Meet the £400k, bulletproof Range Rover Sentinel

Until now, Jaguar Land Rover’s skunkworks offshoot Special Vehicle Operations has mostly been busy making cars that could be described as ‘weapons’. The roofless, tyre-shredding Project 7, for instance. Or the F-Type R-on-stilts that is the Range Rover Sport SVR. Angry things.

Now, it’s had a crack at making a car that can, well, withstand weapons. Welcome to the bulletproof Range Rover Sentinel. All £400,000 of it.

Of course, there have been armored Range Rovers before, built for Prime Ministers, royalty, and protecting precious rappers from the subjects of their diss tracks. But the Sentinel is the first one that’s officially Land Rover. So, you’d hope it’s spent that time doing some weapons-grade homework. And it has.

The bodywork can withstand hits from common 7.62mm high-velocity, armour-piercing rounds. You can detonate 15kg of TNT explosive next to the Sentinel and the occupants won’t even have to turn up the stereo. Which - given the Sentinel is based on the plush Autobiography model - is doubtless a 256-speaker job with more watts than Wembley Arena.

Also standard is a self-healing fuel tank that seals up damage if an attacker attempts to worsen your fuel economy with guns, and an anti-tamper exhaust protected against assailants crawling around under the car. Unlikely to be easily replaceable at Kwik-Fit, that. Naturally, there’s a back-up power supply on board, so if the Sentinel does take some punishment, your enjoyment of Iron Man on the on-board TV sets won’t be interrupted.

All pretty standard so far, as is the anti-smash glass. But there’s so much more, and this is where you get the sense SVO started to show off a tad. There’s a 100mm opening in the driver’s window for passing I.D. documents and the like outside, so there’s no need to compromise security by opening the door. Trapped inside? Doors blocked? No worries – you can clamber out of the escape hatch hidden beneath the rear seats. Yup, this car has a trapdoor. And run-flat, toughened tyres.

The adaptive suspension can support a 650kg payload, of food presumably, if you’re going to holed up inside for a while. If you fancy making a break for it, there’s a 337bhp 3.0-litre supercharged petrol V6 to call on, and upgraded brakes. The Sentinel is quite heavy though, being, y’know, bombproof.

Hilariously, SVO also offers the full suite of personalisation and safety tech options for the Sentinel. If you want your zombie apocalypse Rangie to sport pink leather and blind-spot monitoring, it’s all in the brochure. You just have to sign the cheque, which won’t be smaller than £400,000, since that doesn’t include local taxes.

Oh, and Land Rover insists that despite the extra weight and complication, the Range Rover Sentinel is just as good off-road as any other Range Rover. Frankly, the campaign to get the British Army assigned a whole battalion of these starts here.