Alpine Armoring® Pit-Bull® Featured in Car and Driver Magazine

The Pit-Bull VX® Is a Rolling Fortress

The Alpine Armoring Pit-Bull VX can take a grenade. Just don't ask it to take a corner.

By Ezra Dyer | From the June 2020 issue of Car and Driver Magazine

Your pilot stole your plane. So much for flying to New Zealand. To say you should have seen it coming is inaccurate: You did see it coming, because you plan for all eventualities. So when it was time to escape the city, your decision tree was decidedly more bountiful than most. Scratch the Gulfstream G650 to Auckland; head instead to your converted missile silo in upstate New York, hunker down, and spend a few years sipping your way through the wine cellar until something like civilization is reestablished. But first, you have to get there.

Fortunately, your Alpine Armoring Pit-Bull is just the thing for a road trip through the apocalypse. An armored personnel carrier built on a previous-generation Ford F-550 4x4 chassis cab, the Pit-Bull is normally sold to police departments, militaries, and foreign governments. But Alpine will also sell it to private buyers who can afford the $250,000 base price, which is a bargain for a bulletproof 10-passenger SUV. Of course, that's before you add up the options.

You'd probably want all the stuff that comes on the $298,000 VX model. Take, for instance, the hydraulic battering ram on the front bumper: You can use that to breach a door or wall or whatever else needs ramming, lending new meaning to the term "drive-through." Once you've made your entrance, you can greet your new friends by deploying a tear gas canister from the dispenser at the end of the ram. Look, you're not looting a Starbucks. You're making sure the Starbucks is clear of looters! You'll leave money for the dozen bags of Komodo Dragon Blend you're grabbing. Not that money means anything now, but it's the thought that counts.

Should any roadside bandits pick a fight, they'll need some fairly heavy artillery to slow down the Pit-Bull—especially one with the VX's reinforced armor, rated to stop a .50 BMG round and withstand a grenade. Or 20 kilograms of TNT. Wrapped around the 20-inch wheels, the 41-inch Continental off-road tires have run-flat functionality. And since, as everyone knows, offense is the best defense, there are seven-inch gun ports built into the doors and rear quarters, plus one in the rooftop turret. That turret spins 360 degrees and its roof flips up, so you can use it as a shield. As always, watch out for flanking maneuvers.

The Pit-Bull VX isn't quite as agile as your armored Mercedes-AMG G63, a stock-looking Alpine product that—like the brand's Escalades, S-classes, and Camrys—blends in with traffic. Or at least did, back when there was traffic. Now that the roads are empty, save for marauders and posses, you can let the Pit-Bull stretch its legs a little. You just want to be mindful that the VX's center of gravity feels like it's about halfway to the moon, so even with the slow steering and huge anti-roll bars, a quick tug of the wheel can make you feel as if you're pole-vaulting on the deck of a Bering Sea crab boat. Fortunately, there's really no need for emergency steering maneuvers when you're driving this. The Pit-Bull doesn't avoid traffic; traffic avoids the Pit-Bull. There are very few rules now, but everyone seems to understand that one.

From the driver's seat, the Ford Super Duty dash looks familiar. The Power Stroke 6.7-liter diesel is also old and in a milder state of tune than you'd find in current pickups. Its 330 horsepower and 750 pound-feet of torque are up against, oh, 19,750 pounds or so of armored truck. The VX moves out like an F-350 towing a large boat, determined and inexorable. And as with that setup, you can do 80 mph but probably shouldn't. For one, going that fast might dent your fuel economy, which typically runs about 8 or 9 mpg. No big deal, though. Fuel stations are out of commission, but you can siphon diesel from the locomotives at the train yard.

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