It is just over 6m long, and can withstand bomb blasts and a hail of bullets. The Knight XV, a £323,000 beast of a car made by Conquest Vehicles, a Canadian company, has "created an entirely new niche in the luxury armoured vehicle market", according to its manufacturer. What sort of person would buy this car? "Celebrities, rappers, professional athletes – people who want the biggest, the baddest, and the newest," says Conquest's president, William Maizlin.

You can buy armoured versions of many cars. Barack Obama, for instance, is driven in an armoured Cadillac. Jeff Jankelovits, president of Manhattan Armor, the US's biggest armoured car dealership, sells cars to diplomats, royalty, heads of state and, currently, to oil executives in western Africa. "You are at your most vulnerable from point A to point B and the added cost of an armoured car is not going to bother most people who buy them," he says. He thinks the market is growing. "Where you have such a huge disparity in wealth, criminality grows, and people who are wealthy become the object of that criminality." Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates and Lebanon are among the countries with the highest numbers of privately owned armoured vehicles.

Not all armoured cars are so discreet. While the Knight XV is a wonder of intimidation, nothing quite beats the ostentation of the cars made by Dartz, a Latvian company. Last week, it announced it was building a model whose wheels would be made from gold and decorated with bullets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/10/luxury-armoured-vehicles