Michigan test archive
1993 Michigan State Police Patrol Vehicle Test
The Mustang SSP’s last stand, the new Camaro that ended it — and a Taurus that qualified by one hundredth of a second.
Some changings of the guard happen in press releases. This one happened on a timing sheet. Twelve vehicles ran the fall 1992 test — six police package, six special service — and among them were the last Special Service package Mustangs Michigan would ever test and the first of the new-generation 5.7-liter Camaros. The Camaro out-ran the Mustang everywhere that counts: 154 mph against 137, quicker to every speed, and nearly three seconds a lap faster around the pursuit course. Eleven years after Michigan tested a Mustang and wouldn’t print the numbers, the numbers now printed its retirement. A detail for the road’s end: the two Mustangs were the only vehicles in the entire field without anti-lock brakes.
The sedans had their own headline. The 5.7-liter Caprice — throttle-body injection, in the new aero body — reached 60 in 8.77 seconds, 100 in 25.86, and ran 132.0 mph: ten miles an hour up on the fastest sedan of 1989, and a figure that matched the legendary 1983 Mustang’s top speed exactly. Michigan also tested a curiosity pair: two 5.0 Caprices identical but for their axles, a 3.08:1 and a tall 2.56:1 — and the tall-geared car was slowest to 100 by nine and a half seconds yet topped out 11 mph faster, gearing physics demonstrated with state money.
And the qualification bar — now 10.3, 17.8 and 29.9 seconds with 110 mph inside one mile — produced the year’s finest small print: the Ford Taurus cleared the 0–100 gate at 29.89 seconds. By one hundredth of a second.
The police package cars
| Car | Engine | 0–60 (s) | 0–80 (s) | 0–100 (s) | Top speed (mph) | Dynamics (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Caprice | 5.7L TBI | 8.77 | 15.48 | 25.86 | 132.0 | 85.87 |
| Ford Crown Victoria | 4.6L PFI | 9.57 | 16.29 | 27.91 | 123.0 | 87.57 |
| Ford Taurus | 3.8L PFI | 9.55 | 17.20 | 29.89 | 123.0 | 86.86 |
| Chevrolet Caprice (3.08:1 axle) | 5.0L TBI | 11.14 | 20.23 | 35.28 | 110.1 | 88.91 |
| Chevrolet Caprice (2.56:1 axle) | 5.0L TBI | 11.86 | 21.58 | 41.56 | 121.0 | — |
| Chevrolet Lumina | 3.1L PFI | 11.18 | 20.56 | 38.23 | 115.0 | 89.95 |
Measured against the year’s gates: the 5.7 Caprice, Crown Victoria and Taurus cleared everything — the Taurus’s 0–100 with 0.01 seconds to spare. Both 5.0 Caprices and the Lumina missed the 10.3-second 0–60 gate. The bulletin does not name the year’s winner — the scoring belongs to the full report (see below).
The special service vehicles
| Vehicle | Engine | 0–60 (s) | 0–80 (s) | 0–100 (s) | Top speed (mph) | Dynamics (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Camaro (automatic) ‡ | 5.7L PFI | 6.18 | 10.12 | 15.82 | 154.0 | 79.52 |
| Chevrolet Camaro (6-speed) ‡ | 5.7L PFI | 6.10 | 10.33 | 16.12 | 147.1* | 80.12 |
| Ford Mustang (5-speed) | 5.0L PFI-H.O. | 6.59 | 11.36 | 18.45 | 137.0 | 82.28 |
| Ford Mustang (automatic) | 5.0L PFI-H.O. | 7.98 | 13.18 | 22.34 | 135.1 | 83.39 |
| Chevrolet Caprice Station Wagon | 5.7L TBI | 9.99 | 18.39 | 32.15 | 112.0 | 89.33 |
| Jeep Cherokee (4WD) | 4.0L PFI | 9.84 | 18.45 | 34.15 | 115.0 | 87.00 |
Gold row: fastest vehicle of the entire test — the new Camaro’s 154.0 mph and 79.52-second lap average are records for the program’s published series to this point. The 6-speed car was quicker to 60 but gave up its top-speed run to an instrumentation failure at 147.1. And read the Mustang rows as the end of an era: the SSP’s 137.0 mph and 82.28-second laps — figures that set records five years earlier — were now third-best in their own category.
Complete acceleration data — every 10-mph increment, all twelve vehicles
| 0 to… | Camaro auto ‡ | Camaro 6-spd ‡ | Mustang 5-spd | Mustang auto | Caprice 5.7 | Crown Vic 4.6 | Taurus 3.8 | Cherokee 4.0 | Wagon 5.7 | Lumina 3.1 | Caprice 5.0 (3.08) | Caprice 5.0 (2.56) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 mph | 1.49 | 1.64 | 1.67 | 1.84 | 1.78 | 1.94 | 1.88 | 2.01 | 1.83 | 2.07 | 2.17 | 2.30 |
| 30 mph | 2.38 | 2.40 | 2.50 | 3.27 | 2.94 | 3.56 | 3.12 | 3.43 | 3.16 | 3.51 | 3.68 | 3.98 |
| 40 mph | 3.44 | 3.38 | 3.61 | 4.64 | 4.47 | 5.19 | 4.83 | 5.00 | 4.97 | 5.52 | 5.57 | 5.88 |
| 50 mph | 4.63 | 4.70 | 4.99 | 6.11 | 6.49 | 7.19 | 7.02 | 7.26 | 7.25 | 8.04 | 8.12 | 8.65 |
| 60 mph | 6.18 | 6.10 | 6.59 | 7.98 | 8.77 | 9.57 | 9.55 | 9.84 | 9.99 | 11.18 | 11.14 | 11.86 |
| 70 mph | 7.89 | 8.33 | 8.90 | 10.42 | 11.60 | 12.51 | 12.94 | 13.00 | 13.61 | 15.18 | 15.14 | 15.76 |
| 80 mph | 10.12 | 10.33 | 11.36 | 13.18 | 15.48 | 16.29 | 17.20 | 18.45 | 18.39 | 20.56 | 20.23 | 21.58 |
| 90 mph | 12.89 | 12.94 | 14.32 | 17.33 | 19.84 | 21.61 | 22.35 | 25.22 | 24.22 | 27.94 | 26.93 | 30.52 |
| 100 mph | 15.82 | 16.12 | 18.45 | 22.34 | 25.86 | 27.91 | 29.89 | 34.15 | 32.15 | 38.23 | 35.28 | 41.56 |
This bulletin printed no quarter-mile times; they belong to the full report. The 6-speed Camaro was quickest to 60 (6.10) but the automatic led from 70 mph up — and note the Mustang 5-speed splitting the two Camaros as far as 40 mph before the LT1s walked away.
Brakes — the shortest stop yet, and a table the scan half-ate
What the bulletin shows cleanly is the top of the field, and it is a record: a Camaro averaged 30.34 ft/s² across its two impending-skid stops — a computed 127.6-foot stop from 60 mph, the shortest braking figure in this archive so far, and the first average over 30. Its Phase I stop measured 128.8 feet. Across the twelve-vehicle field the averages ran from 30.34 down to 22.76 ft/s².
The same honesty as the 1995 page applies here: in the archive scan the braking table’s column headers did not survive, so individual results below the anchored Camaro figure can’t be assigned to cars without guessing. The per-car braking rows will be added from the full 1993 book. The acceleration and dynamics tables above are unaffected.
Ergonomics and fuel economy
| Vehicle | Ergonomics (pts) | EPA city (mpg) |
|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Caprice | 230.87 | 14.0 (5.7) / 17.4 (5.0, 3.08) / 17.3 (5.0, 2.56) |
| Chevrolet Caprice Station Wagon | 230.80 | 16.5 |
| Ford Crown Victoria | 207.13 | 16.7 |
| Ford Taurus | 205.47 | 18.8 |
| Chrysler Jeep Cherokee | 187.60 | 14.7 |
| Chevrolet Camaro | 185.67 | 16.6 (auto) / 16.7 (6-speed) |
| Chevrolet Lumina | 173.93 | 18.6 |
| Ford Mustang | 170.33 | 17.3 (auto) / 16.6 (5-speed) |
The big Caprice’s 230.87 is the best ergonomics total of the archive to this point — the sedan and its wagon twin finishing within seven hundredths of a point of each other — while the outgoing Mustang, as ever, finished last with the installers.
What the bulletin doesn’t hold
This page is built from the NIJ’s TAP bulletin of October 1992 as published in The Police Chief — a synopsis. The per-lap dynamics, quarter-mile times, per-car braking phases, final weighted scoring, the year’s winner, bid prices and hardware specifications belong to the full 1993 report, which was never digitized. Those numbers will be added to this page from an original copy of the book; as far as I can tell, they are not available anywhere else online.
What 1993 settled
The torch passed in public, in a table, with both hands on it. The Special Service Mustang — the car that rewrote this archive in 1983 and again in 1987 — ran its last Michigan test still fast, still honest, still without anti-lock brakes, and was beaten in every column by the new LT1 Camaro: 154 mph, laps under eighty seconds, and the shortest brake stop the program had ever measured. The pony car era didn’t end; it changed uniforms.
Beneath the headline, the sedan future was assembling itself: a 132-mph Caprice one model year before the LT1 arrived to finish the job, a modular Crown Victoria quietly clearing every gate, and a front-drive Taurus scraping through the 0–100 requirement by a single hundredth — proof of how exactly Michigan’s stopwatch drew the line between a police car and a car.