The vehicles
Every police vehicle, compared
Every vehicle with its own page in this archive, set side by side. Each figure comes from a Michigan State Police test.
Michigan tests every vehicle by the same procedure, which means the books contain an answer to a question the hobby argues about endlessly and never settles: which was actually the best police vehicle?
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on which column you look at, and the table below shows why.
Best figure ever recorded, by vehicle
| Vehicle | Tested | Entries | Top speed | 0–60 | 60–0 | Decel ft/s² |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sedans | ||||||
| Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor | 1983–2018 | 75 | 150 mph2016 | 5.68 s2018 | 127.2 ft2017 | 30.442017 |
| Chevrolet Caprice 9C1 | 1987–2017 | 42 | 156 mph2015 | 5.91 s2012 | 125.8 ft2012 | 30.772012 |
| Dodge Charger Pursuit | 2006–2020 | 58 | 152 mph2012 | 5.81 s2020 | 123.2 ft2017 | 31.442017 |
| Two-door | ||||||
| Chevrolet Camaro B4C | 1993–2002 | 28 | 160 mph2000 | 5.69 s2002 | 134.4 ft2001 | 28.812001 |
| Sport utilities | ||||||
| Ford Police Interceptor Utility | 1996–2026 | 53 | 150 mph2019 | 5.43 s2020 | 127.1 ft2017 | 30.462017 |
| Chevrolet Tahoe | 1997–2026 | 62 | 139 mph2011 | 7.31 s2015 | 129.8 ft2025 | 29.832025 |
| Motorcycles | ||||||
| Police motorcycles | 2007–2026 | 83 | 147 mph2020 | 3.61 s2026 | 118.9 ft2017 | 32.572017 |
What the table actually says
The table is grouped by type rather than ranked, and deliberately so. Ranking by any single column would imply a winner, and what follows is more interesting than that.
Every performance column is won by a vehicle nobody patrolled in. The motorcycles take three of the four. The fourth — outright top speed — goes to a Camaro B4C, which was a special service package with two doors, no room for a cage, and bought for traffic enforcement rather than general patrol.
The vehicles that did the actual work win nothing. The Crown Victoria, the Caprice, the Charger, the Police Interceptor Utility and the Tahoe — the cars that carried American policing for forty years — do not lead a single column between them.
And the Tahoe is last on every one of them, and is the only vehicle here still being tested. It has been in the books since 1997. The Crown Victoria, the Caprice, the Charger and the Camaro are all gone.
Four columns, four winners, and not one of them is a car a patrol officer spent a shift in. That is most of what you need to know about what these numbers do and do not measure.
The vehicles
| Vehicle | The story |
|---|---|
| Crown Victoria | Thirteen consecutive years at 128 to 130 mph. It won by outliving everything, not by improving |
| Caprice 9C1 | Killed in 1996 as the fastest police sedan in America, back from Australia in 2011, gone again in 2017 |
| Charger Pursuit | Took the top speed record in its first year, then spent fourteen years improving its brakes instead |
| Camaro B4C | 160 mph in 2000, the fastest figure in the archive — and not a patrol car at all |
| Police Interceptor Utility | Lost for sixteen years — Ford would not even lap it in 1998 — then ended the police sedan in 2019 |
| Tahoe | Holds the longest stop ever recorded here and one of the shortest. Forty-four feet apart |
| Motorcycles | Ten makes, and they beat every car ever tested on four measures out of five |
What is not here yet
These are not the whole programme. The Chevrolet Impala has 30 entries across 22 years and the Dodge Diplomat and Plymouth Gran Fury 31 between them. Those pages are not written.
Everything tested, including all of them, is in the full results table, which is sortable, searchable, and filterable by make, body type and decade. Any view you reach there has its own address, so you can link straight to it.