The vehicle

Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor

Forty-five entries across twenty-four Michigan tests. The car that took most of the American police market and held it for a decade — without ever getting faster.

Every test

The principal car each year. Alternative axles, natural-gas and E85 variants are in the full table. Gold-edged rows are the Taurus-based car.

Thirteen years without getting faster

Read the top speed column between 1999 and 2011 and it barely moves:

That is not a car being developed. It is a car being kept in production.

And it is the answer to why the Crown Victoria dominated. It did not win on performance — the Caprice it outlived ran 139 mph in 1996, and a police Camaro was doing 160 while the Interceptor sat at 129. It won by being repairable, durable, available, and still there when everything else stopped.

The 2012 break

Then the name moves to a different car entirely, and the numbers jump in a way they had not done in twenty years.

Three seconds quicker to sixty and nineteen miles an hour faster, in one model year. The Panther had been in the books since 1983.

The Taurus-based car peaked at 150 mph in 2013 and again in 2016, and left the programme after 2018. By 2025 Michigan tested no police sedan of any kind.

Two entries worth knowing about

1996, 149.5 mph, no anti-lock brakes. That car was not in the test to compete. Ford submitted it alongside its own ABS car purely so the two could be braked against each other on the same surface on the same day. The difference was sixteen feet — that story is here.

The natural-gas cars. Michigan tested CNG and NGV Crown Victorias through the late 1990s and into 2001. They ran 104 to 123 mph and were slower to sixty than anything else Ford brought. They appear in the full table rather than above, because they were never the patrol car.

Where it sits in the record

Four entries carry the source’s own limiter footnote, meaning the figure reports an electronic setting rather than what the car could do — why that matters.