Articles
Articles
Pieces that don’t fit on a test page — findings from the archive, corrections to the record, and conversations with the people who keep these cars running.
The test archive is reference material. It answers questions like what did a 1989 Diplomat run to 100 mph? — and it answers them with a figure and a source, which is all a reference should do.
These are the other kind of piece. Things that only become visible when you read forty years of the same test in order: a number that stopped meaning what it used to, a phrase the whole hobby uses that the department itself says has no sanctioning body, a brake test with and without anti-lock that Michigan ran in five consecutive tests, 1992 to 1996, and then dropped.
Everything here is built from primary sources, cited on the page, and corrected in public when it turns out to be wrong.
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Research
How many police cars should there be?
Patrol consumes more than half of most police budgets. In 1975 RAND wrote a program to work out how many cars each command actually needed — and it ran in 240 kilobytes.
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Research
The most dangerous thing in the trunk
Patrol cars caught fire often enough that Tucson’s crime lab and fire investigators ran experiments to find out why. The answer was the road flares — and every alternative tested was less visible.
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Research
Invisible and unmissable at the same time
For twelve years an American officer was struck and killed by a vehicle about once a month. A federal study found that the fix for a patrol car is the opposite of the fix for a fire engine.
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Research
The chases nobody counted
When federal researchers asked 737 American police agencies for their pursuit records in 1994, more than a third could not supply them — because they had never collected any.
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Research
343,758 police cars
The federal government counted every vehicle operated by every local police department in America, and asked what was inside them. Four in ten departments serve fewer than 2,500 people.
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Research
When is a police car finished?
An Idaho State Police lieutenant wrote the fleet manager’s side for the FBI in 2002: when to replace a patrol car, whether to lease it, and what actually breaks first — which is never the engine.
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Research
Sixty-eight thousand police pursuits a year
American police chased 68,000 fleeing vehicles in 2012. Over twenty years, pursuit crashes killed more than 7,000 people — and a third of them had nothing to do with the chase.
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History
California tested police cars too — and a compact beat them all
Before the earliest Michigan book held here, the LA County Sheriff ran six cars through a test that measured lane changes and skidpad circles in g. A Chevrolet Nova took every acceleration column and the hardest stop.
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Research
What a police car was actually worth
A federal study priced every part of owning a patrol car. The police package cost $400, the big engine cost $67, and a big-city cruiser lost 87 percent of its value in two years.
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History
Where the police car console came from
Every American patrol car has a box of switches between the seats. It was designed at Wayne State University, argued for on human factors grounds, and built into a Detroit Police Department car to prove it worked.
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Research
Michigan blind-tested police brake pads
Twenty-eight makers were asked for their severe-duty police pads. Some failed the federal standard in the laboratory. One of the survivors lost fifty feet of stopping distance in ten stops.
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History
The federal police car that almost happened
Between 1974 and 1977 the US government built a prototype patrol car with a computer in the boot, lined up twenty more for New Orleans and Dallas, and cancelled it weeks before anyone drove one on patrol.
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Research
Part I: The Present Chaos
In 1978 the National Bureau of Standards surveyed emergency vehicle lighting across fifty states and headed its first section “The Present Chaos”. Forty-eight years later, almost nothing it recommended has happened.
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Research
Why American police cars look the way they do
Somebody counted every colour, logo and stripe across fifty city and forty-nine state forces. The black-and-white is not even the most common American police car.
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Research
The police lights that make the officer harder to see
A Virginia Tech study measured how police lighting changes driver behaviour. Brighter lights moved traffic over sooner — and hid the officer standing beside the car.
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The 1982 study that found police light bars cost money and saved nobody
The Illinois State Police measured what their light bars burned in fuel, reviewed 381 of their own crash files, and took the bars off sixty cars to find out. Two years later they changed the whole fleet.
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Research
How police car top speed stopped meaning anything
In 2016 a police Charger needed thirteen miles to reach 150 mph. A year later the same model reached 149 in a mile and a half. Nothing in the published figures points to an engine change, and Michigan’s own data suggests what did.
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Research
“Pursuit rated” has no sanctioning body, and Michigan says so
The phrase is in every classified ad in the hobby. The department whose tests everyone cites states plainly that there is no sanctioning body and no specific criteria behind it.
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Research
Sixteen feet: what anti-lock brakes were worth
For the 1996 test Ford submitted a Crown Victoria without ABS, for braking only, alongside its own anti-lock car. Same model, same day, same site. The difference was about one car length.
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History
Who actually started the Michigan State Police tests
Three men are named in one book’s acknowledgments as having originated the programme — and the 1975 start date everyone repeats is a year out, by the department’s own count, four times over.
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Research
What a police package actually buys
Two Chevrolet Tahoes, same platform, tested the same day. Across the first six brake stops they averaged a quarter of a foot apart. After a heat soak, only one of them was still fine.
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History
The police Mustang leaves, and comes back with no engine
In 1993 two Special Service Package Mustangs ran their last test in these books, the only cars in its lap table not marked as having anti-lock brakes. Twenty-nine years later the badge returned as an electric crossover — and in 2026 its GT had the shortest projected stop by a car under the twenty-stop procedure.