The record
The CAV 100 was Courtaulds' composite armoured body for the Defender 110, and the British Army bought 991 of them in 1992 as the Snatch, first deployed to the former Yugoslavia in 1993 and upgraded through Snatch 1.5, 2, 2A, 2B and the Snatch 3 Vixen over the next two decades. The RAF Regiment, whose field squadrons guard airfields and had their own protected-mobility requirement, ran a separate fleet of Enhanced Protection Vehicles from about 1999. Bob Morrison's research from MoD registration and contract numbers concludes they were not reworked Snatches from the original batch but completely new vehicles, and they are recognisable by the windows in the rear body sides that the Army's Snatch lacks.
The photograph, from Joint Forces' history of the CAV 100, shows an EPV in an RAF Regiment vehicle park in plain olive drab: the composite body with its rear side windows, a raised roof hatch with a raked glazed screen for a sentry, a snorkel up the left A-pillar, a spare on the bonnet, a winch in a black bumper with mesh lamp guards, and a wire-cutter bar from the bumper to the roof. The registry's model is built on the standard Defender 110 hard top at the reviewer's request, with the rear side windows, the glazed roof box and its access panel, black bumper and grille surround, winch, lamp guards and snorkel added, the glazed box set over the rear body and the spare on the bonnet as in the photograph. How many EPVs the RAF Regiment received is not stated in the source.
