A first-class Fort Knox on wheels. A Batmobile on steroids. A land yacht for cruising through the zombie apocalypse. Whatever one calls it, the armoured Knight XV is a curious crossbreed, merging the deluxe finishings of a Bentley with the doomsday practicality of a bulletproof SUV that's impervious to AK-47 ammunition.
It’s tank meets swank. And its Canadian makers are banking on the handcrafted ride to entice UAE supercar collectors who have an eye for military engineering packed into a recreational automobile.
The Toronto-based Conquest Vehicles is establishing an Abu Dhabi sales office in November, in a bid to capture the burgeoning Middle East market with the Knight XV (the XV stands for “extreme vehicle”).
But Conquest is not a volume enterprise. Not by any stretch. Indeed, the entire production run of its flagship armoured cars is just 100.
Each bespoke truck takes eight to nine months to assemble by hand, the underpinnings sourced from a Ford F-55 Super Duty chassis and a 400hp V10 engine with a five-speed TorqShift automatic transmission.
The sticker price reflects the stratum of clientele that Conquest is courting. A base model with a skin of ballistic-hardened steel begins at US$629,000 (Dh2.3 million), though most Knight XVs roll out of the plant costing as much as $900,000 (Dh3.3 million), with add-ons such as retractable TVs, video-game consoles, built-in refrigerators and cigar humidors.
One upgrade option includes a “built-in oxygen survival kit” to protect against tear gas and other chemical attacks.
As far as safety goes, the ironclad promise of its armouring is practically audible. You can hear it when you hoist open one of the 230-kilogram (500-pound) reinforced steel doors – each one bearing electronic touch handles – then swing it shut. A satisfying sealed thud.
“You can feel that security. When the doors weigh up to 600 pounds [272kg] each, you can’t just put a normal hinge on that,” Conquest’s head of marketing, Seth Feller, tells me on a tour of the manufacturing plant west of Toronto. “So instead, we actually had to engineer and machine our own proprietary hinging system.”
Feller invites me to pick up one of the chrome hinges set aside on a drafting table. My fingers fumble, struggling to palm it with just one hand.
“That’s a solid block of steel,” he says.
No two Knight XVs are alike, with buyers requesting all manner of accoutrements, from 24-carat gold trim throughout to ostrich-leather seats, decanter bars and private gun safes.
“Every client has a different ideal of what luxury means,” Feller says.
Conquest has already shipped a Knight XV to an unnamed Emirati buyer, custom-painting it gunmetal grey to match his Lamborghini. At the client’s request, electricians installed a cappuccino maker into the back. The leather interior is blue, with his initials hand-sewn into the seats.
“He wanted something unique, something one-of-a-kind, and so his assistant reached out to me,” says Conquest’s founder and former president William Maizlin.
Maizlin declined to identify the buyer by name, citing a non-disclosure agreement.
“I’ll just say he’s a big car guy, and it’s my understanding he’s also very in to horses, and he uses the vehicle for his arrival at certain exhibitions,” says Maizlin, who has a 17-year background in the armouring industry.
At a whopping six tonnes, or twice the weight of a Hummer, driving the pricey behemoth can be a fearsome experience – if not behind the wheel then possibly for surrounding traffic veering out of my path during a test drive.
None of that appears to concern Feller. “Go ahead and put your foot down a little bit,” he coaxes, as I lean on the gas.
Riding high, the black hood glistening with menace, we lumber down a side street near the automaker’s Toronto manufacturing plant and turn into a car park.
Given its heft, the turning radius is tighter than expected. “Just get a feel for it,” Feller says. “You’ll get used to it very quickly.”
To Maizlin, it handles somewhere between a Hummer H2 and a Cadillac Escalade.
To me, it feels like piloting an unstoppable fortress on wheels, and perhaps rightly so.
The 101-centimetre (40-inch) tyres are ballistic run-flats, custom-fabricated to maintain mobility and steering in the event of a blowout. Once punctured, the run-flat system allows for a getaway of up to 129 kilometres. “Some clients might not want to have the run-flat system in the wheels. They might say they’re just buying it for fun,” Maizlin says, noting it’s a “smoother ride” without the system. Still, he adds: “Other clients insist they need it.”
Driving the Knight XV puts me in somewhat rarefied company. Since Conquest began producing its flagship bespoke luxury armoured car in 2008, only 19 have been shipped to buyers, many of them ultra-high-net-worth individuals.
The NBA basketball player Dwight Howard, the superstar centre for the Houston Rockets, is a customer. Another is a Florida businessman whose wife takes the Knight XV to ferry her kids to football practice.
In 2013, Ukrainian rebels seized one of the luxury recreational vehicles from a warehouse belonging to the son of the ousted president Viktor Yanukovich.
“They were showing it on the news, and I remember in his car collection how ours just stuck out like a sore thumb,” Maizlin recalls. (He insists the car was exported legally, though it was made through an intermediary. Maizlin still does not know how the vehicle ended up in Yanukovich’s collection.)
Feller shows me a new nine-tonne model in the Toronto shop with B7 ballistic plating, the top level of protection against small-arms fire, still under construction.
“It’s going to Northern Europe, to a gentleman who purchased one already,” he says. “This one’s pretty much double the armour.”
Introducing the Conquest Vehicles aesthetic to UAE consumers could go a long way, as the global armoured-vehicles market is projected to hit $28.62 billion by 2019.
The company already recognises the potential for expansion in the Middle East, and if there is anywhere in the Mena region that understands the vehicle armouring business, it’s the Emirates.
Last year, Dubai Investments Park opened a 159,700-square-foot manufacturing facility for the Canadian armoured-transport company Inkas Vehicles, at an investment of Dh5 million.
The facility was billed as the biggest of its kind in the region, at a time when the business park was already producing an estimated 1,600 armoured personnel carriers a year, primarily for the Mena and Asian markets. The addition of Inkas brought the annual output to about 2,200 cars.
For Conquest, however, the Knight XV represents a whole new niche by essentially grafting the exterior of a war machine onto a luxury core wrapped in hand-stitched Andrew Muirhead leather and Wilton wool carpeting.
The design may be tough enough for battle, but the function is civilian. Maizlin notes, for instance, that traditional armoured carriers don’t have windows that can roll down. For the Knight XV, Conquest designed an elevator system so its 3.2-centimetre-thick “transparent armour” can raise and lower with a button. The glass feels so sturdy that knocking on the 410kg (900-pound) windscreen is not unlike tapping on the aquarium tank at The Dubai Mall.
Beyond a driver partition at the rear of the vehicle, which Feller calls “the salon”, a cavernous cabin with recliner airline-style seats is controlled by iPad.
“This is electrostatic tinting. This is a very cool feature,” he says, pushing a button. In an instant, the windows frost over, turning opaque. Another switch summons a retractable flat-screen TV connected to a PlayStation 4.
Maizlin recalls opening the door of a Knight XV for Prince Albert of Monaco as he peered inside, marvelling at the interior during the 2011 Top Marques supercars show.
"For him, it was like he was looking at a Bentley on the inside, but something out of Transformers on the outside," Maizlin says.
Climbing into the driver side of a completed Knight XV destined for a Beijing client, Feller points out a range of gauges and displays.
Ignition on, the engine coughs and hums as a multitude of screens – including a night-vision camera and a roof-mounted rear-view camera – flicker to life.
“We have ‘wail’, we have ‘high-low,’ this one’s ‘yelp’,” he says demonstrating the range of siren choices. “There’s an air horn. We can turn on neon strobes; we have police lights up front.”
As bulletproof as the specs may seem, however, there are limitations. Even with a 238-litre fuel capacity and the option to upgrade to a larger tank, the Knight XV is a thirsty beast. It drains 34L per 100km. It can also run on cleaner-burning 85- per- cent ethanol fuel.
Its 2.4-metre girth may also prove challenging for collectors with tight garages better suited to storing high-performance sports cars. Those are minor concessions to potential Knight XV devotees, however.
As office workers on a lunch break in Toronto spot the bulletproof car languishing for a few minutes in an industrial car park, several deploy their smartphones.
“If I win the lottery, this is the first thing I’m buying,” says Shaima Balkhi, posing for a selfie on the steel running board. “It’s my favourite thing in the world. This is the car for me.”
The commotion alerts Conquest’s electrical technician, Mike Mouratidis, who emerges from the garage to ensure nobody is tampering with the $820,000 vehicle, which is scheduled to be transported to China this month.
“I’m one of the builders, and I take a lot of pride in this,” Mouratidis later says.
Scratches and smudges would be unacceptable. Repainting, at this stage, was not on the cards.
“The truck’s the movie star,” he says. “You see a bunch of people around the truck, and we have to watch over it, you know?”
One can never be too careful, after all.
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