What a shock! Place with most Chelsea tractors is... London
ORIGINALLY designed for well- off country folk, Chelsea tractors are now so popular with city slickers that there are more in London per capita than anywhere else.
In fact, a third of all vehicles driving around some boroughs in the capital are big, expensive 4x4s.
Londoners are 19 percentage points more likely than the national average of 13 per cent to drive an off-roader, meaning 32 per cent of them own one, according to a survey.
It concludes: ‘When it comes to car style, Londoners are also living up to their Chelsea tractor stereotype, it seems, by favouring a 4x4. A third of London motorists favour a Chelsea tractor.’
The bulky cars, which start at around £40,000 and can cost well into six figures, include Range Rovers, Porsche Cayennes, BMW X5s and Audi Q7s among others. Although capable of going off road, with their wide, low- profile tyres and sports car performance they are far more suited to wellheeled London districts such as Chelsea, Kensington and Knightsbridge.
The report by Privilege insurance also reveals that London is the Audi capital of Britain, with the German marque 12 per cent more likely to be seen there than the national average.
This is equivalent to one in six of London’s motorists, or 17 per cent. Other motoring facts thrown up by the poll include the news that Wales has become the last bastion of the traditional four- door saloon, with ownership there 14 percentage points above the average in Britain.
Nissans rule in the North East, where many are made at the Japanese firm’s factory in Sunderland, with a disproportionately high concentration of ownership of 5 percentage points above the national average.
Across the nation, hatchbacks came out as the favourite car type, driven by more than 15million motorists, with Ford the most popular model and silver the most popular colour.
But the colour of the cars we drive varies according to where we live, with motorists in the North East, Wales and Northern Ireland being proportionally more likely to drive white ones.
Dark blue is favoured by those in the East, the South East and the South West, while black is the most popular colour in London, the East Midlands, and Scotland, where it shares the honours with silver.