Meet the Beetle: Volvo's New Electric Powered Attack Truck for France
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What can it do?
It may be called a “Beetle,” but it doesn’t look like one.
A French subsidiary company of Volvo has introduced a new light armored vehicle known as the Scarabee, or “beetle,” and it’s a nimble little attack truck.
Designed by Arquus, the dual electric-diesel engine is capable of driving sideways, carrying two tons of equipment, airborne deployment and even being remotely-controlled.
Standing six feet tall and able to transport four people across the battlefield, the Scarabee’s engines allow it to reach 75 MPH and composite armor gives it resistance to a variety of threats.
“We really worked on the speed because that is also a form of protection,” Emmanuel Levacher, the chief executive of Arquus, told Popular Science. “If you put a lot of protective armor on a vehicle it makes it very heavy, big, and therefore slow unless you give it a large, powerful engine—in which case you no longer have a small, agile military vehicle.”
The steering mechanism allows all four wheels to be used, allowing the vehicle to “sidestep” threats like a crab.
The Scarabee also comes with a self-propelled trailer for hauling equipment.
This first appeared in WarIsBoring here.
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