This has happened to me twice now and I can hardly believe this effect is supposed to be deliberate. I sit in my madrugar gunning away, shield and armor are at full points and not forge guns, rail guns or anything of the like can kill me with several direct hits, yet somehow one dude ramming a bpo-LAV into my Madrugar is enough to blow up both my tank and his little jeep.

This never happened pre-1.7 (back then LAVs tended to always blow up if the even just nudged an HAV).

Seems kind of strange to me that a player wearing a militia-starter fit, calling in a completely free LAV is supposed to be able to destroy a tank that not even several proto-suited players can do.

So is this some kind of bug?

sounds like you were hit with a jihad jeep. players strap remote explosives to their LAVs and ram you at full speed dealing enormous damage depending on how many explosives are attached. very effective way to quickly deal with a tank

Not a bug, just an unintended consequence of making REs sticky, tanks OP, and AV useless. When CCP makes conventional AV capable of dealing with tanks in something like a sensible manner the tactic will die out. Meanwhile tankers will have to accept losses to suicide LAVs as the price to pay. While I fully support this tactic as an ingenious counter to tanks that are running wild I deplore the necessity of its use. IOWs CCP did their usual great job of rebalancing. I think tanks can stay as they are now and all AV weapons should have their nerfs undone. Lets try that and see how things go.