Michigan test archive
2015 Michigan State Police Patrol Vehicle Test
Michigan reprints a Ford’s numbers in red because it had to run the car twice — and a V6 Charger records the shortest stop in the archive.
Fourteen vehicles and seven motorcycles, and the most revealing thing in the book is a colour. The Ford Police Interceptor Utility 3.7 AWD appears twice in the acceleration table, and the second set of figures is printed in red with a footnote explaining that the vehicle was retested on 7 November 2014, weeks after the main session. The difference is substantial: 8.57 seconds to 60 on the first attempt, 7.76 on the second — eight tenths of a second, and more than two seconds to 100 mph. Michigan printed both.
That is the same instinct as the 1999 report, which recorded that a Volvo was retested at the manufacturer’s request and then scored on the worse of the two runs. Sixteen years apart, the same department showing its working rather than quietly publishing the number it preferred.
The year’s outright result is a braking figure, and it comes from an unexpected place. The 3.6-litre V6 Charger with 3.08 gears averaged 31.04 ft/s² across twenty stops — the highest deceleration rate in this archive, and a computed 60-to-0 distance of about 124.7 feet. Its HEMI sibling was right behind at 30.95. The two shortest-stopping vehicles Michigan has ever measured are both Dodges, and one of them is the slow one.
And a four-wheel-drive Tahoe entered the police category for the first time — then did not run the road course at all, its dynamics row printed as a dash.
The police category
| Vehicle | 0–60 (s) | 0–100 (s) | Top speed | ¼ mile | Dynamics | Brakes (ft/s²) | 60–0 (ft) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dodge Charger 3.6L (3.08) | 8.14 | 20.77 | 141 | 16.23 @ 88.58 | 1:36.62 | 31.04 | 124.7 |
| Dodge Charger 5.7L (2.62) | 6.38 | 15.48 | 148 | 14.77 @ 97.89 | 1:35.43 | 30.95 | 125.1 |
| Chevrolet Caprice 6.0L | 6.17 | 14.69 | 156 § (147 as first run) | 14.67 @ 100.08 | 1:35.09 | 30.54 | 126.8 |
| Dodge Charger 5.7L (3.08 AWD) | 6.32 | 15.63 | 149 | 14.82 @ 97.17 | 1:34.80 | 29.46 | 131.4 |
| Ford PI Sedan EcoBoost AWD 3.5L | 5.86 | 14.19 | 149 | 14.35 @ 100.58 | 1:35.02 | 29.45 | 131.5 |
| Dodge Charger 3.6L (2.62) | 8.06 | 20.47 | 141 | 16.23 @ 91.46 | 1:36.93 | 30.35 | 127.6 |
| Chevrolet Caprice 3.6L | 7.84 | 19.41 | 147 | 16.00 @ 90.39 | 1:36.82 | 29.83 | 129.8 |
| Ford PI Utility EcoBoost AWD 3.5L | 6.55 | 16.13 | 132 | 14.95 @ 96.55 | 1:37.42 | 29.22 | 132.5 |
| Ford PI Sedan AWD 3.7L | 7.84 | 19.70 | 132 | 16.00 @ 90.85 | 1:37.45 | 29.10 | 133.1 |
| Ford PI Sedan FWD 3.5L | 7.83 | 19.82 | 132 | 16.13 @ 91.20 | 1:38.02 | 28.96 | 133.7 |
| Ford PI Utility AWD 3.7L ‡ | 8.57 | 22.78 | 132 | 16.50 @ 87.14 | 1:39.58 | 29.00 | 133.5 |
| Ford PI Utility AWD 3.7L — retest, 7 Nov 2014 | 7.76 | 20.27 | not re-run | 15.96 @ 90.29 | ‡ | ‡ | ‡ |
| Chevrolet Tahoe 5.3L | 7.31 | 18.99 | 139 | 15.74 @ 91.47 | 1:39.76 | 28.54 | 135.7 |
| Chevrolet Impala 3.6L | 7.70 | 19.71 | 150 | 16.02 @ 90.03 | 1:40.69 | 28.72 | 134.8 |
| Chevrolet Tahoe 5.3L 4WD | 7.85 | 20.47 | 121 | 16.16 @ 88.85 | did not run | 28.56 | 135.6 |
Gold row: 31.04 ft/s², the highest deceleration rate recorded in this archive. Both 3.6-litre Chargers and the 2.62-geared HEMI stopped shorter than any Chevrolet or Ford on the page, and the V6 with the short final drive stopped shortest of all. Note that the AWD HEMI, quickest around the road course at 1:34.80, has the worst braking of the four Dodges by a clear margin.
The muted row is the four-wheel-drive Tahoe, new to the police category and an odd entry in it. It ran 121 mph — eighteen slower than the two-wheel-drive version and the lowest top speed of any police-category vehicle since the Crown Victoria left — and its vehicle dynamics result is printed as a dash. It did not lap.
§ The Caprice 6.0’s 147 mph is not the car’s figure. It was submitted with an incorrect speed-limiting calibration; Michigan says so on page two and retested it on 7 October 2014 with the proper calibration, when it ran 156 mph — printed on its own sheet as “RETEST TOP SPEED ATTAINED”. This archive uses 156, which makes it the fastest speed any police sedan has recorded here, ahead of the 155 the same car set in 2014, 2016 and 2017.
The four-wheel-drive Tahoe’s dashes are not a decision either. Two drivers completed their runs on 22 September before the vehicle left the track; General Motors traced it to a temporary brake torque output difference. It was retested on 23 October 2014 and the book prints that run as a separate row, “Chevrolet Tahoe 5.3L 4WD (RETEST 10/23/2014)”, at 1:39.64.
The motorcycles
| Machine | 0–60 (s) | 0–100 (s) | Top speed | ¼ mile |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BMW R 1200 RT-P | 3.99 | 9.14 | 141 | 12.51 @ 116.08 |
| Moto Guzzi Norge 1200 | 4.69 | 12.51 | 127 | 13.29 @ 107.07 |
| Moto Guzzi California 1400 | 4.94 | 15.01 | 117 | 13.84 @ 99.33 |
| Harley-Davidson Electra Glide FLHTP Special | 5.27 | 15.48 | 110 | 14.39 @ 89.32 |
| Harley-Davidson Road King FLHP | 5.49 | 20.11 | 113 | 14.15 @ 98.00 |
| Harley-Davidson Electra Glide FLHTP | 5.62 | 19.34 | 113 | 14.44 @ 94.70 |
| Can-Am Spyder RT-P | 6.55 | 20.56 | 114 | 15.11 @ 96.00 |
The BMW’s 12.51 seconds at 116.08 mph is the quickest and fastest quarter mile in this archive, and its 9.14 seconds to 100 the quickest by any vehicle before the 2026 BMW’s 7.97.
| Machine | Dynamics | Brakes (ft/s²) | 60–0 (ft) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Can-Am Spyder RT-P | 1:54.60 | 30.71 | 126.1 |
| Moto Guzzi Norge 1200 | 1:43.10 | 29.71 | 130.3 |
| BMW R 1200 RT-P | 1:39.84 | 29.04 | 133.3 |
| Moto Guzzi California 1400 | 1:51.03 | 28.88 | 134.1 |
| Harley-Davidson Road King FLHP | 1:48.74 | 27.03 | 143.3 |
| Harley-Davidson Electra Glide FLHTP | 1:49.09 | 26.80 | 144.5 |
| Harley-Davidson Electra Glide FLHTP Special | 1:47.78 | 26.45 | 146.4 |
Gold row: the Can-Am Spyder RT-P, the first three-wheeled machine in this archive, and it stopped better than every motorcycle here by a wide margin — 30.71 ft/s², about eighteen feet shorter than the best Harley and better than every car in the test except two Dodges. It was also the slowest thing around the road course by three and a half seconds, which is roughly what you would expect from a vehicle that cannot lean.
A second Electra Glide appears this year, badged Special. It lapped 1.31 seconds quicker than the standard car and braked slightly worse. Harley-Davidson now occupied three of the seven motorcycle slots and the bottom three braking positions.
Ergonomics, communications and fuel
| Vehicle | Ergonomics & communications | City mpg |
|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Tahoe | 239.86 | 16 |
| Dodge Charger | 228.46 | 17 (3.6) / 15 (5.7) |
| Ford Police Interceptor Utility | 220.72 | 16 (3.7) / 15 (EcoBoost) |
| Chevrolet Caprice | 220.35 | 18 (3.6) / 15 (6.0) |
| Chevrolet Impala | 210.10 | 17 |
| Ford Police Interceptor sedan | 208.69 | 18 (FWD) / 18 (AWD 3.7) / 16 (EcoBoost) |
The Tahoe’s 239.86 is the highest ergonomics total since 2012 and it earned it on the lines that matter for the job: 9.86 for headroom, 9.43 for ease of entry and exit, 8.64 for rear legroom. The Ford sedan finishes last for the second consecutive year, and for the third consecutive year the reason is the back: 5.36 for rear legroom and 4.71 for rear-seat entry and exit, the lowest single score on the page. The Utility version of the same car scores 7.57 and 7.64 on those two lines.
What 2015 settled
Michigan showed its working again. A Ford Utility was run, produced a poor number, was brought back six weeks later and produced a much better one — and the book printed both, in different colours, with the date of the second attempt. No conclusion is offered and none is needed. The reader is simply told that the figure they are looking at is the second one.
The performance story, meanwhile, has quietly inverted. The quickest car in the test was a turbocharged front-drive-based Ford. The best-stopping car was a V6 Dodge. The best-liked was a sport utility. The 6.0-litre rear-drive V8 Caprice, the traditional answer, was slower on top speed than a front-drive Impala and finished third of fourteen on brakes. Everything the programme had spent forty years measuring still mattered — but by 2015 only the EcoBoost sedan won more than one of the columns.