Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 Bison for U.S. Army

The U.S. Army has awarded GM Defense LLC a $1 million contract to develop its new Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) for prototype testing and evaluation. 

Following recent field tests at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the Army selected GM Defense’s ISV for further assessment of two prototypes to begin this fall.

GM Defense’s ISV is based on the award-winning Chevrolet Colorado midsize truck architecture and its ZR2 and ZR2 Bison variants, supplemented with both custom and commercially available parts proven by Chevy Performance engineering in more than 10,000 miles of punishing off-road development and desert racing in the Best in the Desert Racing series.

Applied to ISV, the Colorado’s architecture undergirds an occupant and cargo superstructure powered by a 186-horsepower, 2.8L diesel powerplant and six-speed automatic transmission.

The ISV must be light enough to be sling-loaded from a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, compact enough to fit inside a CH-47 Chinook helicopter and versatile enough to carry up to nine soldiers and all of their gear at highway speeds on pavement and off-road under extreme conditions. The Army plans to acquire approximately 650 ISVs beginning as soon as 2020.

GM’s solution to the Army’s next-generation transportation challenge features 70 percent commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components, including high-performance parts developed and proven by Chevy Performance engineering such as long-travel Multimatic DSSV dampers, long-travel rear leaf springs, jounce shocks, front upper control arms, steel driveshaft, underbody skid plates and ball-spline half shafts. Most of these parts are available either on the Colorado ZR2 Bison or as Chevrolet Performance race components.

“Our ISV entry is a fully-integrated platform that leverages decades of GM’s engineering, manufacturing and quality expertise at scale to provide the most cost-efficient, reliable and effective answer possible to meet and exceed the Army’s demanding requirements,” said GM Defense President David Albritton. “We’re very proud of the opportunity to move forward in this competition and continue our development of a vehicle that will enable Army units to move around the battlefield with greater ease and reliability.”