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 | ||||||
| Chevrolet Impala | 1978–2016 | 32 | 150 mph2012 | 7.10 s2012 | 132.6 ft2012 | 29.202012 |
| Dodge Diplomat and Plymouth Gran Fury | 1981–1989 | 26 | 121.5 mph1986 | 10.88 s1984 | 141.1 ft1987 | 27.441987 |
| Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor | 1983–2018 | 84 | 150 mph2013 | 5.66 s2014 | 127.2 ft2017 | 30.442017 |
| Chevrolet Caprice 9C1 | 1986–2017 | 49 | 156 mph §2015 | 5.91 s2012 | 125.8 ft2012 | 30.772012 |
| Dodge Charger Pursuit | 2006–2023 | 53 | 152 mph2012 | 5.81 s2020 | 123.2 ft2017 | 31.442017 |
| Two-door | ||||||
| Ford Mustang SSP | 1983–1993 | 19 | 139.6 mph1987 | 6.59 s1993 | 146.5 ft1986 | 26.431986 |
| Chevrolet Camaro B4C | 1991–2002 | 23 | 160 mph2000 | 5.69 s2002 | 127.6 ft1993 | 30.341993 |
| Sport utilities | ||||||
| Ford Police Interceptor Utility | 1994–2026 | 53 | 150 mph2019 | 5.43 s2020 | 126.6 ft2021 | 30.592021 |
| Chevrolet Tahoe | 1997–2026 | 58 | 139 mph2011 | 7.31 s2015 | 127.1 ft2021 | 30.472021 |
| Motorcycles | ||||||
| Police motorcycles | 2007–2026 | 90 | 147 mph2020 | 3.61 s2026 | 118.9 ft2017 | 32.572017 |
§ The 2015 Caprice 6.0L’s 156 mph is from its retest of 7 October 2014, printed on its data sheet. It was first submitted with an incorrect speed-limiting calibration and ran 147, the figure the 2015 book’s summary table and chart print (printed pages 3, 44, 49 and 52).
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.
No performance column is won by a four-door patrol car or utility. The motorcycles take three of the four, two of them through the three-wheeled Can-Am Spyder. The fourth — outright top speed — goes to a Camaro B4C, a two-door car that the 1992 book and the 1997 and 1998 bulletins class as special service and that the 2000 bulletin says Chevrolet offered “for highway and traffic enforcement use”.
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, still being tested, is last on top speed and 0–60 apart from the 1980s Diplomat and Gran Fury. It used to be last on braking among the newer vehicles too; the new-generation Tahoe of 2021 stopped in 127.1 feet, which puts it fifth of the ten on both braking columns; those columns mix braking procedures, as the caption says. It has been in the books since 1997, and with the Police Interceptor Utility and the motorcycles it is still there. The Diplomat and Gran Fury, the Crown Victoria, the Caprice, the Charger, the Impala, the Mustang SSP and the Camaro are all gone.
Four columns, and not one of them led by the four-door cars and utilities that did general patrol. That is most of what you need to know about what these numbers do and do not measure.
The vehicles
| Vehicle | The story |
|---|---|
| Impala | Two cars under one name: a rear-drive V8 thrown out of the 1980 bid, and a front-drive V6 with a higher recorded top speed than every Ford sedan from 2006 to 2011 |
| Diplomat and Gran Fury | One car under two names: the fastest sedan in three tests of the 1980s, and thrown out of the 1987 bid by a quarter of a second |
| Crown Victoria | Thirteen consecutive years at 128 to 130 mph. It won by outliving everything, not by improving |
| Caprice 9C1 | Left these tests after 1996 as the fastest sedan in that year’s test, back from Australia in 2011, gone again in 2017 |
| Charger Pursuit | The fastest sedan in its first test, then spent seventeen years improving its brakes instead |
| Mustang SSP | The fastest car in every test it ran from 1983 to 1990, then overtaken by the Camaro, and last on ergonomics five times |
| Camaro B4C | 160 mph in 2000, the fastest figure in the archive — from a two-door car classed as special service in some 1990s books |
| Police Interceptor Utility | Never above 113 mph in fourteen tests from 1994 to 2008 — in 1998 Ford advised it was not for pursuit, and it did not run the road course — then outran every sedan in 2019 |
| Tahoe | The longest stop in the 1999 test, a projected 185.0 feet for the four-wheel-drive version, and a 127.1-foot stop in 2021 under the later twenty-stop procedure |
| 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. Many vehicles Michigan tested have no page of their own; the full-size Plymouth Gran Furys of 1980 and 1981, a different car from the Gran Fury of 1982 to 1989, are on their year pages.
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.