In 1956, Canadian Car & Foundry Company Limited (CCF) took control of Leyland Motors (Canada) Limited of Longueuil, Quebec. It was not long before production of the Canada began, to meet the needs of North American users, this vehicle being the first truck developed by this subsidiary of Leyland Motors Company Limited, a British manufacturer of automobiles, trucks and trolley buses. This new product was added to several buses and tractor-drawn trailers, a product line introduced in 1956.
Shortly before its acquisition by CCF, Leyland Motors (Canada) had won a contract to manufacture the prototype of the Bobcat, an amphibious and tracked armoured personnel carrier, the first vehicle of its type entirely designed in Canada, developed in collaboration with the Canadian Army. The company completed three prototypes, two personnel carriers and a self-propelled howitzer, then unarmed. All three worked quite well in testing.
Anxious to obtain an armoured personnel carrier at the lowest possible cost, the British Army considered adopting the Bobcat. This Canadian-British cooperation project fell through in late 1959. Indeed, the British military did not believe that it was possible to develop a family of armoured vehicles from the Bobcat. Another cooperative project, this time with West Germany, failed in the early 1960s.
In February 1961, the Canadian government announced that CCF was going to manufacture twenty Bobcats in a factory near Montreal, Quebec. Open tenders for an order of 480 additional Bobcats were to be announced in 1963. Around 1962, however, A.V. Roe Canada Limited, which controlled CCF, transferred control of the project to A.V. Roe Aircraft Limited, a company with no experience in ground vehicle manufacturing.
A prototype of the production version of the Bobcat began testing in February 1963. A report completed around June mentioned many shortcomings. The final development of the Bobcat would require additional funds that neither the Canadian Army nor Hawker Siddeley Canada Limited, a name adopted in May 1962, were willing to spend. In November, the Canadian Army’s headquarters recommended the abandonment of the Bobcat and the purchase of an American amphibious and tracked armoured personnel carrier declared operational in 1960, the famous M-113 from FMC Corporation. The federal government accepted this recommendation.
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