“It’s not you, it’s your car”: A Night Out with SUV Saboteurs
Property destruction has gained prominence among climate activists as a tactic worth considering. Bristol, UK’s “Tyre Extinguishers” are putting this tactic to the test, aiming to make it no longer socially and financially feasible to own a gas guzzling SUV.
Photo by author
I arrive at the pinned Google Maps location in a small, wooded area in Clifton, Bristol, UK and I’m greeted by three people wearing masks to hide their identities. I’ve been sent the location on Signal, a secure messaging app, and told to arrive at 2am.
A Channel 4 film crew shows up shortly after. They’re also interested in the people I’m here to meet. The masked squad and the film crew briefly chat about logistics, and then we’re off, walking briskly into Clifton’s rich neighbourhoods. One of the three masked activists crouches down beside an SUV, fiddles with the tyre (the British spelling of “tire”) and a hiss of gas breaks the silence. A second hiss occurs from the other side as another crew member lets down a second tyre and the third squad member leaves a leaflet on the windscreen. The whole operation takes seconds, as though performed by an F1 pit crew—but rather than improving a car’s performance, the Tyre Extinguishers (TX) sabotage it.
Luxury emissions, status symbols and vanity tanks
“Tyre extinguishing” involves taking the cap off an SUV’s tyres, inserting a lentil, screwing the cap back on and then scurrying away to the next target. As unlikely a weapon as they may seem, puy lentils are the perfect size to fit inside the cap on a tyre so that the valve remains pressed down and air is let out over the course of an hour, with the tyres remaining basically intact. The saboteur then leaves a leaflet on the windscreen (windshield) to make sure that the owners do not try to drive off with empty tyres, and so that the full bold headline: “ATTENTION your gas guzzler kills” might make them rethink their choices. TX members deflate as many SUV tyres as they have leaflets on any given night. Tonight they have 40, so 40 SUVs are being deflated, though the Brighton group claims to have sabotaged 250 in one night.
They do this because SUVs were the second biggest driver of increased emissions between 2010 and 2018, according to the International Energy Agency. A statistic that I hear multiple times during my time with the Tyre Extinguishers is that if SUVs were a country, they would be the world’s 6th largest emitter of CO2.
Part of the rationale for only targeting SUVs and not other types of polluting vehicles is that TX considers most SUVs to be completely unnecessary. One study suggests that three quarters of the SUVs purchased in Britain are sold to people living in towns and cities, a fact that the Tyre Extinguishers consider evidence of the “vanity of their owners,” as they’re used as status symbols rather than for any practical purpose. Because SUVs, particularly in cities, are almost exclusively the preserve of affluent middle- and upper-class people, the campaign targets “luxury emissions” that can be reduced easily without significantly impacting anyone’s quality of life. Amber (a pseudonym) from the Bristol chapter of TX explains that while there has been an inevitable backlash from some quarters (most notably SUV owners), the group has also seen supportive social media comments when news about their actions come out—loads of people hate SUVs.
SUVs’ uselessness in cities and their astonishing contributions to emissions are not the only reasons that TX and its supporters resent their presence. SUVs also contribute disproportionately to urban air pollution, and they are twice as likely to kill a pedestrian in a crash than a regular passenger car. As a result, TX’s actions have been praised by clean air groups, for whom SUVs are a blight, and cyclists who regularly have close encounters with these “tanks.” The Tyre Extinguishers in Bristol and elsewhere have supported those other groups’ calls to ban SUVs from Britain’s cities. However, cyclists and clean air groups—for all their well-intentioned lobbying, protest picnics, and group biking events—haven’t really had much of an impact on SUV use. Tyre extinguishing as a protest campaign, however, garners more media attention and directly ups the costs for anyone that owns, or wants to buy an SUV.
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The Tyre Extinguishers and the cameraman leap up from their crouched positions and try to act normal as we hear footsteps down a nearby street. Stragglers from a student club night lurch past. The Tyre Extinguishers have to be careful not to be seen, as they consulted with lawyers before they formed their group and were advised that deflating tyres is a form of criminal damage. Avon and Somerset Police are prepared to act accordingly.
The central TX Twitter account, which started the wave in Britain, agrees that lentils are best practice to avoid major penalties, but the group told me over encrypted email “If people want to slash tyres or key SUV bodywork, we're not opposed to any of this either.” This also leaves room for a further escalation—from tyre extinguishing to keying SUV bodywork to pouring molasses into engines to disable them once and for all.
From Malm to Movement
The Twitter account was created in 2021, though March of this year was when actions actually began. Groups in eight cities around the UK have sprung up, though they operate independently from any central authority. The tactic itself dates back to Sweden in 2007, when Andreas Malm and a group of other climate activists started deflating tyres on the SUVs of Stockholm’s rich.
Malm, a Marxist geographer and climate activist, recounts the story in his 2021 polemic How to Blow Up a Pipeline. The Tyre Extinguishers behind the Twitter account told me they think “anyone serious about the climate crisis” should read his book. Amber told me that one of their Bristol group is from a different country in Europe where it had started happening in 2021 and they discussed doing it back then, and then Malm’s book came out and the UK wave started, so they got going themselves in March 2022.
Andreas Malm himself has commented on the Tyre Extinguishers, dubbing them and other actions such as the German Ende Galende movement’s coal mine occupations and the Extinction Rebellion (XR) splinter cell’s breaking of bank windows “a rising pattern of eco-sabotage.” The movement has leapt from the pages of his book to the United Kingdom and is now spreading around the world. Tyre extinguishing actions have taken place across the US, rich New Zealanders have woken up to find their tyres flat and affluent Parisians recently had their first encounter with the Dégonfleurs de Pneus. Malm has labelled this effect “sabotage as meme.” It’s an appropriate neologism; the commitment of TX to Twitter beef means their actions have a memeable quality online as the group dunks on their digital detractors, as well as spreading mimetically in the real world.
The response to Malm’s provocation from elsewhere in the climate movement hasn’t all been enthusiastic. How to Blow Up a Pipeline has provoked so much internal debate that Verso published an entire E-book of discussion. Professor Thea Riofrancos, the author of a recent review of Malm’s work, told me in an interview that privileging sabotage above all else could lead to “fetishizing a tactic and taking it out of its context”—i.e. which groups are the ones that can effectively carry out a radical struggle like achieving a just transition, and how any given tactic fits into your broader strategy. This critique ironically mirrors Malm’s critique of XR for their fetish for pacifism.
The limits and potential of the extinguishing experiment
During my conversation with Riofrancos, I recalled a strike I reported on in my hometown of Banbury, UK when workers took industrial action to protect the decent deal their union had negotiated with the coffee factory bosses, and some of the workers pulled up to the picket in SUVs. The Extinguishers I spoke to were not focused on the class politics of their actions. They acknowledge that they only target the rich, choosing wealthy neighbourhoods for their actions, but they prefer not to refer to themselves as left-wing to avoid becoming an easier target for denunciation and to avoid the various circular firing squads that left-wing movements sometimes fall into. TX understands itself as an experiment, and it will presumably mutate with time. But could decently paid working-class people buying into the SUV cargo cult pose a problem for the image of TX and even the broader climate movement?
Perhaps, perhaps not, but well-paid members of the working class are the exception rather than the norm. Riofrancos argues, “Mobility is a particularly unequal sector… there’s this kinetic elite that can travel whenever they want. There’s no reason targeting fancy SUVs or saying we should ban private jets has anything to do with what ordinary people need to survive and thrive… so you can take a class conflict approach and not suggest that ordinary people need to live under an austerity regime.”
About 20 minutes into the raid, one of the extinguishers, Max (another pseudonym) creeps onto the driveway of an SUV owner and deflates their tyres, prompting a worried look from Amber who says they rarely go onto people’s drives because it’s too risky. It’s for similar reasons that they don’t slash the tyres with knives. Amber tells me when I meet her the next day that they use lentils because it makes joining the group and its tactics more accessible for more people. “I think that fits with what it feels like this campaign is all about, which is this kind of escalation in tactics which isn’t escalating to something that’s violent, that isn’t going to involve carrying a knife,” Amber says. “At the same time, I think most of us in the group agree with Andreas Malm that effective climate protesting proportionate to the crisis would involve something that is completely destroying fossil fuel machinery. But lentils are more accessible than knives.”
The fact that tyre extinguishing is accessible and has such low barriers to entry also potentially makes it a useful tactic to draw people into the wider climate movement. It is the low entry requirements that have allowed the tactic to spread around the world in the way it has. Most of Bristol TX’s original lineup were already climate activists, but they have doubled in size since they started. Amber says the experience of taking action is great for connecting people and allowing them to be brought into a broader movement that has many more targets beyond SUVs. Sociologist Dana Fisher recently told the Guardian that the rich carrying on with business as usual while the crisis worsens has left “a lot of people who care about the environment looking around for a protest tactic.” For many activists around industrialized, western countries, tyre extinguishing has become that tactic.
Riofrancos, herself a climate strategist and organizer, has a question for TX over whether this is the best use of their time. “We’d have to apply a similar logic [that the climate movement does] to fossil production… part of the point of targeting physical infrastructure is to make the cost of doing business so high that companies strand their assets. I think the logic would have to be similar for SUV owners—you make it so socially shameful or so costly because you constantly have to fucking get your tyres re-inflated that in a literal and metaphorical sense you make it too costly to be an SUV owner… if we were able to raise the people power to make every SUV undriveable, then maybe we should have targeted pipelines.”
Amber understands the emergence of tyre extinguishing in Britain—and the drive to make SUVs too costly to own—as the result of “the dissipation of momentum behind really broad bases like XR,” adding, “instead, these targeted groups like Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil are springing up. It definitely feels like this is springing up as something much more targeted that is going to highlight exactly what we need to do to decrease carbon use.”
There are signs that they might be having an impact. The TX account proudly boasts the most encouraging reaction they’ve got so far: they’ve pinned to the top of their page a clipping from The Telegraph discouraging its readers from buying SUVs for fear of TX sabotage.
A TX spokesperson recently told Bloomberg that the goal is indeed to make it impossible to own an SUV in the world’s urban areas, and Amber and the Bristol Tyre Extinguishers certainly do not intend to rest on their laurels. She says, “If we could get legislation on SUVs [that stopped people from buying them], that would be an enormous win.” She adds, bluntly, “If the climate crisis keeps getting worse, we’ll be deflating tyres in the daytime.”
Olly Haynes is a freelance journalist covering politics, culture and society. His work has appeared in the Guardian, Rolling Stone and various other outlets. He can be found on Twitter @reality_manager.