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 start date almost everyone repeats is a year out — by the department’s own count, four times over.
The Michigan State Police vehicle tests are the most cited source in American police car history. Manufacturers quote them, collectors quote them, auction listings quote them, and this archive exists because of them.
For something so widely used, remarkably little is written about where it came from. The programme has no founding myth, no anniversary press release, no name attached to it. What it has is a line buried in the acknowledgments of one report, and a set of dates in four prefaces that quietly disagree with the version everybody repeats.
Three names, in one book, once
The 1996 report — the last Caprice year, and one of the richest books in the whole run — carries the usual page of thanks to the people who made the test happen. Among them is a sentence that does something none of the other thirty-five books do.
It thanks Sgt. Bill McFall, F/Lt. Curtis L. VanDenBerg (retired) and Sgt. David B. Storer (retired) for their continued assistance with the programme — which they originated twenty years ago.
That is the sourcing. One clause, in one acknowledgments section, in one year. Three serving or retired officers, credited by their own department with having started the thing.
No department press office wrote that sentence. It reads like what it probably was: colleagues thanking the men who built the programme they had inherited.
There is a detail in the same book that makes it better. By 1996 VanDenBerg had become president of Independent Testing & Consulting, Inc. — the firm that prepared that very report. One of the three men who started the tests in the mid-seventies was, twenty years later, the contractor running them. He is credited on the title page and thanked in the acknowledgments of the same document.
The date everybody repeats, and the four that disagree
It is commonly written that the Michigan tests began in 1975. That figure comes from the National Institute of Justice’s own description of the programme, which states the MSP has evaluated patrol vehicles every autumn since 1975. It is federal, it is authoritative-looking, and it is repeated everywhere.
The department’s own books say otherwise — not once, but in four separate editions spanning twenty-one years.
| Report | What it says | Points to |
|---|---|---|
| 1980 | the programme “was developed in 1976 by the Policy Development and Evaluation Section … in cooperation with the Purchasing Division” | 1976 |
| 1996 | the 20th annual evaluation | 1976–77 |
| 1999 | the 23rd year of conducting the tests | 1976–77 |
| 2001 | the 25th year of conducting the tests | 1976–77 |
The 1980 statement is the one that settles it, because of when it was made. It was written in 1979, three years after the events it describes, by the department that ran them. That is about as close to contemporaneous as a historical record gets.
The other three are counts, and counts are hard to fudge. A programme calling itself the 20th annual evaluation in 1996, the 23rd year in 1999 and the 25th year in 2001 is internally consistent to the year, across three separate editions produced two years apart. All three land on a first comparative evaluation covering the 1977 model year — which, since these are model year tests run the previous autumn, means the first one happened in the autumn of 1976.
Four departmental statements, one of them near-contemporaneous, against one federal summary. The 1975 date should be treated as the NIJ’s error.
The detail that reconciles everything
There is a wrinkle, and it comes from a book published forty years later.
The 2019 evaluation opens with a short history, and its first sentence is one nobody quoting the 1975 date seems to have noticed: the Michigan State Police began testing patrol cars in the 1950s.
Not comparing them — testing them. The book explains how it worked. Quotations were requested from the manufacturers, and only the vehicle with the lowest quotation was tested, to see whether it met the department’s purchasing requirements. Pass, and the state bought it. Fail, and presumably the conversation started again.
That went on for years. And then, according to the same passage, the quotations came in four dollars apart — at which point testing the cheapest car alone stopped making any sense, and the department decided to test every vehicle so it could choose the best one.
The most consequential vehicle testing programme in American policing exists because two manufacturers once submitted bids four dollars apart.
So the two dates are not in conflict. They describe different things:
Testing goes back to the 1950s — one car, pass or fail,
against a specification.
The programme — comparative, scored, weighted, with a bid
adjustment and a published book — began in 1976.
McFall, VanDenBerg and Storer did not start Michigan testing police cars. They started Michigan comparing them, which turned out to be the part that mattered.
What they actually built
The 1980 preface contains one more phrase worth pulling out, because it is usually skipped and it explains the whole character of the programme. The tests were developed by the Policy Development and Evaluation Section in cooperation with the Purchasing Division of the Michigan Department of Management and Budget.
Not by a performance department. Not by a driver training unit. By the police and the people who write the cheques, together.
That is why these books work the way they do. The scoring does not produce a winner’s rosette; it produces a dollar figure. Every vehicle’s performance is converted into a penalty, multiplied by one percent of the lowest bid received, and added to that manufacturer’s actual bid price. The lowest adjusted bid wins the contract — and the state then pays the real bid, not the adjusted one.
Performance never wins the contract outright. It buys a discount against the sticker. A programme designed by a purchasing division would work exactly like that, and one designed by enthusiasts would not.
It also explains why the results are trustworthy in a way magazine tests are not. Michigan has to buy the car it publishes numbers about, from a bid process that is a matter of public record, in quantities that make a mistake expensive. The incentive runs towards accuracy and away from flattery.
What we still don’t know
This is where the record runs out, and it is worth being straight about it.
We know three names and a founding year. We do not know which of the three did what, whose idea it was, or what the first comparative test in the autumn of 1976 actually looked like. The first published report covers the 1979 model year — everything before that was internal, and no copy has been located in any public collection.
The 1950s testing is thinner still. One sentence, written sixty-odd years later, describing a practice rather than an event. No report, no date, no name.
Two things would fill those gaps. The 1977 and 1978 evaluations, which exist somewhere as internal documents and have never surfaced. And the recollections of anyone who worked in that section — which is the sort of thing that stops being available, quietly, while everyone assumes somebody else has written it down.
If you knew Bill McFall, Curtis VanDenBerg or David Storer, or worked in the Policy Development and Evaluation Section in the seventies, I would genuinely like to hear from you.