Tanks for the ride: UK dad drops off kids at school – in a 17-ton army tank

A father in the UK has come up with an innovative idea to get his kids to school on time, and make sure they won’t miss it due to bad weather. He drops off his sons at their village school… in a 17-ton snow-white tank.

It’s a common sight in the village of Helmdon, Northamptonshire, to see Nick Mead driving his FV432 armored personnel carrier, to ferry his two teenage sons, Ashley, 13, and Danny, 16, to school every morning.

“I drive them to school but it’s never good picking them up from school because then you get like 15 more kids,” Nick Mead, 53, told RT, adding that then he would have to drop them all off at home and it would be “a very long journey.”

According to Mead, people generally have positive attitude when they see him and his children approaching in a tank.

“It’s always a good reaction… people like [tanks]. Very rare you get some kind of grim look for the little bit of time you lose in a traffic jam,” he told RT.

Mead runs a driving events company called Tanks-a-lot. He has a large collection of about 130 military vehicles, which set him back a cool £2 million ($3.1 million). Nick also runs a military theme park in the village.

The tanks, which are tax- and MOT-exempt, are used for weddings, funerals and in films. Mead drives them to run his children to school, or even take a trip to the shops.

His love of APCs has been passed on to his boys, as they have driven them on his private estate since they were eight years old.

“But despite what people think, I’m not from a military background; my interest in tanks was a spur of the moment fascination,” he told Birmingham-based Caters News Agency, which posted a video of Mead driving his sons to school in a tank.

According to Mead, during his 20 years of tank driving he had “never had one crash.”

“I bought my first tank 20 years ago and it just snowballed from there,” he said. “I feel blessed to have collected so many military relics from around the world.”