The vehicle

Chevrolet Caprice 9C1

Forty-nine entries across eighteen Michigan tests, station wagons included. It leaves the tests after 1996, returns fifteen years later as a car built on another continent, and leaves again after 2017.

Every test

The principal car each year, with the best braking any Caprice recorded that year. Shaded rows are the Australian-built car.

§ The 2015 Caprice 6.0L’s 156 mph is from its retest of 7 October 2014, printed on its data sheet. It was first submitted with an incorrect speed-limiting calibration and ran 147, the figure the 2015 book’s summary table and chart print (printed pages 3, 44, 49 and 52).

The table used to have two kinds of gap. The 1990, 1991 and 1994 rows were books this archive had not located; the 1990 and 1994 books are now held, and for 1991 the published bulletin. The one gap left is the other kind: 1997–2010 is not a missing book: no Caprice appears in any of the books held here for those years.

The first one, and why it mattered

Between 1986 and 1996 the Caprice goes from 117 mph to as much as 141.2, and from 10.92 seconds to sixty down to 8.02. The biggest step comes in 1994, when the 5.7 gains sequential port fuel injection and 260 hp and runs 141.2 mph, nine better than the 1993 car, though the 1992 car’s 133 mph was already the fastest sedan figure in these books to that point, three tenths of a mile an hour above the 1978 Plymouth Fury’s 132.7. That 1992 car also needed a computed 181.1 feet to stop from 60 mph, with anti-lock brakes and rear drums: the longest stop by any Caprice sedan in these books that has a braking figure.

The 1996 test is also where Ford submitted a Crown Victoria without anti-lock brakes for brake testing only; it was braked at the same site on the same day as Ford’s own ABS car. The difference was sixteen feet — that story is here.

What Ford did with the fifteen years

With the Caprice gone, the Crown Victoria stayed in every test to 2011, its best top speed between 128 and 130 mph in each one from 1999 to 2011. In eleven of those thirteen tests another sedan ran faster: Volvos, Intrepids, Impalas, the HEMI Charger and, in 2011, the returning Caprice.

The Australian one

The car that returns in 2011 is a Holden, built at Holden’s plant in Elizabeth, near Adelaide, according to Government Fleet (13 January 2017) and GM Authority (1 July 2017); the books held here do not say. It is a different proposition entirely.

By 2014 it recorded 155 mph, and 156 on retest the following year — which remains the fastest figure any police sedan has posted in this archive. It held that through 2016 and 2017 as well.

And in 2012 it stopped from sixty in 125.8 feet, the shortest stop in that test and one of three cars in it to stop in 127 feet or less under the new twenty-stop procedure. Figures from the earlier twelve-stop books are not directly comparable.

That 2012 test also bears on when the sport utility overtook the sedan. The Tahoe ran 139 mph against 130 and 131 for Ford’s new Police Interceptor sedans without the turbocharger (the EcoBoost one ran 148). But the Caprice ran 154 in the same test, so the sedan had not been beaten at all — that did not happen until 2019.

Where it sits in the record

§ The 2015 Caprice’s retest figure; see the note under “Every test” above.