The Complete History

The American Police Car

It begins with a battery-powered wagon in Ohio and ends, more or less, with a sport utility outrunning every sedan on a Michigan proving ground in 2019. In between, the American police car became the most specialised passenger vehicle in the country, and then stopped being a car at all.

This page is the whole arc in one place. Each section links to a longer treatment.

The wagon, and the first thirty years

1899–1932

America’s first motorised police vehicle, by the usual account, was an electric patrol wagon. The Akron, Ohio police department took delivery of it in 1899. An engineer working for the city, Frank Loomis, designed it, and the Collins Buggy Company built it; it is said to have cost $2,400. Accounts give it two four-horsepower motors, a top speed of 16 or 18 mph (the accounts differ), a range of about 30 miles between charges and a weight of roughly 5,000 pounds. Its first call, by the usual account, was to collect a drunk at the corner of Main and Exchange. In August 1900 rioters pushed it into the Ohio Canal; it was hauled out, by the usual account the next day, and went back to work.

What follows is not a march toward modernisation. The first police automobiles came one city at a time: Boston’s police department says it put the first car into service as a police cruiser in July 1903, and New York approved its first police car in 1905, by one account. Cost, more than the riot, was the likelier brake, and the Model T, $850 in 1908 and $440 by 1915, made a car something a city could afford. A city could buy speed when it chose to pay for it: Cleveland’s Flying Squads of the 1920s had cars the Plain Dealer said could reach 70 mph.

Then came Prohibition, and the popular story of rum runners in Hudsons and Cadillacs leaving the police behind. When Ford released the V8 in 1932, police and criminals could buy the same speed on the same day.

The package, and what it fixed

1950–1957

Before 1950 a department that wanted a heavy-duty patrol car usually bought a civilian sedan and modified it locally. Ford changed that by putting the parts on the order form. In 1950 it offered a police package, and Ford describes it as the first offered by any carmaker. Hagerty dates the package to 1949, and Ford’s archives and heritage brand manager, Ted Ryan, has said that “the 1950 police package was actually a modified 1949 Ford.”

Hagerty puts the purpose plainly: the package “did not increase speed; instead, the police package made the car durable.” A patrol car idles for hours powering a radio, then runs flat out, then does it again tomorrow. The 1950 package included heavy-duty springs, shock absorbers, clutch and interior trim, an extra-heavy-duty generator and battery, the generator a sixty-ampere unit that held its full output at idle, and, by Hagerty’s account, heavy-duty brakes and cooling. According to Jalopnik, Ford also pitched the trunk as roomy enough for “bulky radio equipment”. Oil coolers and certified speedometers appear in later packages.

Chevrolet followed in 1955, with what General Motors calls the first factory-installed police package. Chrysler’s first complete package came with the 1956 Dodge Coronet, and Plymouth’s in 1957. The category existed.

The horsepower years

1955–1978

The 1955 Chrysler C-300 was the first American production car to make 300 horsepower, and it was sold to anybody with the money. That industrialised the speed problem: where moonshiners had built fast cars by hand, Detroit now sold them by the thousand.

What followed was the golden age of the American police car, and Chrysler dominated it. The peak is a 1969 Dodge Polara Pursuit with the 440 Magnum, which recorded 147 mph at Chrysler’s Chelsea Proving Grounds according to Edwin Sanow and John Bellah’s Dodge, Plymouth & Chrysler Police Cars 1956–1978. No American police sedan in the Michigan tests held here went faster until a HEMI Charger reached 150 mph in 2006, thirty-seven years later. The sedan that got there first was imported: a Volvo S70 T5 matched the Polara at 147 mph in 1998, and in 2000, entered in Michigan’s police category, it ran 153.

Two-door pursuit cars are a separate case, and a faster one. Michigan recorded the Chevrolet Camaro B4C at 155 mph in 1995, 159 in 1996, and 160 in 2000 — figures that sat in the same test books, in a category most people arguing about police car top speeds have never looked at.

The last stand came in 1978. A Plymouth Fury with the 440 recorded 132.7 mph at the Michigan State Police test, beating every other car in the field on top speed, acceleration and the road course — and finishing with the lowest adjusted bid on all four of the book’s price sheets. Two of the six cars tested that year, the Buick and the Ford, were eliminated because they could not meet the minimum acceleration requirements.

After 1978 the big block was gone.

The collapse, and the strange rescue

1979–1993

Emissions rules, two fuel crises and downsizing took the American police car apart. The low point is documented precisely: the 1980 California-specification Dodge St. Regis topped out at 85 mph on flat ground and around 65 uphill. Officers called them dog cars. California sold eighty-six of them at cost, some without ever going on patrol.

It is worth being exact about that, because the collapse was narrower than it looks. In the same model year, the federal-specification St. Regis with the 360 engine recorded 122.7 mph at the Michigan test, and the Plymouth Gran Fury 360 recorded 124.6, the fastest car in Michigan’s 1980 test. Both full-size General Motors entries were eliminated for failing the minimum acceleration requirements. The disaster was California’s, not Chrysler’s.

The rescue came from an unexpected direction. Unable to buy a fast sedan at any price, the California Highway Patrol abandoned the format entirely and in 1982 bought 406 Mustangs. Ford’s own advertisement claimed the car chased Porsches for a living. It was a specialist tool — tiny back seat, no room for equipment — but for a decade it was the fastest thing wearing a badge.

The last great sedans

1991–2011

For 1994 the Caprice’s 5.7-litre V8 gained sequential port fuel injection and 260 horsepower. Michigan recorded the 1994 car at 141.2 mph, the highest top speed by any sedan in its books to that point, and no American police sedan there went faster until 2006. The rear-drive Caprice left Michigan’s tests after 1996.

The Crown Victoria stayed in Michigan’s tests every year until 2011. It was not the fast one: its best top speed in each test from 1999 to 2011 was between 128 and 130 mph, well below the 1994 Caprice’s 141.2, and in eleven of those thirteen tests another sedan ran faster.

When Dodge brought the Hemi-powered Charger in 2006, it recorded 150 mph at the Michigan test, the first American police sedan in the Michigan tests held here to go faster than the 147 given for the Polara, on the same proving ground.

Read more: The sleeper that ended the dark age · The Crown Victoria and the Charger Pursuit (coming soon)

The year it stopped being a car

2012–present

The sport utility had been in Michigan’s testing by 1992, tested alongside the Camaro and the Crown Victoria. By 1997 five of the eleven vehicles tested were sport utilities, and the following year the Expedition and both Explorers did not run the road course at all: Ford had advised that they were not designed or intended for pursuit. In 2005 Chevrolet brought the two-wheel-drive Tahoe back into the police category, and it recorded 124 mph — already faster than the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor with the optional 3.55 axle, which ran 119.

2012 is where it starts to turn. The Tahoe recorded 139 mph; the brand-new Ford Police Interceptor sedan, entered in place of the Crown Victoria, recorded 130 to 131 with its naturally aspirated 3.5-litre V6, though the EcoBoost version ran 148. Against the naturally aspirated car, the sport utility was faster than Ford’s new sedan, and the book prints more headroom and shoulder room for it as well.

It was not yet faster than every car. In the same test a Chevrolet Caprice 9C1 with the 6.0 ran 154 mph, and three cars stopped in 127 feet or less under a new twenty-stop braking procedure, not directly comparable with the earlier books. The sedan still had an argument.

It lost it in 2019. That year the Ford Police Interceptor Utility with the 3.0 EcoBoost ran 150 mph, reached 60 in 5.77 seconds and 100 in 13.59, and lapped Grattan faster than every Charger in the field. Not roomier and nearly as quick — quicker, faster and roomier than every sedan in the test, though three of the sedans stopped shorter. In 2020 the HEMI Chargers were back in front on top speed, and the AWD one on lap time.

The American police car did not die. It stopped being a car.

The full version, 1946 to 1978

This page is the outline. The Golden Age is the era in depth: sixteen chapters on how these cars were specified, bought, equipped and worked in, from the post-war scarcity years to the last big-block Fury.

Every claim checked against two independent sources, and twenty-one things commonly printed wrong about these cars listed openly at the back, with sources.

See the ebook

236 pages · EPUB and PDF

Frequently asked questions

What was the first police car in America?

By the usual account, an electric patrol wagon delivered to the Akron, Ohio police department in 1899, designed by an engineer working for the city, Frank Loomis, and built by the Collins Buggy Company. Accounts give its top speed as 16 or 18 mph. Boston’s police department says its car, placed in service in July 1903, was the first automobile used as a police cruiser in the United States.

What was the first factory-built police car?

The 1950 Ford police package is usually given that title, and Ford claims it: Ford says it was the first carmaker to offer a police package. Hagerty dates Ford’s package to 1949, and General Motors calls Chevrolet’s 1955 package the first factory-installed one. Either way, Ford was selling a police package five years before Chevrolet (1955), and before Dodge (1956) and Plymouth (1957).

What is the fastest police car ever built?

It depends what counts as a police car. The classic-era record is the 1969 Dodge Polara Pursuit with the 440 Magnum, which recorded 147 mph at Chrysler’s Chelsea Proving Grounds according to Sanow and Bellah’s history of Chrysler police cars. No American police sedan in the Michigan tests held here went faster until a Hemi-powered Charger reached 150 mph in 2006, although an imported Volvo S70 T5 sedan ran 153 in 2000. The fastest sedan in the Michigan record is the Chevrolet Caprice 6.0, at 156 mph in a 2015 retest.

The fastest police vehicle of any kind in the Michigan record is the Chevrolet Camaro B4C, recorded at 160 mph in 2000, with 159 in 1996 and in every year from 1999 to 2002. It was a two-door pursuit car rather than a general patrol vehicle, which is why it rarely appears in the argument — but it is in the same test books.

The Camaro’s figures repeat almost exactly across several years, which is consistent with an electronic limit rather than the car’s true maximum. The 1996 and 1999 figures are printed without a limiter mark, and the 2000 one comes from a bulletin whose tables carry no limiter marks at all; the 2001 and 2002 figures are marked as limited.

Why did American police cars get slower in the 1970s?

Emissions regulations forced compression ratios down and added equipment, two fuel crises made large engines a budget liability, and downsizing shrank the cars. Chrysler’s 440 lost nearly a hundred horsepower in three years, and after 1978 the big block was gone from police work entirely.

When did SUVs replace police sedans?

In two stages. In 2012 the Chevrolet Tahoe PPV recorded 139 mph against 130 to 131 for the brand-new Ford Police Interceptor sedan with its naturally aspirated V6 (the EcoBoost version ran 148) — but a Caprice 9C1 ran 154 mph in the same test, so the sedan was not beaten outright.

That happened in 2019, when the Ford Police Interceptor Utility with the 3.0 EcoBoost was the fastest vehicle in the entire test at 150 mph, and the quickest of the four-wheeled ones. By 2024 Michigan tested no police sedan of any kind, for the first time in the books held here.

More questions answered: what P71 and “pursuit rated” mean, the Mustang SSP, the Camaro B4C, the Michigan test and how to tell a genuine police car.