Back in March we revealed that Bowler, the Derbyshire-based manufacturer of high-performance extreme off-road vehicles, was
working on a full-on road car
. Now we can add a bit of meat to that story.
It seems that Steve Haywood - the ex-JLR engineer who was recently appointed MD of Bowler - reckons there is a market for between 150 and 200 road-going versions of its Nemesis 'super-SUV' as well as the 15-20 vehicles it produces for competition purposes every year - and he's been chatting to our colleagues over on Autocar magazine about it.
"We have a tremendous opportunity," Haywood told Autocar. "Bowler has generated huge interest in past years for a street-legal version of the competition cars. But we'll begin work on any new model quite slowly, taking care with its positioning and specifications, keeping all the recognition devices to maintain the pedigree, and listening carefully to the customer's requirements."
Details are pretty scarce about the new road car, but the price looks to be around the £150k mark.
But what do Land Rover think of all this? After all it is their product from which Bowler ultimately creates its vehicles... apparently this is not a problem - Haywood reckons Land Rover is happy for Bowler to provide a kind of performance halo for its cars, but stresses that Bowler has no formal commercial connection with JLR.