Michigan test archive
2000 Michigan State Police Patrol Vehicle Test
A front-drive Impala takes the Caprice’s place, a Volvo built with the California Highway Patrol runs 153 mph, and a Camaro finally gets a clean 160.
Ten vehicles ran from September 18 to 20, 1999 — eight police package, two special service — and the field had thinned to the bone. The Lumina was discontinued. The Tahoe was withdrawn entirely, offered in neither package for this model year. What Chevrolet brought instead was the Impala: front-wheel drive, a 200-horsepower 3.8-liter V6, four-wheel independent suspension, traction control and a tire pressure monitor, entered as the replacement for a Caprice that had been dead for four model years.
It is easy to file the front-drive Impala as a comedown, and the timing figures encourage it — 8.99 seconds to 60, 124 mph, a second and a half slower around the course than a Caprice would have been. But look at the column that decides purchases. On ergonomics and communications the Impala scored 213.75, and the Ford Police Interceptor scored 213.58. Seventeen hundredths of a point separated the new front-driver from the incumbent, and the Impala did it while returning 20 mpg in the city against the Ford’s 16.
The genuine surprise, though, is Swedish. Volvo’s engineers had spent the year working with the California Highway Patrol on a new chassis tuning for the police-package cars, and added throttle-based spin control and 16-inch brakes with electronic brake force distribution. The result: the S–70 sedan reached 60 mph in 7.48 seconds, 100 in 17.86, and ran 153 mph — nearly a second and a half quicker to 60 and seven miles an hour faster than the same car a year earlier. Both Volvos out-ran and out-braked every American sedan in the test, and the wagon stopped from 60 mph in a computed 129.5 feet, the shortest distance recorded in this archive since 1993.
And at the top, with the tests still at the Chrysler Proving Grounds where there is room to run, the automatic Camaro recorded 160 mph — the highest speed in the archive.
Police package
| Vehicle | 0–60 (s) | 0–100 (s) | Top speed | Dynamics | Brakes (ft/s²) | 60–0 (ft) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Camaro (automatic) | 5.80 | 13.92 | 160 | 1:20.49 | 28.53 | 135.7 |
| Chevrolet Camaro (6-speed) | 5.77 | 13.57 | 159 | 1:20.56 | ‡ | ‡ |
| Volvo S–70 T5 Sedan | 7.48 | 17.86 | 153 | 1:23.42 | 29.28 | 132.3 |
| Volvo V–70 T5 Wagon | 7.75 | 18.56 | 152 | 1:23.80 | 29.90 | 129.5 |
| Ford Police Interceptor | 8.75 | 26.09 | 129 | 1:25.71 | 27.02 | 143.3 |
| Chevrolet Impala | 8.99 | 24.92 | 124 | 1:25.49 | 27.13 | 142.7 |
| Jeep Cherokee (2WD) | 9.52 | 31.08 | 111 | 1:25.82 | 25.58 | 151.4 |
| Jeep Cherokee (4WD) | 10.24 | 35.32 | 108 | 1:27.58 | 25.23 | 153.5 |
Gold row: 160 mph, the fastest speed in this archive. The two Camaros are separated by three hundredths of a second to 60 mph and seven hundredths of a second a lap — the closest pairing the program has recorded between a manual and an automatic version of the same car.
The line worth staring at is the Impala’s against the Interceptor’s. The front-drive Chevrolet is 0.24 seconds slower to 60 and five miles an hour slower on top — and it is quicker around the road course, 1:25.49 against 1:25.71, and it stops half a foot shorter. Whatever the front-drive layout cost in straight-line authority, it did not cost handling. Note too that the Interceptor’s 129 mph is not a limit of the car: Ford fitted a 130-mph speed limiter as standard for 2000.
And the Jeeps kept sliding. The four-wheel-drive Cherokee took 10.24 seconds to 60 — over the 10-second bar — needed 35.32 to reach 100, and topped out at 108 mph.
The special-service vehicles
| Vehicle | 0–60 (s) | 0–100 (s) | Top speed | Dynamics | Brakes (ft/s²) | 60–0 (ft) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ford Expedition (4WD) | 10.93 | 37.36 | 106 | ** | 23.07 | 167.8 |
| Ford Explorer (2WD) | 11.55 | 49.02 | 104 | ** | 22.40 | 172.8 |
The Explorer needed 49.02 seconds to reach 100 mph — the slowest figure in the archive by a wide margin, more than eleven seconds behind the Expedition and nearly thirty-six seconds behind the Camaro. Read alongside its 172.8-foot stop, it is a clear illustration of why Michigan invented the special-service category in the first place rather than simply failing these vehicles.
Complete acceleration ladders — every 10-mph increment, all ten vehicles
| 0 to… | Camaro auto | Camaro 6-spd | Impala | Cherokee 2WD | Cherokee 4WD | Interceptor | Expedition | Explorer | Volvo S–70 | Volvo V–70 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 mph | 1.49 | 1.62 | 2.05 | 1.97 | 2.07 | 1.81 | 2.06 | 2.10 | 2.34 | 2.43 |
| 30 mph | 2.38 | 2.48 | 3.28 | 3.31 | 3.49 | 3.04 | 3.76 | 3.73 | 3.33 | 3.43 |
| 40 mph | 3.29 | 3.39 | 4.65 | 4.79 | 5.03 | 4.69 | 5.56 | 5.78 | 4.39 | 4.55 |
| 50 mph | 4.38 | 4.56 | 6.59 | 7.07 | 7.56 | 6.50 | 7.73 | 8.31 | 5.75 | 5.98 |
| 60 mph | 5.80 | 5.77 | 8.99 | 9.52 | 10.24 | 8.75 | 10.93 | 11.55 | 7.48 | 7.75 |
| 70 mph | 7.29 | 7.40 | 11.63 | 12.61 | 13.70 | 11.68 | 14.35 | 15.59 | 9.33 | 9.64 |
| 80 mph | 8.97 | 9.06 | 14.85 | 17.41 | 19.30 | 15.33 | 18.81 | 21.99 | 11.54 | 12.06 |
| 90 mph | 11.30 | 11.07 | 19.40 | 23.26 | 25.94 | 19.89 | 27.17 | 30.49 | 14.63 | 15.23 |
| 100 mph | 13.92 | 13.57 | 24.92 | 31.08 | 35.32 | 26.09 | 37.36 | 49.02 | 17.86 | 18.56 |
| Top speed | 160 | 159 | 124 | 111 | 108 | 129 | 106 | 104 | 153 | 152 |
The Impala’s ladder repays a slow read. It is behind the Police Interceptor at every gate up to 80 mph and then passes it: 24.92 seconds to 100 against 26.09. A 3.8-liter V6 driving the front wheels beat a 4.6-liter V8 driving the rears to 100 mph, in a police test, in 1999.
Complete braking data — both phases, nine vehicles
| Vehicle | Phase I speed | Phase I distance (ft) | Phase I rate | Phase II speed | Phase II distance (ft) | Phase II rate | Average rate | 60–0 computed (ft) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volvo V–70 T5 Wagon | 60.4 | 132.32 | 29.69 | 60.4 | 130.47 | 30.11 | 29.90 | 129.5 |
| Volvo S–70 T5 Sedan | 60.2 | 133.17 | 29.26 | 60.1 | 132.78 | 29.29 | 29.28 | 132.3 |
| Chevrolet Camaro (auto) | 60.3 | 138.28 | 28.25 | 60.4 | 136.27 | 28.82 | 28.53 | 135.7 |
| Chevrolet Impala | 60.4 | 144.20 | 27.17 | 60.2 | 143.97 | 27.09 | 27.13 | 142.7 |
| Ford Police Interceptor | 60.4 | 144.63 | 27.17 | 60.5 | 146.73 | 26.87 | 27.02 | 143.3 |
| Jeep Cherokee (2WD) | 60.3 | 153.77 | 25.44 | 60.2 | 151.48 | 25.73 | 25.58 | 151.4 |
| Jeep Cherokee (4WD) | 60.3 | 154.30 | 25.32 | 60.3 | 155.70 | 25.15 | 25.23 | 153.5 |
| Ford Expedition (4WD) | 60.3 | 168.80 | 23.20 | 60.4 | 170.85 | 22.95 | 23.07 | 167.8 |
| Ford Explorer (2WD) | 60.5 | 185.10 | 21.32 | 60.3 | 166.65 | 23.49 | 22.40 | 172.8 |
Gold row: the shortest stop in this archive since the 1993 Camaro’s 127.6 feet, and the only vehicle here to improve by more than four tenths of a ft/s² between phases — the Volvo wagon stopped harder after six hard stops and a heat soak than it did fresh. Volvo’s engineers had fitted 16-inch brakes with electronic brake force distribution for this model year, and the two Volvos took the top two places by a clear margin over everything American.
At the other end, the Explorer’s phases disagree violently: 185.10 feet in Phase I, 166.65 in Phase II — an 18-foot improvement that mirrors the previous year’s finding that Ford’s trucks were arriving with brakes the factory had not bedded in.
Ergonomics, communications and fuel
| Vehicle | Ergonomics & communications | City | Highway | Combined |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Impala | 213.75 | 20 | 29 | 23 |
| Ford Police Interceptor | 213.58 | 16 | 21 | 18 |
| Ford Expedition | 208.36 | 12 | 16 | 14 |
| Ford Explorer | 199.78 | 16 | 21 | 18 |
| Volvo S–70 T5 Sedan | 176.92 | 19 | 27 | 22 |
| Volvo V–70 T5 Wagon | 176.63 | 19 | 27 | 22 |
| Jeep Cherokee | 173.56 | 16 | 22 | 18 |
| Chevrolet Camaro | 159.35 | 17 | 27 | 20 |
Gold row, by 0.17 points. With the Tahoe absent this is the first year since 1996 that a sedan tops the ergonomics table, and the sedan that does it is a front-driver on a 110.5-inch wheelbase — nearly four inches shorter than the Police Interceptor, with 104.7 cubic feet of interior against the Ford’s 109.3, and it still scored higher with the officers and the installers. Add four miles a gallon in the city and a combined figure of 23 mpg, and the case for the Impala starts to look less like a compromise and more like arithmetic.
What the manufacturers changed for 2000
Chevrolet discontinued both the Lumina and the Tahoe police packages and introduced the Impala as the Caprice’s replacement — front-wheel drive, GM’s 200-horsepower 3.8-liter V6 carried over from the Lumina police car, four-wheel independent suspension, four-wheel ABS disc brakes, traction control and a tire pressure monitoring system. Chevrolet’s engineers acknowledged the front-drive layout as a significant departure from police-package tradition and stated they had spent considerable time on durability. The Tahoe was offered in neither package for 2000, with a possible return as special service for 2001. The Camaro carried over unchanged.
Ford gave the Police Interceptor an aluminium metal-matrix driveshaft to improve top speed and acceleration, improved rear springs, a standard 130-mph speed limiter, and a one-touch driver’s window. It also removed a feature: in response to repeated requests from the law enforcement community on officer-safety grounds, Ford eliminated the “auto-off” parking brake that released automatically when the car was shifted out of park. A headliner without the built-in front map light became optional. Ford declined to test the commercially available CNG Police Interceptor this year, so the natural-gas car disappears from the tables after three appearances.
DaimlerChrysler Jeep fitted the Cherokee with a larger 124-amp alternator, engine refinements for fuel economy, and higher-metallic brake pads that Jeep’s engineers said would improve braking. The measured braking figures moved very little.
Volvo made the year’s most consequential changes: a new chassis tuning for the police-package cars developed jointly with the California Highway Patrol, “high-performance spin control” that trims throttle to match engine torque to available grip, and 16-inch brakes with electronic brake force distribution intended to hold the car stable when braking into a turn.
Two notes on the source
A contradiction closes. For years these bulletins described the dynamics score two different ways on the same page — “the fastest of at least 9 timed laps” in the methodology and “fastest 12 laps” in the table footnote. The 2000 bulletin states it once and cleanly: sixteen timed laps by four drivers, and the score is the average of the twelve fastest. That matches the arithmetic of the published 1999 lap times exactly, so the twelve-lap figure is what every year in this archive has been using.
A contradiction that hasn’t closed. The bulletin’s top-speed section still describes the competitive objective as the actual top speed attained “up to 150 mph” — wording introduced when the tests were held at the speedway and drivers were capped for safety. Four vehicles in this same bulletin are credited with more than 150. The cap is stale text, not a live limit, but I am noting it rather than silently correcting it.
This page is built from the four-page NLECTC bulletin. The full report holds the per-lap dynamics, the individual brake sheets, the vehicle specification pages, the final weighted scoring, the year’s winner and the bid prices.
What 2000 settled
The full-size rear-drive police sedan stopped being the default and became a single surviving example. The Caprice was four years gone, the Lumina was discontinued, the Tahoe didn’t show up, and the entire American sedan case now rested on one Ford and one front-wheel-drive Chevrolet. That the Impala beat the Police Interceptor around the road course, to 100 mph, on fuel and — by seventeen hundredths of a point — on the ergonomics score the officers themselves assigned, is the most quietly significant result of the year.
And the fastest police sedan Michigan could find was Swedish, tuned in California. Volvo’s collaboration with the CHP produced a 2.3-litre four-cylinder that ran 153 mph, reached 60 in 7.48 seconds, and stopped shorter than anything the domestic industry brought. It never displaced the Interceptor in American fleets. But for one year in the record, the answer to “what is the best-performing police-package sedan in the test?” was not an American car at all.