Michigan test archive

2012 Michigan State Police Patrol Vehicle Test

The Panther is gone. Nineteen vehicles, six of them wearing a Ford badge — and Michigan doubles the length of its brake test.

The police category — Chevrolet and Dodge

Gold row: 154 mph and a 125.8-foot stop — the fastest police sedan and the shortest stopping distance in this archive, in the same car, in the same year. Sixteen years after Chevrolet closed the B-body line, the nameplate came back and took both records.

The V6 story is nearly as striking. A 3.6-litre Caprice ran 148 mph and stopped in 126.2 feet — the same top speed as the V8 Caprice of the previous year and a shorter stop than any car in this archive except its own 6.0-litre sibling. The 3.6 Impala reached 100 mph in 18.72 seconds against the 3.9-litre car’s 23.74 the year before: five seconds found in one model year.

Michigan also ran the axle experiment twice over. Two 5.7 HEMI Chargers, 2.65 against 3.06: the taller gear gives up 0.12 seconds to 60 and gains one mile an hour on top. Two 3.6 Chargers, 2.65 against 3.07: the shorter gear is 0.27 seconds quicker to 60 and level on top speed. Thirty-two years after the programme first ran two identical cars with different final drives, it was still measuring the same trade.

Ford’s replacements for the Crown Victoria

Gold row: the turbocharged car, and the only one of the six that belongs in the same conversation as the Caprice and the Charger. Its 5.92-second 0–60 is 0.01 seconds off the 6.0-litre Caprice and its 148 mph matches the V6 Caprice exactly. Ford’s answer to losing a 4.6-litre V8 was a 3.5-litre V6 with two turbochargers, and on this evidence it worked.

The naturally aspirated cars are a different matter. At 7.77 to 8.19 seconds and a governed 130 or 131 mph they are quicker than the Crown Victoria they replaced — the 2011 car needed 8.87 seconds and ran 119 with the 3.55 axle — but they are slower than every Caprice and both Impalas, and slower to 60 than two of the three V6 Chargers on this page.

The braking, though, is excellent across all of them: 128.4 to 131.8 feet, with the front-drive Utility stopping in 128.4 feet — shorter than any sedan Ford had ever brought to this test, and shorter than the 1993 Camaro’s long-standing record. Note also that every Ford in the test carried “N/A” in the fuel economy column; official EPA figures did not exist at press time.

Vehicle dynamics

Gold row: 1:34.39 is the quickest car lap at Grattan anywhere in this archive. Nineteen cars ran, and the spread from quickest to slowest is 7.71 seconds.

Note where the EcoBoost sedan finishes. Its 1:35.85 is fourth of nineteen, ahead of both Caprices bar the E85 car and ahead of every naturally aspirated Ford by nearly four seconds.

The motorcycles

Gold row: the Kawasaki takes two more archive records. 4.02 seconds to 60 mph beats the BMW’s 4.10 from 2008, and 8.29 seconds to 100 takes nearly a second and a half off its own 2011 figure of 9.70. Nothing on four wheels in thirty-four years of these tests has come close to either.

Two Victory machines appear for the first time — the Vision and the Commander I — and both out-accelerate the Harleys while running eight to sixteen miles an hour faster. The Electra Glide’s 31.60 seconds to 100 mph is the slowest run to that speed anywhere in the motorcycle records, though it posted the best braking figure of the six at 139.0 feet.

Ergonomics and communications

The communications section is where the new cars struggled, and it struggled across the board. Trunk accessibility scored 3.28 for the Police Interceptor sedan and 3.27 for the Utility — the lowest communications marks in the modern archive — with the Caprice at 4.99 and the Charger, best of the group, at only 5.28. Every vehicle in this test scored between 4.4 and 6.3 on engine-compartment and dashboard access. The technicians who had to fit equipment into these cars did not enjoy any of them.

The Caprice again shows the split that defined it in 2011: 9.17 for rear-seat legroom, the best figure on the page alongside the Tahoe’s 9.00 — and 4.76 for dashboard accessibility, the worst.