AM General showed off its Blast Resistant Vehicle – Off road (BRV-O) Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) at the Modern Day Marine military exposition at Marine Corps Base Quantico, highlighting its modular kitted hull and promoting its affordability.
Chris Vanslager, vice president of business development and program management, said at the expo that “affordability is one of the main objectives, the main capabilities of the vehicle.” When the company produced 22 vehicles for testing, they were built on the same active production line as Humvees.
Photo: AM General
He noted the company has enough experience with Humvees that it fully understands the costs and risks of the line, and provides “significant amount of commonality with the Humvee.”
Vanslager said the affordability goes well beyond the manufacturing costs. The BRV-O has a fuel-efficient light-weight 3.2 liter diesel engine, which was designed by an AM General subsidiary. Throughout the life of the vehicle, the fuel savings will be significant, and the engine can be upgraded as needed and maintained without fear of parts obsolescence, he said.
The kitted hull has a modular design that Vanslager said makes it easy to unbolt the armor and add lighter-weight armor, more survivable armor, or whatever else is needed for future operational and transportation needs.
“With our systems engineering approach, we went ahead and created that balance of payload, protection and performance well within the constraints of the average unit manufacturing costs, as well as the weight constraints for transportability in helicopters and those kinds of things,” Vanslager said.
Finally, he said the vehicles are now in limited user tests with the Marine Corps and Army, and he said he hopes the testers realize the full extent of the user-friendly technologies added to the vehicle’s design. BRV-O “is very similar to a high end commercial automotive vehicle out in the world today–the stability control, traction control, central tire inflation, engine-transmission interactions help the driver drive the vehicle,” Vanslager said. “The driver can spend more of their time trying to understand what’s going on outside the vehicle rather than trying to steer or to drive the vehicle. The vehicle complements the driver.”
The final request for proposals for low-rate initial production is expected out later this year, once the engineering and manufacturing development contracts for AM General and competitors
Oshkosh Defense [OSK] and Lockheed Martin [LMT] expire in November.