AUTOS : Huntington Firm Puts Its Off-Road Expertise to Use for U.S. Military

What’s the difference between an off-road racing truck and a light-duty military attack vehicle? Maybe not that much.

Rod Millen Motorsports, which made its name in professional rally and off-road racing, has been working with the U.S. Marine Corps to develop prototype attack vehicles that can fit inside cargo-carrying helicopters.

Apparently, the Hummer personnel carrier that won acclaim in the Persian Gulf War and now can be purchased from commercial dealers as a king-size civilian “sport utility vehicle” is too big to fly.

The Marines asked company owner Rod Millen, a builder and driver of race cars, to use his off-road expertise to develop a Helo Transportable Multi Mission Platform.

That project has been completed, and the company, based in Huntington Beach, is about to wrap up manufacture of a Joint Tactical Electrical Vehicle that both the Marines and the Army are funding, said John LaPlante, Millen’s senior engineer.

“We’re about a month away from completion of the vehicle, and then we’ll have about six months of in-house testing,” LaPlante said, noting that the basic suspension and engineering of a military vehicle that can cruise rough terrain is not much different from that of a professional off-road race truck.

A big way the tactical vehicle differs is that it uses a diesel engine to run an alternator that continually charges an array of batteries. Those, in turn, power a pair of electric motors that propel the four-wheel-drive vehicle, LaPlante said.

That design, he said, has several advantages over conventional internal combustion power: a lighter, quieter powertrain, lower emissions and more mechanical efficiency. And when being quiet is really important, the driver can shut down the diesel and switch to battery power for as long as 10 minutes.

While many manufacturers are shifting away from military projects in light of dwindling defense budgets, Millen is taking the opposite tack.

The tactical vehicle “accounts for about a third of our annual budget, and we hope other projects will flow from it,” LaPlante said. “Racing has its ups and downs too, and as long as they don’t coincide with the defense industry’s, this is one way to keep the company diversified.”