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Sixteen feet: what anti-lock brakes were worth
In 1996 Ford brought a Crown Victoria without ABS to the Michigan tests, purely so it could be braked against an identical car that had it. Same model, same day, same surface. The answer was about one car length.
Almost everything we know about police cars comes from comparing different vehicles and arguing about the variables. Different weights, different tyres, different drivers, different days. It is why the Michigan tests exist at all — running everything through the same procedure on the same afternoon removes most of the argument.
Very occasionally the programme does something better than that. It tests the same car twice, changing exactly one thing.
In 1996, Ford submitted a second Crown Victoria for brake testing only. It was not there to run the road course or chase a top speed. Its only job was to stop, without anti-lock brakes, alongside the ABS car Ford was actually selling.
The result
| Ford Crown Victoria | Average deceleration | 60–0 mph |
|---|---|---|
| With anti-lock brakes | 29.02 ft/s² | 133.4 ft |
| Without anti-lock brakes | 25.90 ft/s² | 149.5 ft |
Sixteen feet. Slightly more than the length of the car doing the stopping.
That is the whole finding, and it is worth sitting with for a moment, because sixteen feet is both very small and very large depending on where you are standing. It is nothing on a test track. It is the difference between stopping behind something and stopping inside it.
Two identical cars, one variable, one day. The programme has run thousands of brake tests in fifty years and this is the only time it isolated a single component this cleanly.
Why it needed proving at all
By 1996 anti-lock brakes were not new, but they were not settled either. They were an expensive option on a vehicle bought in fleet quantities, and fleet buyers were being asked to pay for something whose benefit was described rather than measured.
The Michigan record shows how recent the argument was. Three years earlier, in 1993, the two Special Service Package Mustangs were the only vehicles in the entire field without anti-lock brakes — a detail the book records almost in passing, as the type made its last appearance. By 1996 the non-ABS car had to be specially submitted as a comparison, because there were no longer any in the regular field to compare against.
Read those two years together and you can see the changeover happening. In 1993 the absence of ABS is a footnote about two old cars. In 1996 it is an experiment. After that it stops being mentioned, because everything has it.
What sixteen feet looks like in context
The honest way to judge that gap is against the spread Michigan was seeing between different vehicles in the same era.
In 1980, before anti-lock brakes existed on anything in the test, the field was scattered. The shortest stop recorded that year was 154.6 feet, by a mid-size Malibu; the longest was 187.9, by a full-size Ford. More than thirty feet separated cars that were otherwise doing the same job, and the variation came from brake sizing, weight distribution and tyres rather than from any single component.
Against that, sixteen feet from one system is substantial — roughly half the entire spread of the 1980 field, recovered by fitting one option.
And then look at what happened once everything had it. By 2013, all thirteen vehicles in the test stopped within 7.2 feet of each other — four manufacturers, three body types, V6s and V8s and turbos and a full-size sport utility, every one of them between 128.2 and 135.4 feet.
| Year | Spread across the field | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1980 | 33 ft (154.6 – 187.9) | no anti-lock brakes anywhere |
| 1996 | 16 ft from ABS alone | the changeover, measured |
| 2013 | 7.2 ft (128.2 – 135.4) | universal ABS, universal discs |
That is the second finding hiding inside the first. The braking column had been one of the most brutal discriminators in the programme — a place where a bad police car was exposed immediately. Within two decades of ABS becoming standard it separated almost nothing. Every car could stop.
Where the gains went instead
Braking did not stop improving. It simply stopped being a way of telling police cars apart, and the absolute numbers kept falling.
The 1993 Camaro’s 127.6-foot stop stood as the programme’s shortest for nineteen years. Then in 2012 three cars beat it in a single test, led by a Chevrolet Caprice at 125.8 feet. By 2017 a rear-drive Dodge Charger was averaging 31.44 ft/s², around 123 feet. And in 2026 a Ford Mustang Mach-E — all-wheel drive, battery electric, and the heaviest kind of thing you might expect to stop badly — recorded 122.45 feet, the shortest distance ever printed in these books for a car.
Thirty years and about eleven feet, spread across every manufacturer at once. Nothing like the sixteen feet a single box of valves bought in 1996.
One caveat, stated plainly
The 1996 comparison is as clean as this programme gets, but it is not a laboratory. Two physical cars are two physical cars: different pads bedded differently, different tyres from the same specification, a different sequence of runs through the day. Michigan’s procedure controls for a great deal — same surface, same instrumentation, same afternoon, distances computed from measured deceleration rather than paced out — and it does not control for everything.
The book also does not describe the exercise as a controlled experiment. It records that a non-ABS Crown Victoria was submitted for brake testing only, and it prints the numbers. The interpretation here is ours; the figures are the department’s.
With that said: sixteen feet is a wide margin. It is not the sort of gap two sets of brake pads produce on their own.
Ford submitted a car it had stopped selling, to lose a test, on purpose. The result is the clearest single measurement in fifty years of these books.
Why it matters to anyone with one of these cars
If you own a mid-nineties patrol car, or are looking at one, this is the figure that should shape how you drive it. An early-nineties police sedan without ABS is not a slightly worse version of the same car. It needs sixteen more feet, every time, and it needs a driver who knows how to modulate a pedal rather than stand on it.
It also explains something you will see in the classifieds. Anti-lock brakes were an option on police packages well into the nineties, ordered or not ordered department by department. Two apparently identical cars from the same year can differ here, and it is worth checking the build sheet rather than assuming — our guide to identifying a genuine police package car covers where to look, and the option codes reference lists what to look for.
Sixteen feet was worth paying for in 1996. It still is.