Hello, hello, hello, my darlings! What a year it has been so far. I heard you didn’t get that time off from work you put in for, poor thing. As for me, I have been gallivanting abroad, soaking up the sun and happily tuning out the wails of the downtrodden. It’s been rejuvenating, to say the least. And I’m in a particularly good mood today because I’ve just come across two men who’ve built a custom “tank limo,” which is good news for you.
As you are probably well aware, I’m a huge fan of tanks. They’re large, imposing and the people in the cheap seats (see also: personal cars) tend to get out of their way quickly. The only thing I could fault them for is they don’t typically come with a whole lot of creature comforts. There is a lot of exposed metal in there, you see.
At least in my personal armada, I outfit my tanks with plush velvets, goose-down pillows and silks. My tanks are up to spec, but most others aren’t. But these two gentlemen, who run a tank-limo-for-rent business, seem to have the whole comfort thing figured out. Their tank looks quite cosy, and completely appropriate for someone who wants to charade as me for a day.
“[We’ve] done christenings, kids’ parties, stag parties, we’ve done hen parties, we’ve done proms, we’ve done everything. And right at the end, we can even do your funeral,” Nick Mead, owner of TankLimo.com, tells Barcroft Cars in a video interview. “We do everything from birth to death.”
Tod Chamberlain, the tank commander, calls the tank-limo, “Rolling thunder.” That’s the name of my Komodo dragon! How did he know??
Anyway, Mead says he got into tanks about 30 years ago and ended up with two. (It’s a lot easier than you think, if you’re the right kind of person.) His original plan was to sell one and keep the other, but just before that happened, a company asked if it could hire one and the business idea took flight from there.
The tank-limo was built by welding two “former British Army FV432 APC personnel carriers with an original two-man turret of the FV432 used in the Berlin Brigade,” according to the video’s caption. It can seat up to 10 people, or just you because if you’re going to be me for a day, you also need to know I don’t share. Sharing is for the birds and the losers.
The tank-limo is 6.71 metres long, about 2.4 metres wide and weighs about 17.5 tons. Mead’s gotten it up to 35 mph, which is more than enough to quell peasant uprisings and flatten pathetic roadblocks cobbled together from hopes and dreams.
Mead and Chamberlain charge £1,600 ($2,925) a day to rent their tank. It’s a small sum of money, but definitely well worth it if you’re looking to spend a few hours in the life of me.
Of course, you’ll never be able to pull off what I do with the same amount of class and taste, but they say imitation is the purest form of flattery.
via TecheBlog and Luxurylaunches