Waterboro, Maine - This, fellow off-roaders, is the world’s fastest tracked vehicle - a luxury two-man tank!

The Ripsaw Extreme Vehicle was originally designed and built for the US military as a high-speed armoured vehicle. It's the brainchild of identical twin brothers Geoffrey and Michael Howe of Waterboro Maine, who call themselves Howe and Howe Technologies,

They focus mostly on developing military-spec vehicles but aren’t averse to spreading the love around for action film-makers and private customers - if the money is right

Weighing in at about 4.5 tons (without military hardware) powered by a 6.6-litre GM Duramax turbodiesel V8 that's rated atmore than 450kW and 1350Nm, and boasting 300mm of suspension travel, the civilian EV2 is officially the world's fastest tracked vehicle.

Just how fast the brothers aren't saying, but judging from the video, it's a lot faster than the previous record-holder, an experimental tank built by Walter Christie in the late 1920s that was powered by a V12 aircraft engine and reached a verified 110km/h.

Since then Howe and Howe have spent thousands of man-hours developing the EV2 as a go-anywhere, high-speed luxury armoured vehicle for “extreme off-road recreation”.

* WHEEL STEERING

Tracked vehicles are normally “skid-steered” by using two brake levers to slow down one or other of the tracks. This is not only inefficient but also chews up tar roads rather badly, so the Howe twins have devised a steering method using dual hydraulic clutches that's controlled by what looks and works like a conventional steering wheel, which means you don't need a bulldozer licence to drive one! Each Ripsaw EV2 is hand-built to customer specifications, so the brothers Howe are unwilling to quote prices, beyond a vague “well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars”, depending just how much luxury and performance you ask for, and delivery times of up to six months. And you have to supply your own Lara Croft-lookalike driver.

If you think you've seen the Ripsaw before, you're right; the one-man tank driven by Bruce Willis in the action blockbuster “GI Joe: Retaliation” was based on a Ripsaw chassis - and, according to Howe and Howe, none of the stunts in the movie were computer-generated or faked. All the action, including the jumps, is for real and during 13 intense days of filming the tank suffered just one minor component failure, which was fixed in 25 minutes.

Motoringnigeria..com / iol.co.za

Click to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WxO6TwnFzU&itct=CBsQpDAYAyITCJ-99OGe8MUCFQHmfgoddo8AVTIHcmVsYXRlZEjW5bSDy9nb9_cB&gl=NG&client=mv-google&hl=en

Well, this is more of an APC than a tank. The fastest MBTs I know are the Leopard 2 and the M1A2 Abrams.

RickRichards:
Well, this is more of an APC than a tank. The fastest MBTs I know are the Leopard 2 and the M1A2 Abrams.

M1A2 max speed is 67km/h and leopard 2 is 72km/h. I get ur point but with speed, this little guy is definitely fast.

I agree with the gentleman that said it's more of an APC cos I don't see a big gun/turret. It's one mean machine.