History

California tested police cars too — and a compact beat them all

Three years before Michigan published its first book, the Los Angeles County Sheriff ran six cars through a test that measured things Michigan never has. A Chevrolet Nova won it outright.

The six cars

Look at the power figures before anything else, because they explain the era. A 400 cubic inch V8 making 144 horsepower. Two of them, in the Montego and the Torino. Compression ratios of 8.0 to one. This is emissions-strangled Detroit at its lowest ebb, and the biggest engines in the test are the weakest.

The Nova wins, and not narrowly

The Nova takes every single acceleration column. Not by a tenth — by more than a second to 60, by nearly two seconds from 30 to 65, and by 1.3 seconds from 60 to 80 against the next best car.

That last figure is the one that matters operationally. Sixty to eighty is the overtake, the closing speed, the merge onto a freeway behind something already moving. The Nova does it in 6.8 seconds; the Pontiac LeMans, with a 400 and 185 horsepower, needs 12.7.

And it out-braked them too

Here the sheet does something Michigan has never done: it reports braking in g, not in feet.

The Nova stops hardest from both speeds. Whoever owned this document thought so too — the 1.2 g figures are circled in red ink on the surviving sheet, the only marking on the page.

‡ The Dart’s 0.48 g from 30 mph is an outlier that does not fit its own 1.0 g from 60, and no explanation survives with the sheet. Treat it as a probable error rather than a finding.

The columns Michigan doesn’t have

This is the part worth the attention of anyone who reads these tests seriously. Michigan measures handling with a stopwatch: thirty-two laps of a road course, and an average time. It tells you which car is quicker around a circuit. It does not tell you why.

The Sheriff’s programme measured specific manoeuvres, in g, one at a time.

A single lane change is an avoidance — something appears and you go round it. Two and three lane changes test whether the car settles between inputs or keeps swaying. Recovery is the one nobody else measures: what the vehicle does after you have asked too much of it.

And the results do not line up. The Plymouth Fury is best at a single lane change and mid-field everywhere else. The Pontiac LeMans is last overall and ties for the best recovery figure in the test. A car can be poor at everything and still forgiving when it goes wrong — which is a real and useful property that a lap time hides completely.

Note also the left-versus-right circle figures. Every one of the six cars pulls more g turning left than right. That is what you would expect from the era’s suspension and tyre practice, and it is only visible because somebody measured both directions.

Why the Nova matters beyond this sheet

The timing here is the interesting part.

The Sheriff’s programme tested the Nova and it won in 1975/76. In precisely the same period, the federal government’s Police Patrol Car Program — managed by The Aerospace Corporation, with a chiefs’ advisory council that included Peter J. Pitchess, the Sheriff of Los Angeles County — chose a 1975 Chevrolet Nova as the base vehicle for its prototype, and built its entire economic case on the argument that police work should move to compacts.

Those two things are not unconnected. The man whose department had just measured the Nova beating five bigger cars was in the room where the federal programme specified its own.

And then the argument collapsed for reasons that had nothing to do with the car. The federal programme was terminated in March 1977, and one of the four stated reasons was that support had fallen away because the industry was downsizing anyway — making smaller cars the standard rather than the exception.

What this sheet is, and what it isn’t

Two cautions, because this is a single page rather than a book.

It is a results summary, not a full report. There is no methodology section, no description of the course, no note of conditions, drivers or how many runs fed each number. The scoring is described only as Total Score, Weighted 25%, and what that weighting applies to is not stated on the page.

And it is not directly comparable with Michigan. Different measures, different units, different weighting, different decade. A 1.2 g stop and a 133-foot stop are answers to related questions asked in unrelated ways.

What it does establish is that Michigan’s programme was never the only way to do this — and that in 1975, on the other side of the country, the answer to what should a police department buy came back as the smallest car in the test.