If you’re that special breed of person who has dreamt of owning both a piece of movie history and a tank, now’s your chance to kill two birds with one stone: the Ripsaw mini-tank from the eighth installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise is headed to the auction block next month for less than $200,000.
According to the listing at Mecum Auctions, the dual-tracked land vehicle that defense contractor (and future Textron subsidiary) Howe & Howe first unveiled for the U.S. Army in 2019 has appeared in both the furiously fast Fast and Furious 8: The Fate of the Furious and the two live-action G.I. Joe movies, The Rise of Cobra and Retaliation.
While the vehicle famously featured an M153 Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station (CROWS) mounted to its roof with a Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun in The Fate of the Furious, the configuration that’s up for sale through Mecum Auctions is, sadly, unarmed. However, it does feature the original paint job and a 750-horsepower engine with a top speed of up to 60 mph, making this the perfect vehicle for casual offroading and scaring the bejesus out of your neighborhood.
As our gearhead colleagues at The Drive note, the interior of the Ripsaw is nothing to write home about, featuring a pair of seats and some harnesses along with a handful of basic control consoles. Luckily, the Ripsaw features an automatic Allison transmission, which means even the most inexperienced operator can likely replicate the Ripsaw’s magnificent feats of strength from Fate of the Furious, from smashing through snowdrifts to flying high off errant moguls.
Still, the possibility of owning a mini-tank remains ridiculously cool, even if you aren’t the only person in the country with one: the Army selected the M5 variant of the Ripsaw for its Robotic Combat Vehicle-Medium (RCV-M) program in 2020, and the service is currently putting a batch of unmanned Ripsaws with beastly remote-controlled 30mm cannons through their paces.
This Ripsaw will be available at Mecum’s Indy 2023 auction, which runs from May 12 to May 20, for an estimated price between $150,000 to $180,000. And while that seems like a hefty chunk of change, trust us: that’s a way a better deal than a Dodge Charger with an impossibly high-interest rate.
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