This is the US Army’s new Chevrolet troop carrier

This, fellow car-fans of the Internet, is the US Army’s badass new Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV). It has been designed to carry a nine-soldier squad through the battlefield and is based on the road-going Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 pickup truck.

Pretty cool, right? GM Defense (a subsidiary of General Motors) has been awarded a $214.3 million contract to build, field and sustain these things, and although it may not look like it - given the lack of doors, windows and pretty much all other bodywork – apparently 90 per cent of the parts are off-the-shelf commercial units.

The ISV is powered by the ZR2’s 181bhp 2.8-litre turbo-diesel engine connected to a six-speed automatic gearbox, and it even runs the production truck’s Multimatic dampers and Chevrolet Performance suspension setup.

GM’s press release also proudly states that the ISV is “light enough to be sling loaded from a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter and compact enough to fit inside a CH-47 Chinook helicopter”. Very cool.

The only issue? The contract covers the initial Army Procurement Objective of 649 vehicles, and some quick calculator-based maths reveals that’s $330,200 per ISV. Someone needs to inform the US Army of the existence of the Ferrari 812 Superfast, or if it’s open-topped motoring they want, perchance a McLaren 720S Spider with change?