For the man who has everything, including enemies that want to take it all away, behold the Range Rover Sentinel. Available from the factory with all the usual luxury trim plus resistance to armor-piercing incendiary bullets, DM51 grenades, and TNT.
Here’s an explainer/amp-up video to take a closer look:
Additional features include windows tinted so hard they’ll stop bullets, an “anti-tamper exhaust,” a self-sealing fuel tank, an auxiliary back up battery and run flat inserts that allow the SUV to be driven on flat tires.
There’s an escape hatch through the back if doors become blocked or broken and an onboard fire suppression system. Plus sirens, strobes, and a PA system to warn the peasants in your path that they only have a few seconds left before you release the hounds.
So this is the next machine to come out of Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) skunkworks of wonders. Not a hardcore off-road Range Rover SVX (which I still think is coming), but still pretty awesome.
At around $450,000, this will probably be the most expensive Land Rover product in the lineup for some time.
As managing director of Jaguar Land Rover Special Operations John Edwards describes it, Sentinel will “provide class leading levels of protection to occupants against extreme attack, whilst retaining the Range Rover’s luxury and refinement with off-road capability.” You probably already figured that.
Despite being saddled with significantly more mass than a regular Range Rover, Sentinel will run the company’s smaller 3.0 V6 supercharged engine with the eight-speed transmission dialed to a specific shift schedule. I guess the V8 would have been too heavy, because I know they’re not worried about pushing the price too high on this.
Shocks have been beefed up along with the brakes, which have 380mm discs up front and 365mm in the rear, and are apparently the best brakes Land Rover’s ever made.
The SUV’s certified to the “VR8” level of protection, which basically means it’s a match for an AK-47 and small explosives. Naturally, I’ve asked Land Rover’s PR people if they’d let me take it for a spin while the pelt me with bullets and so far all I’ve heard back is that they’d like to. So stay tuned, I guess.
Images via Land Rover
Andrew’s the off-road and adventure guy here at Jalopnik. Shoot him an email at andrew@jalopnik.com or hit him up on Twitter to talk trucks.