Michigan test archive
Police car tests of the 1970s
The decade the programme was built — and the one the archive can barely reach.
This is the thinnest decade on the site, and the reason is worth stating plainly: the published record barely exists.
Michigan’s comparative evaluation programme began in 1976. Its first published report covers the 1979 model year. Everything before that was internal, and the Michigan State Police have confirmed they do not hold complete reports from the 1970s. One results table survives from 1978, in a re-typeset copy rather than an original.
So this page carries one test year, and around it the documents that explain how the programme came to exist at all.
The tests
| Model year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1976 – 1977 — the programme’s first comparative evaluations. Internal; never published, and not located | |
| 1978 | The earliest results here — a 440 Plymouth at 132.7 mph, two cars disqualified, and the bid adjustment printed as a price ‡ |
| 1979 — the first published report. Not located | |
‡ The 1978 figures come from a re-typeset table rather than an original report, and are flagged as unverified on that page.
What else the decade produced
The testing record is almost empty. The research record is not — the 1970s are when the federal government took the police car seriously for the only time in its history, and most of what it produced went straight into an archive unread.
| Year | What |
|---|---|
| c.1970 | Wayne State University measures the 1969 Ford and Plymouth and builds the centre console every American police car now has |
| 1973 | The National Bureau of Standards prices a patrol car — the police package cost $400, the big engine $67 |
| 1974–77 | The federal government builds a prototype police car with a database in the boot, lines up twenty more for New Orleans and Dallas, then cancels it |
| 1975 | The Los Angeles County Sheriff runs its own test — and a compact Nova beats every full-size car in it |
| 1975 | RAND writes a program to work out how many patrol cars a department needs, in 240 kilobytes |
| 1976 | Michigan starts comparing every car instead of the cheapest, because two bids came in four dollars apart |
| 1978 | The National Bureau of Standards surveys emergency lighting and titles its first section “The Present Chaos” |