Ford is producing a new model of police interceptors specifically designed for the exclusive use of police departments, based on the Taurus, and Chevrolet is producing a new model of the old Caprice line, based on a Pontiac G8, and of course there’s the Dodge Charger, which will come in a special “Pursuit” model.
I’ve seen very diverse range of vehicles being used as taxis, but as for a standard model to take over for the Crown Victoria, I think that the Chevy Impala may slide into that role.
I think he is talking about why the same country that just sent a man to the moon could trash a Ford Mustang in the early 70’s and 80’s just out of complete incompetence. That is just one example of dozens. American cars from the 70’s until the early 2000’s were not terrible by world standards but they weren’t all that great either. I am as patriotic as anyone and yet I have never owned an American car. The is no reason why the engineering had to be mediocre at best in general when we have many of the best engineers in world. There were a few good examples of American vehicles. We excelled in pickup trucks like the Ford F-150 for example but the overall report card is a C- at best during the time period. It is a better now that GM got resurrected but is hard to beat the Toyotas and Hondas of the world when they had such a huge head start on true quality improvement just because they tried.
Well we have tried to sell them our Australian Holden re-badged as a Chevy Caprice but apparently you yanks don’t know what a good car is…
http://www.gmfleet.com/government/police/2012-caprice-ppv-patrol-car.html
Actually i would like to know why this is the case? Any views?
This is what I came in to post. They’ve sold a ton of them to police departments here in Michigan and I’ve seen the Taylor, MI police already driving the Taurus models around.
They look pretty good.
One department(Grand Rapids, I think) bought all the final Crown Vic cop cars to avoid getting a new and relatively untested model.
The American cars where always fast ,big and shiny looking .Where the base was not on this but on small, fuel efficient and new technology.
So they did not do well where American did well and Americans did not do well where they did well.
The cars that pre date the late 90s where always big.
Yes that does look like nice car just like some of other cars here http://www.ford.com/fordpoliceinterceptor/ and so does the Dodge Chargers .
But they more suited has race cars and on the highway not so well on the city streets.
If you do not go for the purpose-built you’ll likely end up with a mix of small vans (for providing wheelchair accessibility), compact SUVs and mid- to full-size sedans. It also varies per market region – around here the standard new cab doing the SJU airport beat is a nonstretched regular-size van, because there’s a lot of ride-sharing and whole-family travel with luggage, and because the truck-type suspension takes the potholey streets better.
The big thing about BOF cars in this line of work is that the trunk opening could be made very large, to fit all kinds of stuff. The newer unibody cars don’t have a big opening for the trunk even if the physical dimensions are the same, just due to the nature of unibody contruction. If your entire job consists of carrying either luggage or guns in the trunk then this is a non-trivial advantage.
Toyota still makes the Crown Comfort which does similar duty in Japan and other Asian markets, and Nissan until recently made a similar car. Oh look it’s basically a 1980s car with a live axle. Why do the Japanese continue to make such bad cars for so long with all their advantages and access to the best engineers in the world? What’s Jeremy Clarkson’s angle on this? :rolleyes:
Why is what the case? That they do sell the Caprice here or that few people buy it?
They sell the Caprice here because Holden is circling the bowl and if they weren’t making them then the plant would be idle because no one else is buying them, not even Australians. Otherwise they would have to shut the plant down.
Holden is circling the bowl not because the Commodore is a bad car but because it’s not economically viable to make anything in Australia. I imagine they will probably shut the whole operation down soon and move production to South Korea.
So GM wants to keep the plant going, but they don’t want to sell too many of the cars because they don’t really make any money off it.
In seperate news General Motors is a company with a lot of talented engineers and designers run by ignoramuses.
I don’t see them moving the Commodore off shore due to the government subsidies etc.
The Caprice is based on the Statesman and was specifically designed for US LE so my question still is “why have they not been embraced in the US?”
The current iteration of the Caprice PPV is based on the VE Commodore that was introduced in 2006. At this point it’s almost 7 years old and due for a major redesign next year. So it’s only going to be made for at most another year or two. If I were a fleet manager does this sound like a good idea from the perspective of stocking parts and repairs?
GM is notorious for doing this. Holden makes a pretty good car, it takes 3 years for the rest of GM to notice, another 3 years of management wrangling to actually get it over to the US by which time the damn car is out of date and going to be replaced anyway and everyone has already given up so the car will get no marketing or any management commitment. See also: Pontiac GTO/Holden Monaro, G8/Commodore.
The Taurus has a similar problem, although not as serious since the Taurus is still fairly new. The Charger is the best car from this perspective as it is quite new and the platform is going to be around for a while yet. Not to mention it’s just a great car in many other respects and Chrysler is just managing their fleet operations better. That’s why the Charger is leading in sales. The Taurus might get a few sales just because it’s made in America.
Cool that makes sense.
I would just like to add that the Taurus Interceptor has been designed to be backwards compatible with most Crown Vic equipment; that alone could end up giving it a good sales edge. I know my towns police force is switching from a mix of older Crown Vics and Chargers to Taurus Interceptors, since the Chargers have proven to be PITA maintenance-wise.
Yeah, my local police department also had a change of heart with the Charger. They bought a bunch of them a few years back as they became the default RWD V8 sedan. With their cramped interiors and poor visibility (even before you cram all the cop gear in there), most of the officers hated them. Since then they’ve decided FWD isn’t so bad after all and have been buying Impalas and now Tauruses.
With Taxis, hybrids have changed the dynamic a bit. Taxis rack up huge amounts of stop and go miles, which means they take full advantage of the hybrid system. The economics of when you recover the premium you pay for the hybrid system are still pretty iffy for a “civilian” but a hybrid taxi pays for itself pretty quick. As a result from a strictly cost perspective, a new hybrid is starting to make more sense than a used cop car.
This. I haven’t seen a new Ford anything decked out in police paint schemes. This is so typical of Ford. They refine a car and then dump it.
IMO this was a real stupid decision.
:rolleyes:
Oh, gee, I don’t know, maybe it costs more to import a car from Australia than it does to buy one made on this continent?
How “refined” is a car that was barely changed at all from 1997-2007? And at the tail end of that was only directed towards low-margin fleet sales?
If you had read the thread, you would have seen that Ford has introduced a dedicated police vehicle and it’s already on the street. Not a converted passenger car, a dedicated police pursuit vehicle. You can’t refine much more than that.
IMO yours was a really unwarranted post.
Indeed. As it stands right now about a third of the NY fleet is already hybrids (mostly Escape SUVs, some Camrys and the like) – they did not wait for the Taxi Of Tomorrow to be rolling to start supplementing the Vic. Bloomberg wanted to go all-hybrid but did not get his way.
BTW one thing about the police/taxi package vehicles is that it’s not just heavy-duty running gear but also often it requires the car to be “stretched”, to allow for more space for various equipment including especially a safety barrier between the front and rear seats, which tends to be hard to fit into a standard car.
What are you talking about? The Ford cop cars are either a converted Taurus or a converted Explorer.
I don’t know if you’re trying to say that police departments “stretch” their vehicles on their own like a coach builder would to make a limo because that’s certainly not true. The Taurus and the Charger are the same length as the civilian versions, the Caprice is a longer version of the Pontiac G8 but that’s because it’s sold in that form from the factory as a civilian vehicle in other markets.
Where did I say, “always”, or “all”?