NAMED MODELSpecial · MarineMilitary · FranceUnited Kingdom
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.
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.
Specification
MANUFACTURERLand Rover (Defender 110 soft top)
MODIFIER / COACHBUILDERSNSM station (roll cage, bull bar, beacon)
MANUFACTUREDDefender 110 soft top, 200/300 Tdi era (inferred from the pattern); photographed 2003
ENGINELand Rover 200/300 Tdi 2.5 L turbo-diesel (inferred)
PRODUCTION RUN1
COUNTRY OF ORIGINUnited Kingdom
OPERATED INFrance
STATUSunknown
REGISTRATION6146 VG 80
FITTINGSExternal roll cage, mesh bull bar, blue beacon, loudspeaker, canvas tilt
RECORD KINDNamed model
MODEL LINEDefender
WHEELS4
NOMINAL WHEELBASE110″
CATEGORYSpecial · Marine, Military · France
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.
Renders & references
Front three-quarterRegistry renderThree-quarterRegistry renderSideRegistry renderRearRegistry renderFrontRegistry render6146 VG 80 in 2003 — the reference for this model; linked only.Flickr user 65005481@N06 ↗
Where it was
FR France1995–2010 · SNSM lifeboat station
BuiltLand Rover, Lode Lane, SolihullUnited Kingdom · 1990–200352.43, -1.78