Michigan test archive

2018 Michigan State Police Patrol Vehicle Test

A hybrid returns 40 mpg, a pickup reaches 60 quicker than most of the sedans, and Chevrolet turns up with nothing but Tahoes.

The police category

Gold row: quickest to 60 and 100, highest trap speed and fastest lap. But look at the third row. The F-150 pickup reached 60 mph in 6.29 seconds, one hundredth quicker than the EcoBoost Utility and more than a second quicker than either Tahoe. Its lap time is the slowest on the page, and its top speed is governed to a round 100 — but the acceleration figure is not what a pickup was supposed to produce.

The braking column moved sharply the wrong way this year. In 2017 eleven of thirteen vehicles stopped inside 131 feet; here only one does. The two Tahoes are the worst of it at 146.2 and 147.9 feet, eight and a half and twelve and a half feet longer than their own 2017 figures, and the EcoBoost sedan needs 141.8 against 130.7 the year before. Nothing in the book explains a field-wide change of that size, and it is worth treating with care.

One number hidden in the per-driver laps deserves an airing. The Ford Special Service Police — the two-litre car — was lapped by its four drivers in 1:42.34, 1:43.54, 1:48.85 and 1:50.76. That is a spread of eight and a half seconds between the quickest and slowest driver on the same vehicle, by far the largest in this archive; the other twelve cars sit within one to two seconds. Something about that car did not suit everybody.

The motorcycles

Gold row: the Yamaha FJR1300, new to the archive, takes the highest motorcycle top speed ever recorded here at 143 mph — and needed 40,727 feet, or 7.71 miles, to find it, more than five times the distance any other machine required. It also matched the 2012 Kawasaki’s pace to 60 at 4.10 seconds and reached 100 in 9.81.

Harley-Davidson brought four machines representing a tuning ladder — a standard FLHP, an FLHP Stage II, an FLHTP Stage I and an FLHTP Stage IV — and the ladder is legible in a single column. From standard to Stage IV, 0–100 falls from 19.12 seconds to 12.41. Nearly seven seconds, on the same motorcycle, bought entirely with tuning parts.

And the electric Zero has closed right up: 4.80 seconds to 60, against 6.89 in 2016, and 102 mph against 95. It is now quicker to 60 than two of the four Harleys.

Communications and fuel

The hybrid’s 40 mpg city and 38 combined is not a marginal improvement on anything in this archive; it is a different order of number. The best figure any previous police vehicle recorded was the 1996 Geo Tracker’s 22, and the best from a full-size sedan was 20. Against that, it scored 6.74 on communications — the lowest on the page, with 5.67 for engine-compartment access — because a hybrid drivetrain leaves nowhere to put anything.