The Tess Defense Industrial Consortium has given the Spanish Ministry of Defense other seven combat vehicles on wheels (VCR) 8×8 Dragon. To this lot we must add the first four vehicles delivered in early April, as reported by the specialized media .
In this way, the company completes the delivery of the initial lot of 11 VCR 8×8 And all belong to the Zapadores version (VCZ), as planned. The 8×8 Dragon is manufactured by the Tess Defense Consortium, composed of Indra, Sapa Placencia, Escribano Mechanical & Engineerging (EM & E) and Santa Barbara Systems, the latter of General Dynamics.
The consortium is the winner of a contract of the Ministry of Defense valued at about 2,000 million euros for the production of 348 combat vehicles on wheels (VCR) 8×8 Dragon for the Army of Earth and by 2024 the delivery of 92 units had been committed.
However, that objective was not met – no unit was not delivered – and the situation has generated the manifest concern of the Ministry of Defense in the face of the various project delays, which have forced the program calendar for several occasions. The delivery of these seven vehicles, in addition, was scheduled in principle on April 29, however, the date at the end moved to May 5 for the blackout.
After the official reception, the 11 VCR 8×8 They have been assigned to Tess Defense for the formation of the first crews. In fact, the company has just completed a driver training course. The consortium will also carry out routine maintenance work to ensure operability, as explained by the specialized media.
Indra, as the majority shareholder of Tess Defense, plans to deliver up to a hundred units throughout this year. The president of Indra, Ángel Escribano, in an intervention in March in the Congress of Deputies highlighted the complexity of the program and the capacities of the VCR 8×8.
The manager stressed that the project, after a long phase of choice of the platform and technological demonstrators, officially started in August 2020. “The project really begins (…) five years is a reasonable time,” he said.
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