Research

What a police car was actually worth

A 1974 federal study priced every part of owning a patrol car — and found that a big-city cruiser lost 87 percent of its value in two years, that the police package cost $400, and that black-and-white paint made the car harder to sell.

What one cost

Start with the invoice, because it is the most quietly fascinating table in the document. This is a typical 1972–73 quotation for the standard four-door patrol car most departments actually bought.

Read those middle rows again. The police package cost $400 — the heavy-duty suspension, the cooling, the brakes, the electrical system, the whole reason the car exists as a category. And the 400 cubic inch engine cost sixty-seven dollars.

The study also prices the whole market. Averaged across Ford, Chevrolet, Plymouth, Dodge and American Motors for 1973:

The number that should be better known

Now the other end of the life. These are real resale figures for two-year-old patrol cars actually sold by departments in 1973.

A large-city patrol car bought for around $3,500 was worth two hundred and sixty-two dollars two years later. It had lost 87 percent of its value while an ordinary private car of the same age lost half.

And notice the spread between owners. The same kind of car, the same two years, and a state highway patrol car came out worth three and a half times what a big-city car did. That is not the vehicle. That is city miles, idling, multiple shifts, kerbs, and the condition a car is in when it comes off a downtown beat — and it is the reason surviving highway patrol cars are so much more likely to be decent than surviving municipal ones.

Black and white cost money

Then there is a finding that goes straight to the heart of what this site is about. In its conclusions on reducing depreciation, the study records that standard black-and-white vehicles have a lower resale or trade-in value than the more popular colours.

The most iconic paint scheme in American motoring was a financial penalty. Every department running black-and-whites was paying for the look at the point of disposal, whether or not anyone had written it down that way.

The study follows it with advice that is almost heretical. If a department buys middle or top-of-the-line cars and plans to sell them early, it says, then including luxury accessories and eliminating the austere police car appearance will usually be desirable on cost grounds.

The reverse also holds: on bottom-of-the-line cars, or ones kept several years to high mileage and poor condition, luxury accessories were seldom worth it. Nobody pays extra for a tired ex-fleet car whatever is bolted to it.

The rest of the arithmetic

Several other conclusions are worth having, because they explain fleet behaviour that otherwise looks arbitrary.

Smaller cars did not save what everyone assumed. Across the sample of a thousand-plus cars in twenty-nine cities, smaller patrol cars saved on fuel — but did not deliver the maintenance savings usually obtained from downsizing other fleets. The data showed a small rise in maintenance cost as car size decreased. A compact worked harder to do the same job.

Timing the sale mattered as much as the car. It was most efficient to buy and dispose early in the model year — but depreciation levelled off between late spring and late summer before rising sharply again, so a sale delayed into spring could be deferred further without much penalty.

Reconditioning paid, within limits. Selective work to about 10 percent of the car’s estimated value was a reasonable rule of thumb, and worth more on cars with real consumer appeal.

In-house workshops were usually the wrong answer. Contracting maintenance out was more efficient for fleets of fifteen cars or fewer — and where police and commercial wage rates were similar, cheaper even for fleets of around a hundred.

And there is no such thing as the correct replacement interval. The study explicitly refuses to define an economic life for patrol cars in general, because costs vary so much between departments. Its position is that every department has to work out its own from its own numbers — the point being where rising running costs and falling depreciation cross.

Why low bid survives

One last passage, and it explains a great deal about the tests in this archive.

The study found that departments often continued accepting the lowest bid believing they had no alternative — when in fact procurement regulations frequently allowed exceptions. The catch is what you can prove. Justifying a refusal on the grounds of projected higher depreciation, operation and maintenance costs was usually difficult. Departments were far more successful rejecting a low bid on documentable grounds: higher parts prices, the cost of changing inventory, new maintenance equipment, retraining mechanics.

Which is precisely the problem the Michigan programme exists to solve. Michigan does not argue that the cheap car will cost more later. It converts measured performance into a dollar figure, adds it to the bid, and lets the adjusted number decide — turning an unprovable projection into an arithmetic one.

This study identified the gap. Michigan built the instrument that closed it.

What it means for a survivor

If you own one of these cars, this report is the explanation for its condition.

It was sold at two years old for a fraction of its cost, into a market that valued it less because of its colour, from an owner with every financial incentive to spend nothing on it beyond about a tenth of its value. The cars that survived in good order are overwhelmingly the ones that came from the owner at the top of that table rather than the bottom.

And the $400 line on the invoice is the one worth remembering. That is what the police package cost when new — less than a seventh of the car, and the entire reason it is worth preserving now.

For the same subject thirty years later, written by somebody who had to make the decision rather than model it, see when is a police car finished?