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A car bomb is an improvised explosive device placed in a car or other vehicle and then exploded. It is commonly used as a weapon of assassination, terrorism, or guerrilla warfare, to kill the occupant(s) of the vehicle, people near the blast site, or to damage buildings or other property. Car bombs act as their own delivery mechanisms and can carry a relatively large amount of explosives without attracting suspicion.

The U.S. military and law enforcement agencies often call a car bomb a "VBIED", an acronym standing for "Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device", or "SVBIED" if it is used in a suicide attack.

The earliest car bombs were intended for assassination. These were often wired to the car's ignition system, to explode when the car was started. Ignition triggering is now rare, as it is easy to detect and hard to install — interfering with the circuitry is time-consuming and car alarms can be triggered by drains on the car's electrical system. Also, the target may start the car remotely (inadvertently or otherwise), or the target may be a passenger a safe distance away when the car starts.

It is now more common for assassination bombs to be affixed to the underside of the car then detonated remotely, by the car's motion or by other means. The bomb is exploded as the target approaches or starts the vehicle or, more commonly, after the vehicle begins to move, when the target is more likely to be inside. For this reason, security guards often check the underside of vehicles with a long mirror mounted on a pole.

The effectiveness of a car bomb is that an explosion detonated inside a car is momentarily contained. If the force of the explosion were to double each fraction of a second and the car were to contain the explosion for one second before its chassis gave way, this would result in a much greater force than if the detonation took place outside the car. Therefore a greater amount of damage is obtained from a given amount of explosive.

In recent years, car bombs have become widely used by suicide bombers who seek to ram the car into a building and simultaneously detonate it.

Defending against a car bomb involves keeping vehicles at a distance from vulnerable targets by using Jersey barriers, concrete blocks or bollards, or by hardening buildings to withstand an explosion. Since the height of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) campaign, the entrance to Downing Street has been closed, preventing the general public from getting near Number 10. Where major public roads pass near buildings, road closures may be the only option (thus, for instance, in Washington, D.C. the portion of Pennsylvania Avenue immediately behind the White House) is closed to traffic). Historically these tactics have encouraged potential bombers to target "soft" or unprotected targets, such as markets.^[1]

It may be the first car bomb was the one used for the assassination attempt on Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1905 in Constantinople.

In the past, groups to use car bombs included:

• In 1920, when Italian anarchist Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon filled with explosives and shrapnel near the corner of Wall and Broad streets, directly across from J P Morgan Company. The explosion killed 40 and wounded 200.

Vietcong terror car bombing aftermath scene in Saigon, 1965.

Car bomb in Iraq, made up of a number of artillery shells concealed in the back of a pickup truck.

A 2005 car bombing in Iraq, in which a second car bomb was detonated while Coalition forces were investigating the scene of an earlier such blast, resulting in 18 casualties.

BATF summary table illustrating the size and range of effectiveness of car bombs by vehicle type used

• In the late 1940s, the radical-Zionist Stern gang used car and truck bombs against Palestinian and British targets as an attempt to end peace discussions;
• The British deserters in the pay of Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al Husseini used car bombs to attack Jewish targets in Palestine;
• The Viet Cong guerrillas used them at the end of the First Indochina War and throughout the Vietnam War;
• The OAS used them at the end of the French rule in Algeria;
• The Sicilian Mafia used them to assassinate independent magistrates in the early 1960s;
• The IRA (and its splinter groups) used them frequently during its campaign during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The IRA used mercury tilt switches in the majority of their car bombs. IRA car bombings usually resulted in no fatalities, or very few, as warnings were almost always issued to the British Army, however, sometimes these warnings gave insufficient evacuation time and resulted in civilian casualties. (see Bloody Friday (1972))
• Protestant terrorist organisations in Northern Ireland such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association often used car bombs against Irish civilians in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The worst terrorist atrocity in the 30-year Northern Irish Conflict occurred when the UVF detonated car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan. (see: Dublin and Monaghan bombings)
• During the Soviet-Afghan war, at a variety of training camps in the tribal areas of Pakistan;^[2],

the Pakistani ISI with the aid of the CIA trained mujahadin in the preparation of car bombs

• In the 1980s, the Latin American drug lord Pablo Escobar used vehicle bombs extensively against government forces and population centers in Latin America;
• In 1995, the white-supremacist Timothy McVeigh detonated a Ryder box truck filled with an explosive mixture (fuel oil and fertilizer) in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (see Oklahoma City bombing)
• In the late 1990s and early 2000s, vehicular explosives were used by the Chechen separatist Shamil Basayev against targets in Russia

Mass-casualty car bombing, and especially suicide car bombing, is currently a predominantly Middle Eastern phenomenon. The tactic was first introduced to the region by the Stern gang, who used it extensively against Palestinian and British targets; it was subsequently taken up by Palestinian bombers as well.^[3]The tactic was widely used in the Lebanese Civil War by the Islamic fundamentalist group Hezbollah. The most notable car bombing was the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, which killed 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French military personnel. In the Lebanese civil war, an estimated 3,641 car bombs were detonated.^[4]

Groups that still use car bombs include:

• Palestinian militant groups, against both military and civilian Israeli targets.
• Tamil Tigers, in Sri Lanka's long-running civil war.
• Al-Qaeda (see esp. 1998 United States embassy bombings)
• The Iraqi insurgency. Car bombs have become more frequent during the Iraq War. An estimated 578 car bombs were detonated in Iraq between June 2003 and June 2006^[5].

• List of mass car bombings

• Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso: New York, 2007).

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Car bombs

• Video of a detected car bomb (VBIED) going off
• A history of the car bomb (Asia Times)
• "Explosive reading", review by Daniel Swift for the Financial Times