Product Details

The E-V/4 Panzerkraftwagen Ehrhardt was one of the first examples of a type of high and flatsided armoured car design that the Germans used almost until the start of the Second World War for internal policing duties. It weighed nearly 9 tons, had a crew of eight or nine, and carried an armament of up to three machine-guns. Three prototypes were produced in 1915 and deployed to the Eastern Front with little success. Thereafter they were retained in Germany for internal policing duties. They were so successful in this role that an additional 20 vehicles were ordered and produced in 1919. The E-V/4 was in fact considered just what internal policing required, for its height gave it the capacity to tower over crowds and offer police units better control of riots. E-V/4's were in use almost until World War II. The requirement for armoured cars were so high that by 1918, the Germans were forced to employ numbers of captured armoured cars of Rolls-Royce or other make, and the Ehrhardt vehicles were never around in sufficient numbers. On the Eastern Front the cars were never able to make much of a tactical impression, and so the design is now little known and few operational details have survived.