GM Defense, a division of General Motors, has won a contact to produce the new Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) for the U.S. Army. The deal, with $214.3 million for 2,065 vehicles, also includes fielding and sustaining the product.
“Winning this Army award is well-deserved recognition for the hard work and dedication of our GM Defense team and their production of a fantastic vehicle. We are confident the GMD ISV will meet and exceed all of our customers’ requirements,” said David Albritton, president of GM Defense. “It’s indeed an honor to leverage our parent company’s experience as one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers to design, build and deliver the best technologies available to the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces and our allies.”
The model is designed to excel in a number of climates.Photo courtesy of General Motors
The new ISV is designed to be light, agile, and improve rapid ground mobility for the Army. It’s all-terrain troop carrier that’s designed to seat nine members of an Infantry squad and transport them across a battlefield.
The model’s comparatively low weight allows it to be slightly loaded from a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter. It is compact enough to fit inside a CH-47 Chinook helicopter.
GM Defense will build the ISV on the midsize truck architecture of the 2020 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2. Ninety percent of its parts are off-the-shelf from GM commercial models, including Multimatic dual spool-valve dampers and Chevrolet Performance suspension components.
GM has extensively tried the performance components, not just as part of the traditional equipment set of the Colorado ZR2 the average customer buys, but also in the Best in the Desert race series.
Most of the large scale conflicts the military has been involved with in the last two decades have been in areas of the world with desert climates and dirt-filled primitive landscape.
All ISVs will be powered by a 186-horsepower 2.8-liter Duramax turbo-diesel engine, which is paired with a six-speed automatic transmission.
Though GM has just won the contract, the project started in earnest 2019 when GM Defense partnered with Ricardo Defense after the U.S. Army awarded three $1 million contracts to competing industry providers to develop ISV prototypes for testing, evaluation and down-selection for the production contract. Ricardo Defense will support key product logistics and fielding requirements of the GM Defense ISV.
