Seat of Our Pants

To the casual observer, this vehicle may look like an unusually ugly Volvo 142. In reality, this is something more curious than that: it is a class A tractor, aka an EPA-traktor.

During world war two, Sweden needed tractors for its defense forces, and to alleviate the need for tractors at home, the government introduced a few measures to reclassify a normal car into a tractor. In Sweden, the legal age for driving a car is 18. To drive a tractor you only need to be 16. This legislation resulted in monstrosities such as this one, since every sixteen year-old in the whole kingdom wanted to drive around in something that looked like a car rather than riding a bicycle.

The tractors are often ugly beyond belief, many of them have wooden couches mounted on their rear ends. Some are combinations of several cars (you can’t tell from this picture, but the front end on this one comes from a SAAB). Since every owner promptly sells their tractor once they turn 18, each tractor has had multiple owners. Some have been handed down for generations. We were driving at least 50 feet behind it and we could still feel the stink of many, many layers of cheap air freshener.

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