Knight XV, Hummer news - Meet the Hummer-crusher - 2009

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Giant. Gargantuan. Colossal. Supersized. Mammoth. Whichever way you say it, the Knight XV is big. Very big.

Take a look at the Knight XV alongside the Hummer H2. The Hummer H2 is not a small car. The Hummer H2 is a very large car, in fact. But it looks tiny, miniscule, laughably petite next to the Knight XV. The Knight XV is big.

So what the hell is it? It’s a luxury armoured vehicle (honest) from Canadian-based firm Conquest Vehicles. Inspired by the Gurkha military truck and based on the underpinnings of a Ford F-350 truck, it measures just over six metres in length and tips the scales at five-and-a-half tonnes. The Knight XV is big.

Part of the reason for that weight is that the Knight XV is built to withstand, well, just about anything. Constructed of ballistic hardened steel, ballistic fibreglass and six centimetre thick armoured glass, it’ll withstand fire from Kalashnikovs, Dragunovs and Kasporovs. OK, we made the last one up. He’s a chess player.

The Knight XV is powered by a Ford-sourced 6.8-litre V10 putting out 400bhp and 500lb ft of torque. It'll run on E85 ethanol, so it's er, green. Sort of.

Conquest boasts that it will ‘comfortably seat six professional basketball players’ which, if you were in any doubt about the size of the thing, puts it in the ‘really very enormous' category.

Oh, and one final indicator of scale. See those wheels? Well, the alloys in the middle are 20-inchers. Getting a flavour for the bigness yet?