‘Come and speak to us’: BAE affords military rival armoured automobile as beleaguered £6bn Ajax venture staggers on

BAE Systems has opened the door to talks with the UK about an alternative armoured vehicle deal as a plan to buy rival Ajax staggers on despite catastrophic flaws.

Britain’s biggest defence contractor lost out to US rival General Dynamics when the American firm won a £6billion contract to develop the Ajax.

But the programme has been dogged by huge vibration problems, making soldiers feel sick and vomit. It has also been revealed that the vehicles could be poisoning troops with carbon monoxide.

On Tuesday, defence minister Luke Pollard said that following an investigation, the government would proceed ‘cautiously’ with Ajax with training initially resuming at a ‘crawl’ to ensure soldiers’ safety.

But the boss of BAE’s combat vehicle hub in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden, said the company was ready to offer its own alternative, the CV-90, if Britain wanted it.

Ministers are proceeding ‘cautiously’ with the troubled Ajax armoured vehicle project

BAE System’s CV-90 is already in use in Ukraine

Already in use in Ukraine, the model has an order backlog of more than 600 with talks also taking place for further deals with Sweden, Norway, Finland, Lithuania and Estonia totalling 800 more – taking deliveries to 2032.

Tommy Gustafsson-Rask, managing director of the BAE Hagglunds facility, said: ‘If the UK government wants to buy CV-90, they can come and talk to us.’

And Gustaffson-Rask shed light on the procurement debacle behind the Ajax disaster, suggesting impossible demands had been made by the Ministry of Defence.

He told reporters: ‘We were in competition, we lost to General Dynamics. We proposed a solution we knew that we could deliver.

‘The specification… was not possible to deliver.’

Implying that the MoD was asking for capabilities that would have defied the laws of physics, he said: ‘You had to wake up Newton to deliver that specification that the UK had put on the table. We were not compliant – and I’m fairly happy about that.

‘The political discussion – Ajax do or die – if the UK wants, come back and talk to us. From my point of view: competitors are competitors, we shall respect them, they do the best that they can and we will not intervene in anything.’

Gustaffson-Rask said the use of rubber track on its vehicles meant it avoided some of the vibrations problems experienced by Ajax affecting ‘the environment both for the soldiers but foremost for the technical equipment’.

He added: ‘There are some other suppliers that have some issues with that. Vibrations is something you reduce by 30 per cent.’

The Army is due to receive 589 Ajax vehicles, due to form the backbone of its armoured strike brigades for the next 30 years.

The first of the 40-ton vehicles should have entered service by 2017 but have been plagued by problems for years.