OVIK

History

OVIK was set up in 2008 by two brothers, Jez and Duncan Hermer, from a small village near Dorchester in Dorset, close to the British Army's Armour Centre at Bovington. Jez Hermer had served twenty-three years in the Royal Marines and had worked at Örnsköldsvik in Sweden with the all-terrain vehicle builder Hägglund & Söner; the company's name is a contraction of that town's. The firm designed and built specialist and armoured vehicles and chassis systems for police, government and defence customers rather than producing anything in volume, and it also did integration work on other people's platforms — notably the conversion of the Singapore Technologies Kinetics Bronco all-terrain tracked carrier into the Ministry of Defence's Warthog for Operation Herrick in Afghanistan.

The Land Rover work that brings OVIK into this registry is the Pangolin. By the late 2000s the Police Service of Northern Ireland was still running armoured Land Rovers designed and built in-house by the Royal Ulster Constabulary from 1986 — the Tangis — some of them around twenty-five years old, and it drew up a requirement for a replacement on a current chassis. OVIK won it. Working with ABBA Commercials, the company designed the Pangolin, named after the scale-armoured anteater, on a heavy-duty derivative of the Defender 110 chassis with the 2.4-litre 'Puma' turbodiesel and six-speed gearbox: armour cladding with deep skirts, protective mesh and grilles over all lighting, air conditioning, and room for a crew of six — delivered, unlike the battleship-grey fleet it replaced, in the PSNI's white livery with Battenburg markings.

An initial batch of 60 Pangolins was delivered from 2011. The follow-on order became contentious: Penman Engineering protested the award and was subsequently authorised to build a visually similar equivalent, the Penman ALR Mk4, alongside OVIK's upgraded Batch 2 vehicles (reported variously as 30 or a further 60), a handful of which also went to Merseyside Police. OVIK's own material later put the total in service with the PSNI and Merseyside Police at 193.

Beyond the Pangolin the firm offered the Crossway armoured 4x4 and 6x6, the Centaur specialist all-terrain chassis, the Meerkat super-light tracked vehicle and the Cameleon IV440 modular mission vehicle, selling to Thames Valley, Dorset, Kent and Essex Police, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary and the MoD, and it had proposed a Pangolin Advanced on its STRIVE chassis. The company went into liquidation in April 2020; the Pangolin nevertheless remains a front-line PSNI public-order vehicle.

Vehicles in this registry (1)

• OVIK Pangolin Armoured police patrol vehicle · deep skirts · protective mesh guards · converted

Sources & citations

• OVIK (established 2008 by brothers Jez and Duncan Hermer; based in Dorset near the Armour Centre at Bovington; name derived from Örnsköldsvik, where Jez Hermer had worked with Hägglund & Söner; Crossway, Centaur, Pangolin, Meerkat and Cameleon IV440 products; 193 Pangolins with the PSNI and Merseyside Police; Bronco-to-Warthog transformation for the MoD; liquidation April 2020) ↗ — Wikipedia (accessed 2026-09-10)
• Pangolin Armored Land Rover Mark 4 Index (Defender 110 'Puma' basis; OVIK with ABBA Commercials; Batch 1 of 60 from 2011; Batch 2 and the competing Penman ALR Mk4) ↗ — WarWheels.Net (accessed 2026-09-10)
• This is a Pangolin ALR Mk.IV that is used by the PSNI in Northern Ireland (crew of six, armour cladding, mesh and grille protection, air conditioning, PSNI white and Battenburg livery) ↗ — UK Emergency Vehicles (accessed 2026-09-10)
• Ovik Crossway review: we test the UK's toughest SUV (built in a small village near Dorchester, Dorset, close to the Armour Centre at Bovington; Jez Hermer's 23 years in the Royal Marines and his armoured Land Rover Defenders) ↗ — Auto Express (accessed 2026-09-10)
• Land Rover Tangi (RUC-built armoured Land Rovers replaced by the Pangolin and Penman ALR from 2011) ↗ — Wikipedia (accessed 2026-09-10)