Roshel develops LUV that converts to armored truck in 2 hours

Canadian armored vehicle manufacturer Roshel will debut three new military platforms at CANSEC 2026 in Ottawa, leading with a modular light utility vehicle that can convert from a standard unprotected configuration to a STANAG Level 2 armored vehicle in approximately two hours, offering NATO-aligned militaries a way to maintain battlefield-ready protected transport without sustaining large fleets of dedicated armored vehicles in peacetime.

The announcements, confirmed by Roshel CEO Roman Shimonov ahead of the show, come as Canada advances its Defence Industrial Strategy with an explicit focus on sovereign land vehicle capability and domestic manufacturing.

The LUV platform’s two-hour conversion concept addresses a logistics and economics problem that has frustrated defense planners in Canada and comparable NATO nations for years. Maintaining a large fleet of dedicated armored vehicles is expensive in peacetime: the vehicles require specialized storage, maintenance, trained crews, and supply chains even when no immediate threat justifies their full operational deployment. The alternative, buying armored vehicles only when a crisis materializes, runs into the reality that armored vehicle production takes years and cannot be accelerated on short notice. Roshel’s LUV proposes a third path: a vehicle that operates as a standard soft-skin platform under normal conditions, indistinguishable in its driving characteristics and operational requirements from a conventional truck, and converts to STANAG Level 2 blast and ballistic protection by swapping out doors, windshield, and other modular protection components when the threat level requires it.

STANAG Level 2 is the NATO standardization agreement threshold that covers protection against fragmentation, small arms fire, and blast effects from mines and improvised explosive devices at a defined severity level, representing the baseline protection standard for light armored vehicles operating in environments where those threats are present. It is not the heaviest protection tier available, but it is the level that covers the most common threats facing light utility vehicles in the kinds of conflicts that Canada and its allies have actually fought since the end of the Cold War, from the Balkans through Afghanistan and into the current Ukraine-influenced threat landscape. A vehicle that can reach that protection standard in two hours from a standard truck starting point gives military planners genuine flexibility that neither pure soft-skin nor permanently armored fleets provide.

The LUV’s development draws directly on Roshel’s operational experience with more than 2,500 vehicles currently deployed in Ukraine, giving the company a feedback loop between active frontline use and Canadian engineering that few vehicle manufacturers anywhere in the world can match at this stage of the conflict. Ukraine has provided the most intensive real-world stress test of light military vehicles in the modern era, with vehicles subjected to extreme operational tempos, improvised threats, difficult terrain, and the kind of sustained use that exposes design weaknesses that peacetime testing never surfaces. Roshel’s ability to incorporate that frontline feedback directly into the LUV’s development makes the platform’s claimed survivability and maintenance characteristics more credible than laboratory specifications alone could support.

Roman Shimonov, Roshel’s CEO, articulated the strategic logic behind the company’s product direction: “Modern defence procurement is changing rapidly. Countries need scalable, flexible, and economically sustainable solutions that can respond quickly to evolving threats without maintaining enormous inactive fleets. Canada has identified new sovereign capability requirements in land vehicles through the LUV and DAME programs, with a strong focus on Canadian-made solutions, domestic manufacturing, and secure local supply chains. Roshel aims to support these Canadian programs with its domestically manufactured vehicle platforms, including the new LUV and Senator Medical Evacuation Vehicle.”

The ExtremV tracked vehicle that Roshel will also unveil at CANSEC represents an expansion of the company’s product portfolio into territory that wheeled platforms cannot cover. Developed in partnership with ST Engineering and localized for Canadian production, the ExtremV is an all-terrain tracked platform engineered for the extreme operating environments that Canada’s geography makes operationally relevant: Arctic cold, deep snow, alpine terrain, mud, and the kind of remote wilderness that wheeled vehicles bog down in or cannot reach at all. Its twin-cabin design allows the front and rear sections to move independently across uneven ground, reducing the risk of the vehicle becoming high-centered on obstacles that would strand a rigid-frame alternative. The platform carries up to 4,000 kilograms of payload in its soft-skin configuration, operates across a temperature range from minus 46 to plus 49 degrees Celsius with a cold start kit, provides amphibious capability, and covers approximately 350 kilometers on a single fuel load.

The ExtremV’s operational pedigree extends beyond Canada. Roshel describes the platform as sharing tactical DNA with vehicles deployed by the UK Ministry of Defence in Afghanistan, and cites operational use in high-risk firefighting in Germany and disaster response missions in Thailand, Japan, and Mexico, giving the platform a documented track record across diverse environments that a brand-new design could not claim. Roshel confirms it is already prepared to begin large-scale production and assembly of the ExtremV in Canada, positioning the company to move quickly if Canadian defense procurement programs select the platform.

The Senator Medical Evacuation Vehicle rounds out Roshel’s CANSEC showcase with a focus on casualty evacuation under modern operational conditions, designed to allow wounded personnel to be extracted and loaded with minimal physical effort from the medical personnel performing the evacuation. That design priority reflects lessons from Ukraine and other recent conflicts where casualty evacuation has proven one of the most dangerous and physically demanding tasks that combat medics and infantry soldiers perform, often under fire and with limited personnel available to lift and move casualties.