New Scarbo SV Rover： 1500hp Twin-Turbo V8 Hyper Truck! ｜ 4K

If you want a fast, capable off-roader, Land Rover has got you covered. We'll be right back. This, this isn't one of them because what you're looking at here is a gorilla in a sheepdog costume This is the Scarbo SV Rover and it's sort of and it contains almost no actual Land Rover. Oh sure, it does have all the accoutrements though. bursting out all over. It has locking differentials and a low range gearbox and even under there somewhere an original Land Rover VIN number. But show me the Land Rover that looks like that underneath. What you're looking at here is the world's first street legal hyper truck. We'll take it out onto the wild streets of Southern California later in this film, but first let's get the full story from the man whose name is on the back, Joe Scarbo. Oh, and if you're wondering about Joe's pedigree, his passion is desert racing, and he cut his teeth on Volkswagen's Baja Touareg project. He was also involved with Radford on the ill-fated Type 62, helped out on Oil Stain Lab's Half 11 and most famously engineered and built Ken Block's Hoonicorn Pegasus. Okay Joe, how much of an original Land Rover Defender is under this? Because it looks quite substantially different. The engine's not in the same place anymore. Nope. So it's now mid-engine. Yeah. And the bodywork obviously is reshaped slightly, but fundamentally the firewall... Reshaped slightly. The firewall, the overall width is still identical to the original Land Rover. The door handles are the same. The windshield seal is the same. So you know there's there's still some original Land Rover. Yeah yeah right so let's start in the front and go through it because yeah I mean you've got you I love how you've done some of the details so you picked up the old original design tropes with it but then you look at it and you go yeah but they didn't really have carbon fiber bodywork in the back and they certainly didn't have damp oil coolers mounted coming through the bonnet. Essentially, it's more of a trophy truck underneath here, isn't it? Correct. So the original design of this truck, prior to it being a Land Rover, is I had been designing a new off-road race truck. And it only happened that after we started building our SV line of cars, that I realized that I really wanted to body this as something. And when we chose to do a Land Rover, that's when the race truck design kind of got morphed around the Defender shape. Right. So it was fundamentally a tube chassis race truck to start, and then that morphed with the Land Rover. Yeah. So there's certain parts on this truck that are more ridiculous than others. So when you start to make a lot of parts that you realize should be billet aluminum, the front differential housing in particular, I found out that you can only get aluminum plate 14 inches thick. And unfortunately, the front diff is larger than that, so it had to come out of a piece piece of 22 inch round stock. So when you get a 22 inch piece of round stock that's long enough you're 1200 pounds in your block of aluminum and then you carve that down to 75 pounds. So you've got bash guards and stuff in place but right in behind it is the most beautiful looking piece of aluminium. That part is kind of like the central node of the truck and it was really hard to justify doing that because I really didn't want it to, I wanted to make it laser cut plate and press broken and welded. Yeah. But the problem is once you weld something it all moves around and with a billet chunk of You know that the material properties are consistent, and you know it's dimensionally stable, and it was like one of those days, it's like, are we really gonna do this? Like, okay, we'll do it. So now it's like the lower control arm connects to it, the upper control arm connects to it, the diff goes into it, the steering mounts to it, all the chassis pickup points are on it. It does everything. It does everything. Yeah. It is fabulous. And like wheels and tires, then did you know what you were gonna stick on it? Did you have to sort of set the wheel and tire package? Originally for it every car that I designed always starts with the wheels and tires in position Yeah, and it gives me a box and then I build inward from the wheels and tires Most off-road trucks do not run a 20-inch wheel. It's becoming a little more common nowadays But they've typically been 17 inch wheels in the past so 20 but it allowed me a big brake package and it allowed me the ability to space my Joints apart a lot and move them into the wheel The wheels we did design and make from scratch. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Did you? Yes. So you couldn't just buy a set of stock wheels. You had to go and design your own. When we raced this truck, a set of our wheels and tires got stolen. Two days later, I think that the person that took them returned them to us and wanted some money for them but I think the reason he did that is because he tried to fit them on every F350 or 2500 pickup he could but there's nothing that has this bolt pattern. Yeah. So this bolt pattern is bespoke to this and the wheels are custom for this application. Wow. We'll talk more about the suspension when we can see it in the back but what I love about this is that you've got a good viewing angle down from when you sit in the cockpit. Because I would have imagined that your fenders would have had to be much higher to give you the wheel clearance here. For sure and obviously if the tire is moving to here you need to have a fender. But you don't want the fender to be overly high and yeah it immediately made me think okay the fender has to be able to move out of the way. And my first thought after I thought that was wow that sounds really complex and crazy. Like nobody does this. So it ends up it's a secondary rocker that has a nitrogen strut attached to it that the upper control arm actuates when the tire gets within an inch of the fender. So as you come off of the jump and the tire starts to come up, the A-arm contacts a pad and it moves the fender up out of the way. Oh that's so cool isn't it? That is excellent. So you get under yeah and it's on a hydraulic dam or it's on a strut. A nitrogen strut. Nitrogen strut so it just, oh that is so cool. And then we've got, I love this, that you've still got recognizable Well, you know what external hinges from a Land Rover, but they're not what's really What's really funny about this truck is that I work on my own stuff and I really get frustrated when there's hidden fasteners You can't find or can't get to or you have to take off five things to get to the one thing you want to take off So with this truck, there is a lot of exposed hardware simply because it makes it easier to work on and I like The dash cowl removes by itself. If you want to get to the display or if you want to get into the dash to work on it, you can remove just that piece. This truck's much easier to work on than the last truck. Yeah, but I'm guessing 3D printed parts. So this truck is a combination of tooled carbon, 3D printed, and billet mostly, and sheet metal, pressed broken sheet metal. All the hinges on the truck are 3D printed aluminum. Yeah, and are they done to the original... Specification, or they look a bit bigger actually, aren't they? They're completely different. Yeah, I thought they might be. They're completely different, but they kind of look the part. Yeah, but I'm guessing you've had to do some parts bin stuff for like door mirrors and door handles as well? Factory Land Rover part. That's a factory Land Rover? Correct. Good. So factory Land Rover part for the door handles. Yeah. There are some Jeep parts in the door mechanism. Humanism? Yeah. Um... And it's not so much that we wanted to use Jeep parts, it's just that the area that we need to work within, that particular door lock actuator fit into that volume. And door 10 inches longer you said? 10 inches longer than a factory Defender. Wow. But I love how you've still got the template of all the design and stuff going on here. It does look convincingly, up to a point, like a Defender. Yes, there's design cues for sure. Nikita and Ilya Bryden from Oil Stain Labs came up with the flying buttress kind of C-pillar, which I absolutely love. I think it was a really neat Yeah. Did you ever look at trying to, was it, it was always going to be mid-engined, I guess? Always. Because the original truck, the original race truck I designed prior to anything Land Rover related was always mid-engine. Yeah. My background in off-road racing prior to designing this was that Volkswagen Baja Race Truggy TDI, which was a mid-engine V12 twin-turbo diesel and... That used the Le Mans engine, didn't it? It did, yes. Oh my god. So that's similar to how this drivetrain is positioned. The engine pointed forward to a trans, to a transfer case, the transfer case has a power takeoff to the front diff, and then it snakes around and comes back. And you've got the same on this rear arch as well, you've still got a flex on it. So the thing that's really funny about moving fenders is when you get the truck up to 80 or 100 miles an hour... Start to realize what the aerodynamics of a fender is, and how heavy you need to make that strut to make the fenders not want to start flying. Yes, so that happened in the front. The lighter you make this, the heavier the strut has to be, because it doesn't want to hold itself down. But it turned out to be an 80 pound strut in the front and a 50 pound strut in the back. That's what makes it happy. It's, uh... Empirical testing. Yeah, well, let's go around the back, open up the door, because the packaging in here is ridiculous. I'll come around this side. Because that is absurd, isn't it? Just to cut in here a second, this is not Joe's first truck. You might remember a yellow car a couple of years back that was subsequently sold, giving him the money to fund the next stage. So what I love about this is outside, still mostly like an old Defender, and then you open up the back and you just go, no, that's a trophy truck in the back of here, isn't it? So it's just outrageous. Definitely makes you scratch your head when you look in through the back. A lot of people walk up to it and they look under the front and they see there's no engine there. Yeah, and then that's the first inkling that like what's different and then I think they come back here and it's just like oh Wow, because it I mean it looks like a slightly of a hypercar back end with just more space around it because you've still got It's so trick and so bespoke and the engine's buried so far up into the chassis and then All of this area the mountings and the housings to hold all the suspension on. I mean, it's wild what you've done with it with something like this you have so much space this is a big thing it's not relatively small and you would think okay when you're designing i have so much space to do all of these things and then you take this big tire and all the suspension and you move it all this way and then you realize you don't have that much space anymore because all these moving parts are taking up all this real estate so um yeah you end up with yeah a very small These two flats on the suspension rockers are there because these nearly touch each other at full bump. So as these rock up they both come to here and there's about three millimeters of clearance between these two pieces. So that's 30 inches of travel or so you said isn't it? 30 inches of travel front and rear. in the rear end this Because, when I was at Volkswagen, we were always packing chase trucks with spare parts. And when you have a lot of spare parts or a lot of different components, you have a whole truck full of spares. So when I was laying out this truck, I was thinking to myself, okay, we have fundamentally similar suspension front and rear, similar travel, same wheel and tire. So the upper control arm works on all four corners. The lower control arm is the same on the left-hand side. The right rear and the left front upright are the same. The brake rotor on all four quarters. Four corners is identical, calipers are left-handed and right-handed, so if you had to carry spare parts to race it, there's a limited number of parts you'd have to carry, which I thought was neat. The shocks on all eight shocks are the same. Eight shocks. Is that just because you're dealing with a lot of weight and everything here, but you've got an awful lot of cooling on those shocks as well. Everyone runs twin shocks. Why do they do that? This truck has a... You need twin shocks for the amount of oil and the amount of damping because the shocks get extremely hot 400 degrees F or higher you hope not. So the first truck had air suspension and we learned a ton about the rate of an air spring and air accumulation and we had a little bit more of a development road than we wanted with the air suspension. I would like to go back to air suspension Yeah, and it allows you to do a lot of things you cannot do with a spring. It's just we have to develop that for racing. And we haven't even talked about the engine yet, but because you are offering this as an EV as well. The reason we offer it as an EV is because the entire chassis and driveline was packaged around both internal combustion and EV layouts. Right. And the way that the fuel cells are made, they live in the floor. And they accommodate the same volume that's required to put an EV cell, EV battery in. So you pull this engine, the transfer case is fully divorced from the transmission, yeah, in this already. So you pull the transmission, you pull the engine, an electric motor sits in that same spot, and two battery packs go down the sides. Hands down, the whole truck was designed around actual EV parts to be able to do that build. Right. It's just we haven't had... People say they want one. Yes. I'm guessing. Yes. Yeah. If you hear this truck and you drive this truck, something makes you like twin turbos. I don't know. So the engine in there, it's an LS engine? It's based on the LS platform. Yeah. But it's not a crate engine. It's not a crate engine. Yeah. So a client of mine, I had asked to build an engine. He builds drag race engines. And I had told him the power I was looking for and he laughed at me and said absolutely no problem. Which is? So this truck on 91 octane is 1200 horsepower and E85 haven't dynoed should make 1500 and so what is it 6.6 so it's a 6.6 so it's a long travel a long stroke 6.2 correct yeah and The first truck was a crate engine because that was our real first development mule and when we moved from the supercharged wet sump GM engine to this hand-built dry sump version we were able to lower the engine five inches which helped us with packaging of a lot of things. Center of gravity obviously went down but twin turbos and all the plumbing associated with that takes up a lot of space so I thought we were going to gain all this room And I thought, well, we won't have that supercharger sitting on top. I would definitely take the supercharger packaging over the turbos. Because you can see the turbos lie wide on each side, don't they? And they're nested in the chassis. Yeah, I see. The manifolds coming off the exhaust are 3D printed, stainless manifolds also. Those turned out to be a really neat part that incorporate the wastegate housing. But, yeah, just a lot of plumbing. Yeah, it's more complex. There's a lot of stuff going on in there, isn't there? Amazing. Let's go and have a look inside. I'd better watch my head on the bar. Yes. Ooh, good seat. Well, they are a Recaro bucket, aren't they? They are. Yeah. Trick, they feel really good. They feel, again, much more like supercar seats than they do like anything else. For sure. I don't think they belong in an off-road truck, but let's see. Here they are. Yeah, yeah. Well, you've got pretty deep pads and stuff on them, haven't you? Are these going to be the seats you're using? These are the seats that the truck was designed. The new interior was designed around these seats, so ideally for function and being able to move the seat forward and back, this is the geometry that the truck likes. And then you've got what clearly ahead looks like quite a new Defender inspired layout and stuff. The styling of the dash and the steering wheel for sure came from the new Defender just to stay in line kind of with... the Defender. Obviously the interior cues and how we built things is a little different but styling for sure. Yeah but this again is this this is all billet aluminium isn't it? Correct so all the trim is billet the steering wheel was cut from billet unfortunately three pieces of billet because the outer hoop is one piece that's what gets wrapped and then the spokes and then the horn cover this cowl was all cut out of one chunk of billet Speaker covers. How much billet do you think you've used around the car? I think the truck has started, if you consider every billet component on the truck, I think it's close to 20,000 pounds. That's like 10 tons. It's insane. That's outrageous that you've had to chip away at to get to here. Speaker grills, I guess, as well. And then you've got a tiny little tool to make all these little... Oh, my word. I mean it is it so you can see the work of art, but right now can I turn it on? Yes, you can. Just give it a bit. So you just key the ignition 90 degrees. Yeah Yeah. So fuel pumps, brake booster, dash comes on, display comes up Yeah, and the center display gives you normal things, time, weather It has a native Spotify app. Yeah, it's kind of like a global and Commonly used solution, Waze app for navigation, then obviously it brings you back to your home screen. Fairly simple. Yeah, lovely. This has a very nice six channel audio system from Dynaudio with some pretty high end components. And you can actually hear it in here over the noise from behind you. You know, you have to turn it up quite loud. I'm not surprised. Because I think the volume of the drive train is about what your ears want to hear. That's the limit, so. And you've got an HVAC system in here with 3d printed parts by the looks of it here? Correct so there's a lot of stuff on this truck that's printed a lot that's billet and it all depends on the shape so a component like this isn't totally possible to machine yeah because you can't get to it because there's a separation inside this duct for the defroster and the vent so if you were to get in there with a tiny cutter to try to you know machine all those louvers and make the deviation Yes, I'm sure somebody would say, I'll give it a whirl, but definitely a practical part to 3D print. Yeah, yeah. Cool. And then we've obviously got the levers here. I'm guessing gear lever, which again looks 3D printed at the moment. Is that going to change that? That will be a billet part. That's an interesting design part that my team and I are trying to figure out exactly what we want that to look like. So we've had a few printed variations and yeah we're getting. But we didn't actually talk about the gear, box. It's an eight-speed automatic. It's an eight-speed Motec controlled automatic. Deciding to go down that development road was a little bit crazy. Because this is a Motec, it's a bespoke. Correct, this is a Motec and Bosch Motorsport power distribution and ECUs entirely. Fairly. And I think this is the only vehicle in the world that has a fully Motec-controlled 8-speed automatic transmission. Yeah, so someone has got to redo all the software coding for it. Correct, from scratch. Some other fun stuff is that this truck does have full four-wheel steering, and because the rear is hydraulic, independent from the front, There's three driving modes for four-wheel steering on the center button. So the center button in the first click is front-wheel steer only. The second click is automatic four-wheel steering. So there's a map based on vehicle speed that tells the rear how much to steer. Obviously, when you're going very slow, you get full four-wheel steering. This truck has as much steering in the rear as it does in the front. And I... We'll tell you, the first time you make a turn in a parking lot, to feel the whole truck pivot around the center, it's like half forklift, half normal car, it's a very odd feeling. Even the new Hummer and the Tesla Cybertruck, which have four-wheel steering, they don't have nearly as much rear steer as they do front steer. So it feels more like a normal car. You get the sense that it's helping you turn, but it's not like this weird pivoting sensation. And then the third button click, you can, is full manual rear steer with that knob. So you can, if you get in the rocks... Oh, so you can just literally just turn the wheels, not with the steering wheel, but with the... So you could drive the truck with that knob only, leaving the steering wheel straight. So you could, like, forklift your way around a parking lot just with the rear. So you've got separate controls for front and rear diffs? Correct. What was the reasoning for that? I think it's the way that these transfer cases are built. Mm-hmm. Allows you engagement of the drive for the front and the back, based on higher low range. So you could knock one, each of them out, and just have a front wheel drive or a rear wheel drive truck if you wanted to. If you had to. Yeah. Yep. Which we ended up doing in Mexico when we raced. Really? We ran a stage in front-wheel-drive. Did you? And it was all okay? It was fine. Amazing. Putting all that power through front wheels. These Yokohama tires are kind of like paddle tires. Yeah. And they throw a lot of sand and miraculously pull you through crazy stuff. Fantastic. It's great. So you've got paddle shift on here as well for the gearbox. So once you're up and running, you'll be able to run like that. The view out with that upright windscreen looks quite Defender-ish and old Defender. Here, this is very much new Defender. But yeah, it feels pretty comfortable. I just, how noisy is it going to be in here with that going? Quite noisy. Yeah. Can we go and find out? We should. We should do that. Go get a beer. Yeah. Well, maybe not a beer, Joe. But then again, you're the one doing the driving. This is excellent. It's noisy. I don't think I've ever been in a Land Rover anything like this though and yet I have got the foot to the plate down there to say it's a Land Rover. It is 100%. When you say you haven't been in a Land Rover like this it's because the only thing that's left is the door handles. Yes. And a part of the chassis. Yeah. I mean, even in America, this feels quite extreme out on the road. Basically, it feels more like you're in a pre-runner or a trophy truck or something. Without question. Yeah. So what's the plan for development with it then? Are you going to do... Are you happy with the mechanical package? It's just the tuning of it now that you've got to do? Correct. Oscar, who wrote the software for the transmission, last night, before getting on the phone with me to upload what he'd done, had written 2,000 lines of code. Wow. Which is madness. Yeah, yeah. So, obviously, we have the thing shifting first, second, third. Yeah. Obviously, the code hasn't been written for the clutch in fourth. Yeah. And he's got to get it through eighth gear. So, my game plan, honestly, is if this is a licensed street thing, I want it to be semi-drivable. Yeah, yeah. So, my plan is to personally drive this thing. To make sure that it's drivable and realistic. Yeah, yeah. So you're intending to fit some more sound deadening to it? The firewall needs upholstery and deadening for sure. That's where the majority of the sound is coming from, noise. So you want people to be able to drive it out on the road? A bit more comfortably than this. Not like this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What does it weigh at the moment? How much weight have you got? 5,400 pounds at the moment. And it has a 65-gallon fuel cell. Yeah. And it was weighed with 30 gallons of fuel. Okay. So it's 2,000 for us, 2,800, 2,900, under three tons. Correct. Somewhere around there. And to be frank, I fought very hard to get this to weigh what it does. The first truck had quarter inch thick steel boat sides on the side of the chassis and that has the air tanks for the air suspension. This truck now has sacrificial aluminum boat sides. Yeah. It's such a lot of good noise though. You can tell that once it's tuned gosh yeah yeah I cannot wait. The plan, obviously, was to have this thing tuned for today. Yeah. But it's like, you can only push so hard. Yeah, yeah. And also, it's just the way you feel it starting to lift at the front. Ha, ha, ha. And you feel so high above the ground in it, with all this noise, and you feel... It's nice having the windows down, because you hear the turbo whistle coming in as well. I can't wait to hear waste gates and blow off valves. Oh, yeah. it's just wild driving around in this thing it just feels so rude it feels like so good it's probably a really good thing the trans hasn't been calibrated past third gear Yeah. yeah it's great i think we might need to pull over so we can chat a little bit more about it for sure so we can hear each other maybe yeah we should go and get a drink somewhere time for that drink then but maybe just a glass of water for now Right, well that is quite a wild thing isn't it? So how much more refinement are you going to go for in that? So we have to finish the transmission programming obviously. Once the transmission programming is done we can do engine tuning and then we can continue our algorithm for the rear steering. Okay. But fundamentally as you saw all those systems are working. Yeah, yeah. It's a tuning thing now. So we have probably a couple more weeks of coarse tuning. Yeah. And then we can really start to play. Start to play. And that means taking it out to the desert and doing some proper stuff with it, getting it a bit dirty under the very pretty bits underneath. Quite honestly, my plan for development to do that is to pull all of the bodywork off. Go out to the desert, run it secretly and finish our development test. Fantastic. So when do you think you're going to have them on sale? Um, when you can... How long is it going to take you to build one? Okay, so we currently have two other trucks going already, as far as chassis and all the suspension components. So I'm planning to at least have two on deck to sell. Yeah. Right now we are taking orders if somebody wants to get in line for one of the two that we're building. Yeah. So... That's kind of where we're taking it, this is going to continue to be our development mule, the truck that we take to the desert and beat up and test. Yeah and how much is it going to cost? I lost. The base truck, painted truck, with a few of the features missing is 1.5 million. The bare carbon bodied truck with 1500 horsepower, hand-built trans, some other features is 2.2 million. So it's chunky money, isn't it? It is, unfortunately. But there's nothing else like it, is there? We never anticipated this truck getting so out of hand, and it's one of those things that once you just build the truck and have the bill of materials and the time, it just, unfortunately, that's where it gets. That's where you are. Well, fair enough. Cheers. Cheers. Appreciate it. The cost has probably knocked the wind out of your sails, so let's finish up by taking the SV Rover to its natural environment. No, not the desert, the beach. That lets you know that technically at least this is an old Land Rover. Of course it's not, it's a mad raging King Kong of a thing, or at least it will be once the setup and development is done. And yeah, $2.2 million is a ridiculous amount of money, but then this looks and feels as exotic as any hypercar. And who'd have ever thought you'd be able to say that about an old Land Rover?