SNSM Defender 110 Soft Top
Olive-green Land Rover Defender 110 soft top 6146 VG 80 of Les Sauveteurs en Mer (SNSM), a French lifeboat station's shore and boat-handling vehicle with an external roll cage, mesh bull bar, blue beacon and loudspeaker, recorded in a 2003 photograph.
History
The Société Nationale de Sauvetage en Mer — Les Sauveteurs en Mer — is France's volunteer sea-rescue service, with lifeboat stations around the whole coast. Alongside their boats the stations keep tractors and 4x4s for launching and recovery and for reaching casualties along the shore, and in the 1990s and 2000s a number of stations ran military-pattern Defender 110 soft tops, some of them former Armée de Terre vehicles kept in their olive drab with the SNSM diamond added.
The 2003 photograph shows one such vehicle, 6146 VG 80 (a Somme registration, on the Picardy coast), passing through a seaside town: olive Defender 110 soft top with a full canvas tilt and an external tubular roll cage over it, a bull bar with mesh across the grille and headlamps, a blue beacon and a loudspeaker on a bar above the windscreen, the SNSM diamond on the rear body sides, a round sticker on the rear corners, black steel wheels and a white French plate. Per the queue notes the model is listed under both the marine rescue group and the French military selector. The registry model reproduces that vehicle; the beacon is the only lamp it carries.
Imagery
Registry record
- Manufacturer
- Land Rover (Defender 110 soft top)
- Manufactured
- Defender 110 soft top, 200/300 Tdi era (inferred from the pattern); photographed 2003
- Modifier / coachbuilder
- SNSM station (roll cage, bull bar, beacon)
- Engine type
- Land Rover 200/300 Tdi 2.5 L turbo-diesel (inferred)
- Production run
- 1
- Country of origin
- United Kingdom
- Operated in
- France
- Status
- unknown
Catalogue data
- Record kind
- Named model
- Model line
- Defender
- Wheels
- 4
- Nominal wheelbase
- 110″
Catalogue fields describe the vehicle's structure and body as this registry records it. They are not certified factory measurements, and no performance figures are published here.
Sources & citations
Researched sources
- SNSM Land Rover Defender 110, 2003 (Flickr, 65005481@N06) ↗ — Flickr (accessed 2026-09-12)
Catalogue references
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/65005481@N06/7017119051/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/65005481@N06/7017119051/ ↗
Registry record updated 2026-09-12T05:58:50.238Z · status: researched