Meet the newest automobile to hitch the ranks of the United States Army.
It’s been developed by General Motors’ GM Defense subsidiary and goes by the identify Infantry Squad Vehicle, or ISV for brief. As the identify suggests, the automobile is designed to hold infantry, on this case 9 at a time.
GM has been awarded a $214.three million contract to construct, subject and maintain 649 examples of the ISV. And in the event that they show well-liked, the military has approval to order an extra 1,416 items.
The ISV relies on the platform of the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 mid-size pickup truck. For the military’s necessities, the truck wanted to be gentle sufficient to be sling-loaded from a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter and sufficiently small to suit inside a CH-47 Chinook. Its engine, on this case the identical 186-horsepower 2.8-liter turbodiesel supplied on the Colorado ZR2, additionally wanted to have the ability to get all of the troops and their gear as much as freeway speeds each on and off the street.
2021 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2
For the ISV transformation, the donor pickup is stripped right down to its basic structure after which up-fitted with in-house {custom} {hardware}, together with armor safety, in addition to commercially out there tools.
According to GM, the ISV makes use of about 90% business off-the-shelf components. Among them are are Multimatic’s place delicate spool valve suspension dampers, that are designed to additionally consider wheel journey when making changes to the damping drive.
GM is not the one automaker with a brand new protection automobile based mostly on a manufacturing pickup. Jeep unveiled a Gladiator-based automobile final 12 months, which it developed with Humvee builder (and former sister model) AM General.
Like GM’s ISV, the Gladiator Extreme Military-Grade Truck (XMT) is basically a civilian mannequin with numerous custom-built and commercially out there tools. There’s no phrase if Jeep has been awarded a contract for the XMT, although.