London’s wealthiest streets are wrestling with a summer import they can’t seem to ticket into line: supercars from the Gulf that park wherever they like, then jet home with the fines unpaid. Eliot Brown and Kate Lynch report in the Wall Street Journal that in Westminster—home to Harrods and some of the capital’s most expensive real estate—foreign-plated Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Rolls-Royces routinely clog no-parking zones, taxi ranks, and bus stops. A Qatari Ferrari left in a Harrods loading area with a fresh ticket on the windshield is typical, not an outlier.
The financial hit is real and largely uncollected, though London cops did just impound $10 million in supercars in a single weekend three weeks ago. But between 2018 and 2022, Westminster tried to recover payment on more than 13,000 tickets issued just to vehicles from the United Arab Emirates; only about 1% were paid. Officials say they enforce the rules as they would with any driver, but foreign governments outside Europe often don’t share driver details, making follow-up difficult—and clamping and towing are used sparingly. A 2009 assessment put London’s annual losses from unpaid foreign-vehicle fines in the millions of pounds. For the full picture—and the numbers behind it—read the piece in the Wall Street Journal.