Nobody this side of Howe & Howe knows how to overcompensate like the Rezvani team, and the new Tank X is so brutally macho that you'd need to be Dwayne Johnson to hang your arm out the window and look right. Starting at US$349,000, meet your new 1,000-horsepower off-road hyper-SUV.
As if 2017's regular old Tank wasn't wild enough, or the Tank Military Edition didn't take this thing to a crazy enough level, Rezvani has gone bananas and built the most powerful SUV in the world.
"Designed to be a daily driver," the Tank X can be optioned with a 6.2-liter blown V8 – the 840-hp one from the Dodge Demon, but further fettled to pump out "over 1,000 horsepower" (746 kW) and 870 lb-ft (1,180 Nm) of torque. According to our calculations, that puts this outrageous machine in the hypercar category. Indeed, this is the first hyper-SUV.
The design has evolved since the first tank – perhaps our man C.C. Weiss's complaints were heard, because Samir Sadikhov's new Tank Xs styling maintains the original car's Rambo-grade military stealth feel while dialing back some of the more awkward features, like the old car's "is that a back window or a widescreen telly" rear end. You can put us down as a fan of the new bodywork, even if the back doors still look like a weird compromise.
The base grade suspension uses Fox 2.0 shocks at each corner with four inches (100 mm) of lift, but you can option that up to Fox 3.0 Extreme shocks with six inches (150 mm) if you really wanna show 'em who's boss, and there's a little pop-out step to help you hoist yourself up and into the cabin. The brakes, on the other hand, start out as big as they get: eight-piston calipers on 16-inch (406.4 mm) discs.
The standard tires appear to be Nitto Trail Grapplers, which Nitto claims were "forged in the fires of motorsport." So who knows, maybe they might hang on for a quarter of a second when you drop a gumboot into the guts of your one-thousand-horsepower supercharged V8. Oh, and unless you've got the 4WD mode selected, all that power's headed to just two of the wheels. It's probably for the best if the tires spin – if they gripped, this thing might have the torque to wheelie away from the traffic lights. Actually, when you think of it that way, let's get Pirelli to make some high-sided Trofeo Rs with dirt tread.
The interior is all fancy and luxury, which is frankly a little disappointing looking at the exterior. It should be bare metal seats in there, with cantaloupe-sized indentations to cradle your mighty cojones and a gun rack for each seat.
If you want to go totally berserk, and we fully encourage you to, the Rezvani Tank X can be optioned up into a Military Edition. With the 1,000-horse donk, that's going to start at US$444,000, but it's got ballistic armor, thermal night vision, underbody bomb shields, ram bumpers, electrified door handles, sirens, strobe lights, smoke bombs, cloud-connected video surveillance, intercoms, gas masks, blinding lights and other goodies. The old one had the ability to drop loads of metal spikes designed to rip up the tires of anyone following you – we'd assume that's included too, or at least an option.
The Military Edition is also equipped with an EMP protection system that surpasses all known military standards. It'll handle up to 40 EMP strikes in a row, whether they're created by EMP weapons or as a by-product of nuclear explosions, protecting your vehicle's electronics from blasts of more than 100,000 amps and activating within 500 trillionths of a second. So if that's something that happens a lot in your neighborhood, we guess this is the car for you.
Who is this the car for? Well, apparently the first of the original bulletproof Tanks was sold to musician and Rihanna-batterer Chris Brown. Actor/musician Jamie Foxx has been seen with one, as have MMA star Rampage Jackson and rapper Xzibit. I can't think of a better daily driver for somebody like Dan Bilzerian, although perhaps he might need something with more space, since he's rarely seen without a minimum gaggle of at least four bikini models and a pallet-load of machine guns.
The Rezvani Tank X is an extraordinary machine, a humble Jeep Wrangler that's been stripped back to nothing and rebuilt into the most testosterone-soaked, intimidating urban war machine imaginable. And we mean that, we genuinely feel that if Rezvani could imagine a way to make this thing more scary or badass, they'd have done it in a heartbeat. Nobody combines shirt-ripping looks, insane power and James Bond gadgetry quite like these guys, and while it's probably not the car for you and us, we're delighted to live in a world where this thing exists.
Check out a video below, in which a well-coiffed Tank owner appears to be blowing off dinner with his missus to go for a hoon.
Source: Rezvani