: A total of 10 companies have registered to bid on the British Army's new Armored Battlegroup Support Vehicle program, which will involve 800 or more vehicles. The ABSV is to have protection equivalent to the Warrior armored infantry fighting vehicle and performance equal to a Challenger-2 tank. The basic vehicle will be an armored personnel carrier, and while most of the contenders come with a two-man turret mounting a 25mm cannon, the British want this APC to be fitted only with a one-man turret mounting a 12.7mm machinegun. (Other variants might include the usual suspects: ambulance, anti-tank, command post, repair/recovery, mortar carrier, artillery forward observer, engineer, air defense, etc.) The ABSV will replace those Alvis FV432 personnel carriers not replaced by the 8x8 Multi-Role Armored Vehicle. The contending vehicles include: Warrior and Warrior-2000, both offered by Alvis of the UK CV90 offered by Hagglunds of Sweden Marder-1 by Germany's Henschel Wehrtechnik a new vehicle design by Krauss Maffei Wegmann of Germany The Piranha 8x8 LAV armored car by MOWAG of Switzerland a new advanced armored vehicle offered by Multi-Drive Dardo by Italy's OTO-Breda the Bionix armored vehicle by Singapore Technologies Kinetics the ASCOD by Austria's Steyr-Daimler-Puch and the new Mobile Tactical Vehicle Light by United Defense.--Stephen V Cole