History
The federal police car that almost happened
Between 1974 and 1977 the United States government built a prototype patrol car with a computer in the boot, lined up twenty more for New Orleans and Dallas, and cancelled the programme weeks before anyone drove one on patrol.
The reasoning behind it is stated in the opening pages, and it is not the sort of thing federal agencies usually put in writing. Every major crime commission since 1931 had called for modernisation, the report says — and yet in design, equipment and operation, police systems were one to two decades behind comparable military and aerospace systems.
So in December 1974 the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, under its director Gerald Caplan, started a programme to fix that. It hired The Aerospace Corporation to manage it.
They got further than you would expect.
They asked the chiefs first
In January 1975, before a single component was specified, a planning conference was held with a Chiefs of Police Advisory Council assembled for the purpose. The membership list is a period document in itself: Edward M. Davis of Los Angeles, Peter J. Pitchess of Los Angeles County, Philip G. Tannian of Detroit, C. B. Giarrusso of New Orleans, Donald A. Byrd of Dallas, M. J. Cullinane of Washington D.C., Col. John R. Plants of the Michigan State Police, and Glen King of the IACP, among others.
The capabilities that emerged came out of that room.
What they actually built
The prototype was not a design study. It was a running car: a 1975 Chevrolet Nova four-door in police configuration — 350 cubic inch four-barrel V8, Turbo Hydramatic, heavy-duty front suspension, oversize brakes, high-capacity cooling, engine oil cooler.
Choosing a compact was the whole economic argument. The programme projected 15 miles per gallon, which it described as roughly a 100 percent improvement over the police fleets of the day, and then extrapolated:
| Projected saving | Per car | Nationally, per year |
|---|---|---|
| Fuel | — | $250 million |
| Maintenance and repair | $260 | $42 million |
| Vehicle replacement | $1,550 | $82 million |
The computer in the trunk
This is the part that makes the document extraordinary. In 1975 and 1976 the prototype carried a microcomputer-controlled digital communications system with an onboard database, mounted in the boot.
The specification is worth reading as a 1976 artefact:
| Component | As built |
|---|---|
| Program storage (PROM) | 12,188 bytes |
| Working memory (RAM) | 8,192 bytes |
| In-car database (CCD mass memory) | 16,384 bytes |
| Loaded by | digital tape cassette, reader in the dashboard |
Sixteen kilobytes of database. What they proposed to do with it reads like a description of modern policing written twenty years early:
The officer could file an incident report directly from the car to the base station computer without filling out forms. He could query the stolen vehicle file himself rather than waiting on a dispatcher. The in-car database held a local hot sheet of wanted vehicles and persons, searchable on the spot. Roll-call information could be loaded onto a cassette and handed to him at the start of a shift, displayed on the car’s terminal instead of holding the meeting. And a hand-held digital and audio terminal let him stay in contact after leaving the vehicle.
A patrol officer, in 1976, filing his paperwork from the car and running his own plate checks against a database in the boot.
Because the microcomputer had spare capacity beyond what the data system needed, the engineers used it for something else: vehicle diagnostics. Sensors throughout the car monitored engine temperatures, pressures, fluid levels, speed, tyre pressure, and status of doors, lights and siren. The system would alert the driver or dispatcher to out-of-limit conditions automatically, print a hard-copy status report for the maintenance department, and build a central database for fleet analysis.
That is telematics, described in full, in a 1977 government report.
The seat that was also a roll bar
The safety work is less famous and arguably better thought through.
The prototype used an integral seat-and-headrest frame of tubular steel which the report says qualified as a roll bar. Over the headrest frame went a clear see-through vinyl cover — resilient support for the head in a rear-end collision, without blocking the driver’s rearward view.
The seat itself was designed against fatigue rather than comfort in the showroom sense: correct seat-pan tilt, correct angle between pan and back, and a pan cushion sized short enough not to press on the underside of the thigh and restrict circulation. Deliberately flat rather than bucketed, so an officer could move his legs, work the pedals and get in and out easily.
Individual front seats then made room for a between-the-seats console carrying the warning light and siren controls — the layout every police car in America now uses, and one that had been designed and built a few years earlier at Wayne State University. That story is here.
Twenty cars, two cities
LEAA funding allowed field testing in two cities. Candidates had to run urban, suburban and highway patrol, already use digital communications for command and control, and have experience with experimental projects.
New Orleans and Dallas were approved. Twenty vehicles were to be retrofitted and put into real police operations. Both cities had chiefs on the advisory council that specified the car.
Why it died
The report lists four reasons, and to its credit it does not soften any of them.
Engineering. The state-of-the-art equipment had been integrated successfully, but considerable further development was needed to optimise weight and power and prove the whole system viable.
Model years. This is the detail that should be taught in project management courses. The prototype was a 1975 Nova. The 1976 Novas were similar enough. But field testing would now happen in 1977 vehicles — which required a complete re-integration and retrofit design effort. The programme was being outrun by the annual model change.
Time and cost. That re-engineering would add one to two years. $2 million had already been spent; subcontractor bids came in far above estimate; and completing the work was now costed at more than another $2 million.
User demand. And here is the quiet one. Support from the police community had fallen away — because the industry was downsizing anyway, making smaller cars the standard rather than the exception.
The programme’s central economic argument was that police should switch to compacts. By 1977 Detroit was doing that on its own, and the chiefs no longer needed a federal programme to tell them so.
It was terminated in March 1977, before field testing began.
The body that was drawn but never built
One strand ran in parallel and turns out to be the most prophetic thing in the whole programme. Alongside the Nova retrofit, Aerospace sub-contracted a clean-sheet body design to Autodynamics Corporation of America of Madison Heights, Michigan. Their report is dated 12 March 1976.
Autodynamics began from a position that no American manufacturer held at the time. A police car, they argued, should be an industrial vehicle — built for its job the way postal vans, armoured cars, ambulances and fire apparatus are — rather than a passenger car adapted afterwards.
So they did not propose a car. They proposed a purpose-built body on a Chevrolet Blazer or Chrysler Ramcharger chassis.
| Autodynamics proposal | Nova | Full-size | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Length | 171.0 in | 196.7 | 227.7 |
| Wheelbase | 106.5 | 111.0 | 121.5 |
| Width | 78.0 | 72.2 | 79.5 |
| Height | 63.0 | 54.3 | 54.5 |
| Front headroom | 41.0 | 39.5 | 38.9 |
| Shoulder room | 60.0 | 56.6 | — |
| Load capacity | 1,696 lb | 1,100 | 1,100 |
| Curb weight | 3,204 lb | — | — |
| EPA city / highway | 16 / 21 mpg | — | — |
Read that table again. It is fifty-seven inches shorter than a full-size police sedan — nearly five feet — and narrower, while carrying more head room, more shoulder room and six hundred pounds more payload. The trick is the nine inches of extra height. Sit people upright in a taller box on a truck chassis and you no longer need the length.
A tall, wide, short, truck-chassis police vehicle with a full-size interior and a big payload. In 1976 that was a proposal. Today it is a Police Interceptor Utility, and it is what almost every American agency buys.
The engineering answer to the obvious objection is the clever part. New body tooling only pays for itself at around 250,000 units a year, and Autodynamics estimated police production at 20,000 to 40,000. So they designed a low-tooling build system that needs no stretch form dies at all: a welded frame of rectangular steel tubing, exterior panels folded on standard press brakes from cheap edge dies, fixed by welding, riveting or bonding in places not visible from outside so no sheet metal finishing is required, and fibreglass only where the shape gets complicated.
That tube frame does double duty. It encloses the occupant area completely and forms a roll cage, with seat belts and shoulder harnesses integral to the seat structure, an energy-absorbing instrument panel and door trim, and a urethane-covered impact bar around the whole exterior for car park damage.
And the equipment list they designed the centre console around, in 1976, reads: microprocessor, mass memory system, recorder, computer terminal, teletype printer, remote terminal transceiver — and a heads-up display system.
There was also a study of dual-mode drive-trains — an economy mode for ordinary patrol and a power mode for emergency response, the fuel saving of one weighed against the capability of the other. Hybrid thinking, under a different name, in 1976.
What it was actually for
The programme’s stated purpose was never to sell cars. The knowledge from the field test was to be disseminated through the law enforcement community and its industrial suppliers, in the hope that improved equipment would become commercially available for agencies to buy as they saw fit.
It was, in other words, an attempt to show the industry what a police car could be and let the market follow. That is a reasonable theory, and it needed the field test to work. The field test never happened.
The sport utility took until 2019 to become the fastest and quickest vehicle in the Michigan tests, and until 2025 for the police sedan to disappear from them altogether. Autodynamics had the shape of it in March 1976.
Everything in that prototype exists in police cars today — the mobile data terminal, the in-car database, the plate check run from the vehicle, the report filed without paper, the engine diagnostics, the centre console. None of it arrived because of this programme. It took another twenty to thirty years and came from manufacturers and vendors, one piece at a time.
The 1977 report closes a programme that had spent $2 million and produced one working car. Read now, the striking thing is not how ambitious it was. It is how nearly right.