Shorland S55 APV · Otokar ZPT

History

Otokar's route to the ZPT ran through Land Rover before it ran through Short Brothers. The Istanbul manufacturer had an agreement with Land Rover to assemble coil-sprung One-Ten vehicles from CKD kits with a proportion of locally made components, including chassis and wheel hubs, supplying Turkish civil, police, military and utility customers; the agreement also let Otokar serve government and military markets across the Middle East and North Africa. That local assembly base is what made a licensed armoured derivative practical.

The design came from Belfast. Around 1988 the Shorts engineer Eric Tuckey demonstrated the company's armoured personnel vehicle — probably an SB 401 prototype — on the Kırklareli ranges in Turkish Thrace, at a time when the Jandarma faced frequent attacks on bases and convoys in the south-east. In January 1988 Short Brothers announced a contract to supply 40 S 55 armoured personnel carriers to the Turkish Ministry of the Interior for gendarmerie use. Turkey then went further and had the vehicle built at home: Otokar's version of the S-55, designated ZPT for Zırhlı Personel Taşıyıcı (Armoured Personnel Transporter), was in production and being photographed at the company's Ankara workshops and outside its Istanbul factory by 1992, and the Turkish government procured it in large numbers.

The ZPT is not simply a rebadged S55. It sits on Otokar's own strengthened version of the Defender 110 chassis — the same basic chassis Land Rover used for the CAV 100/Snatch and R-WMIK+ — and Otokar substituted the curved One-Ten mudguard treatment with plastic wheel-arch cheeks for the Ulster car's steel plates, which gave slightly better dissipation of an under-wheel mine blast. Three front-end generations are recognised by the military Land Rover writer Bob Morrison, whose Mk.1/Mk.2/Mk.3 labels are descriptive rather than factory designations. The Mk.1 kept the angular, slab-sided Shorts S-55 wings and bonnet and the Rover 3,532 cc V8, later the 3,946 cc version, with the armoured air-intake cowl on either the bonnet or the wing top; from the mid-1990s the 2,495 cc 300 Tdi and then the five-cylinder 2,498 cc Td5 diesels were offered, neither of which needed any bodywork change. The Mk.2, current by the time of the 2005 Iraqi order, introduced moulded one-piece wings with less rake and a slight forward rake, so the bonnet sat flush with the wing tops and the vertical engine-bay fillets disappeared. The Mk.3, from around 2007, added the angular bonnet with a pronounced rear bulge needed to clear the 2,402 cc Ford DuraTorq (Puma) diesel, replaced about four years later by the 2,198 cc version.

The largest single batch went to Iraq. Morrison's research attributes the widely quoted figure of 573 vehicles — listed elsewhere, including on Wikipedia, against the quite different Otokar Akrep scout car — to a batch ordered from Otokar in 2005 under an $88 million contract, probably underwritten by the United States as part of rebuilding the Iraqi Army, with deliveries appearing across Iraq from late 2006 and early 2007. Iraqi Army ZPTs of the Mk.2 pattern were photographed on joint patrols with US forces in Mosul and Tal Afar through 2007 and 2008. Later Puma-engined Mk.3 batches went to Azerbaijan from around 2009 and Bahrain from around 2012, and Otokar-built armoured Land Rovers serve with several Persian Gulf states that confidentiality clauses keep unnamed. The Wikipedia inventory line giving Iraq 72 Shorland APVs is assessed by Morrison as most likely covering Ulster-built armoured Land Rovers held before 2003, and should be treated with caution.

The final ZPT brochure, dated to about 2011, gives 4,150 x 1,810 x 2,260 mm to the top of the hull, a combat weight of 4,100 kg, a four-cylinder common-rail intercooled turbo-diesel of 90 kW (122 hp) at 3,500 rpm, 125 km/h top speed, a 60 per cent gradient, 30 per cent side slope, 600 mm fording, a 315 mm vertical step and a 6.7 m turning radius. After roughly thirty years Otokar dropped the ZPT, leaving the larger and heavier Kobra as the bottom of its armoured-vehicle range.

Imagery

Registry record

Manufacturer

Otokar ↗

Manufactured

Turkish production from about 1990 (in build by 1992) to roughly 2011 — a production life of about thirty years

Modifier / coachbuilder

Short Brothers ↗

licensor; the ZPT derives from the Shorland S55 armoured personnel vehicle

Engine type

Rover 3.5-litre, later 3.9-litre V8 petrol; Land Rover 300 Tdi and Td5 diesels from the mid-1990s; 2.4-litre and later 2.2-litre Ford DuraTorq (Puma) diesel from 2007

Production run

No overall total published. Largest identified batch is 573 vehicles ordered by Iraq in 2005 under an $88 million contract (Joint Forces' attribution of a figure listed elsewhere against the Otokar Akrep), delivered from late 2006; Turkey procured large but undisclosed numbers, with further batches to Azerbaijan from c.2009 and Bahrain from c.2012

Country of origin

Turkey

Status

out of production; discontinued in favour of the Otokar Kobra

Catalogue data

Record kind

Named model

Model line

Defender

Wheels

4

Nominal wheelbase

110″

Base catalogue fields are exported from the Difflocked game. In-game physics values are arcade tuning, not certified historical measurements, and are deliberately not shown as specifications here.

Sources & citations

Researched sources

• MLR26 ~ Short Brothers APV and Otokar ZPT ↗ — Joint Forces News (Bob Morrison) (accessed 2026-09-10)
• MLR27 ~ Otokar Zırhlı Personel Taşıyıcı ~ Revisited ↗ — Joint Forces News (Bob Morrison) (accessed 2026-09-10)
• Shorland S55 (Wheeled armoured personnel carrier) — Turkish Ministry of the Interior contract, January 1988 ↗ — Army Guide (Jane's-derived) (accessed 2026-09-10)
• Shorland S 55 — Armoured Personnel Carrier ↗ — The Shorland Site (accessed 2026-09-10)
• Shorland armoured car — operator list (Turkey entry conflates the ZPT with the Otokar Akrep) ↗ — Wikipedia (accessed 2026-09-10)

Catalogue references

• https://www.joint-forces.com/utility-4x4/28162-short-brothers-apv-and-otokar-zpt https://www.joint-forces.com/utility-4x4/28162-short-brothers-apv-and-otokar-zpt ↗