Armoured Bentley Bentayga . . . or a 1997 Land Rover Discovery?

Recently I was reading about the stunning armoured (to use the British spelling) Bentley Bentayga offered by the high-end Canadian security company Inkas. For the nicely rounded sum of $500,000 the company will sell you a formerly-oh-so-ordinary Bentayga fitted with blast- and bullet-resistant armouring, plus a host of other Bond-esque tricks, resulting in possibly the planet’s most opulent terrorist-foiling four-wheel-drive machine.

But as I started reading about some of the options, it hit me: We had already owned a vehicle with a significant portion of those tricks—our 1997 Land Rover Discovery.

One featured option on the Inkas Bentayga is “shocking electric door handles,” which will give a nasty jolt to any would be carjacker as soon as he tries to gain access.

Big deal.

A few months into our ownership of the Disco, a friend who was getting in the passenger side when Roseann was driving leaped back as soon as she touched the door. “It shocked me!” she cried. Roseann got out and tried it, with the same result. Thereafter, at random moments, whomever was trying to get in any door on the vehicle would be nailed with an impressively high-amperage dose of DC current. We never did figure it out—but then we also were never successfully carjacked throughout our ownership period of the Discovery. Coincidence?

The Inkas Bentayga can also be equipped with a genuine smoke screen function to blind tailgating bad guys.

Pause while I roll my eyes. Anyone with a 120,000-mile Land Rover has a built-in smoke screen function. And nowhere on the Inkas option list did I see the classic Aston Martin DB5 oil slick defense, which—need I point this out?—is also standard equipment on any Land Rover.

How about the “fire suppression system for the engine bay?” That’s easy if you simply employ your 50/50 antifreeze mix for double duty, as we frequently did with leaky hoses and gaskets. (Not to mention the fact that, on the regular days when the engine would simply not start, there was very little likelihood of it catching on fire.)

How about “signal jamming?” Given the reception we got on the Disco’s AM/FM, I’m strongly tempted to think there was one of those hooked up somewhere too.

So, yeah, our Disco might not have had the level of interior craftsmanship enjoyed by the buyer of an Inkas Bentayga.

But then, we saved $498,000 on our four-wheel-drive British-made anti-terrorist machine.