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.
It is the single most recognisable interior feature of a police car, and it is the one nobody ever explains. The radio, the siren control, the light switches, the computer — all stacked in a tower between the two front seats, in a car that left the factory with a bench.
That arrangement did not evolve. Somebody worked it out, wrote it down, and had one built.
The document is a 200-page study from Wayne State University’s College of Engineering, produced with the Detroit Police Department for the federal government. It is the most thorough attempt anyone has made to ask what a patrol car actually is — and the console is only its most visible answer.
The question underneath it
The study starts by rejecting the premise everyone else was working from. For most of the century the police vehicle was understood through visibility and the threat of apprehension — a machine for deterring crime.
The researchers point out that crime is only a portion of police work. Once you accept that, the car stops being a pursuit machine that happens to have an officer in it, and becomes something much harder to design: a workplace that also has to chase.
So they went and measured one.
They took the 1969 cars apart
The human factors work was done on the two vehicles the Detroit Police Department actually ran: the 1969 Ford and the 1969 Plymouth. One of the study’s figures is a direct comparison of where the controls were on those cars against where they should have been — the recommended reach areas for a seated officer.
The gap between those two things is the whole problem. Police equipment was installed wherever it fitted: under the dash, on the transmission tunnel, hanging off the steering column, screwed to the door. Every item added by a different supplier at a different time, none of them talking to each other, in a car designed around a bench seat for three.
Officers surveyed for the study varied in age, length of service, precinct and type of duty, and the researchers collected both performance data and attitudes. A third phase reviewed the scientific literature on comfort in vehicle systems — because an officer spends a whole shift in the thing.
Nobody had ever asked whether a police officer could physically reach the equipment they were expected to operate at speed.
The recommendation
The answer is stated plainly in the summary chapter: place as many controls of police-related equipment as possible on a specially designed console positioned between the two officers, mounted on the bench seat or between two bucket seats. Doing this, the report says, brings the controls into normal reach areas.
Then they built it. A front seat package including the equipment console was designed and installed in a Detroit Police Department patrol car. The report contains the control panel layout, an installation drawing and photographs.
That is the object. Every console in every American police car is a descendant of a piece of university engineering fitted to a Detroit squad car to see whether it would work.
And the lineage continues. When the federal government ran its clean-sheet police car programme in 1974–77, the prototype used individual front seats specifically to make room for a between-the-seats console carrying the warning light and siren controls. The idea had moved from a recommendation to an assumption in under a decade.
The other recommendations, and how they aged
The console is the famous one. The rest of the list is a fascinating scorecard of what a careful engineer in Detroit got right.
| They recommended | What happened |
|---|---|
| Console between the officers | universal |
| Individually adjustable seats — vertically and angularly, not just fore and aft | universal |
| Power steering on all full-size vehicles | universal |
| Automatic transmission, liquid-cooled, minimum three speeds | universal |
| Limited-slip differential only where traction demands it | roughly what happened |
| No tinted glass — tinted windscreens found detrimental to night vision; use sunglasses by day | ignored completely |
| Externally mounted sound monitor to hear what is happening outside | never adopted |
| Foot controls | “okay as they are” |
The tinted glass finding is the one that stings, because the reasoning is unanswerable — tint costs you nothing in daylight that sunglasses cannot fix, and costs you real vision at night, which is when patrol work gets dangerous. Modern police cars are tinted anyway.
And a recommendation about the lights
Buried in the same summary is a sentence that lands very differently once you know what came after it. The study recommends a colour scheme of blue and white, and the adoption of the blue beacon.
This is a Detroit-based study, written years before the National Bureau of Standards surveyed the whole country and headed its report “The Present Chaos” — finding sixteen states that permitted blue on police vehicles and six different rules about how the blue was allowed to move. One of those sixteen was Illinois, where the permission applied to Chicago only.
Somebody in Detroit had reached a clear answer. So had the researchers in Washington. Fifty years later, a 2020 census of ninety-nine police forces found eleven colour schemes and no agreement at all.
“Heavy-duty in name only”
There is one more passage worth pulling out, because it is the intellectual ancestor of everything in the Michigan test archive.
The study examines how departments were writing purchase specifications, and finds them specifying components: a heavy-duty radiator, a fan of a certain size, a particular number of blades. The problem, the authors point out, is that if the manufacturer only makes one radiator that fits the vehicle, then the standard radiator becomes heavy-duty in name only. Specifying the fan does not guarantee cooling. The radiator, fan, water pump, engine and transmission have to be matched as a system.
Their conclusion is that since the manufacturer is best qualified to do that matching, the department should stop specifying parts and instead make the performance requirement the specification — define the operating limits expected of the vehicle and let the manufacturer meet them however it likes.
That is exactly what Michigan does. Do not tell them what to fit — tell them what it has to achieve, and then measure whether it did.
Michigan’s published purchasing standard is a list of outcomes: 60 mph within nine seconds, 100 within 24.6, a deceleration rate averaged over twenty stops, and thirty-two laps without a major component failure. Not one component is named. This study argued for that approach before the Michigan programme existed.
The two philosophies of pursuit, already written down
One last find, and it is startling in a document this old. The study sets out two competing theories of how a police car should handle a fleeing vehicle.
In the first, departments attempt to eliminate the pursuit function of the patrol car altogether — relying on helicopter support to identify and trail a fugitive vehicle, or on communications and roadblocks — on the theory that the public is then not exposed to the hazards of a high-speed chase.
In the second, you minimise the duration of the chase by giving the officer a high-performance vehicle, on the theory that good handling and acceleration end it quickly.
Those are still the only two answers anybody has. And when the federal government finally went and asked a hundred and forty-six people who had fled from the police what would have made them slow down, more than seventy percent said the same thing: they would have stopped driving dangerously once the police car was out of sight. Which is an argument for the first theory, arrived at thirty years later, from the other direction.
Why it matters
Because this is the document that treats the patrol car as a designed object rather than a purchased one.
It asked what the vehicle is for, measured whether officers could operate it, built a solution, installed it in a real car, and wrote down what it found. The console is on every police car in America. The seat adjustment is on every police car in America. The performance-specification philosophy is how the most respected vehicle test in the country works.
And the report is a scanned typescript, faint in places, sitting in a federal archive with an accession number in the double digits.