desire to some, they’re crass symbols of late-capitalist excess to others: as thirsty for fossil fuels as they are for attention, antisocially driven, only genuinely accessible to elites.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
