Well I have. On my department. Most of the departments that started getting Dodge products are moving away from them. They are terrible.
It wasn’t just tooling. The car would have needed major updates to comply with newer crash protection standards too. The market isn’t that big. People pining for cars from the reign of Emperor Reagan can still buy plenty of them on the used market.
Top Gear did a segment on the replacement for the Crown Vic. The big three have replacements available.
They tested the Ford Taurus V6 twin trubo.
The Impala with the V8 Camaro engine (police option only)
And the Dodge Charger V8 Hemi.
All performed quite well, but the Taurus twin turbo won their segment.
The heat has some hot cars available. I hope their driving skills are up to it.
Fair enough. Your post implied that it would be easier to re-tool a line for BoF vehicles.
So this is main reason they done away with Crown Vic. It became outdated.
Why did they not bring out new generation of Crown Vic with all new stuff.
They did. It was called the Five Hundred and it didn’t do very well (until the rebadged it as the current Taurus).
Ford’s Police Interceptor & Utility have been designed to withstand a 75 MPH rear-crash test; the Crown Vic wasn’t magic in that regard. Cite.
Size-wise, the new Taurus based Interceptor is a tad larger than the old Crown Vic; Ford has a nifty overlay that compares the Interceptor with other police cars. http://www.ford.com/fordpoliceinterceptor/#/models/sedan
Could one of the LEO’s posting in here explain why a rear wheeled drive car was so heavily preferred? I’ve been driving front wheel drive vehicles for so long- including plenty of heavy snow and ice days here in the Northeast- that I cannot imagine wanting a rear wheel drive vehicle.
What’s up wid dat ?
Not a LEO, but RWD is typically easier and cheaper to repair, the weight is more evenly distributed, and it has better handling and acceleration.
Is there a belief that they are safer on snow, ice etc especially during, oh say, a high speed chase?
I’m just surprised that front wheel drive vehicles are not de rigeur.
The Taurushas a shorter wheel base and is slightly smaller in ever way to the Crown Vic.
Not sure how that translates with all the electronic gear on board but it is smaller than the CV.
front wheel drive doesn’t help traction once the car is moving and the poor weight distribution makes high speed pursuit less stable around corners.
What’s wrong with them out of curiosity?
If I had money to burn I’d choose the twin turbo front wheel drive. It would be obnoxiously fun to drive. If I had a budget to work with for fleet cars I’d avoid it like the plague.
Dunno about New Jersey, but down here they’ve got an awful reliability record.
As it turns out, the Ford Interceptor is AWD-standard so that may be a handling bonus. (Actually there’s two Ford Interceptors - the 500/Taurus based sedan and an SUV [Explorer-based??] )
Oh- thanks !
Not in this case, the Chevy sells for a comparable price to the alternatives. We have a “free” trade agreement with the USA so tariffs etc are not a problem and transport costs are pretty small.
Spot on the G8 is based on the Commodore and the Caprice on the Statesman. The statesman is a luxury car that is often used by bogans, hire car companies and politicians. I have also owned one and I am none of these subcultures, I just did a lot of country driving with 3 adult passengers, OK maybe a little bit bogan 
I’m not sure what you mean by “less stable” exactly, but front weight bias tends to cause a car to understeer, which is what I would consider to be “more stable” compared to oversteer, aka fishtailing. If you think of a car as a lever and the point of rotation as the fulcrum, then moving that point forward causes the rear of the car to act like the long arm of the lever, meaning it takes more force to rotate.
The drive wheels typical have very little to do with the handling characteristics of a car. In any case, the Crown Vic is so grossly underpowered that any theoretical advantage of RWD is vastly outweighed by the fact that it’s a 250hp, 2-ton slug with an archaic suspension. A modern V6 Camry would absolutely murder it on a road course, FWD and all, which means that for high speed pursuits they’d be better off buying Camrys.
I don’t know if RWD is better from a maintenance perspective; it may well be. If so, then replacing Crown Vics with transverse-engined AWD Tauruses sounds like a maintenance nightmare.
why bother? the retail customer for something like a Vic/Grand Marquis/Town Car was literally dying off (at a previous job we called the Town Car “heaven’s taxi cab.”) Fleet sales aren’t that lucrative either. Spending a shit-ton of money to update a car that sells at most 80,000 units a year (and that’s the Crown Vic and Town Car combined at the low margins of fleet sales would be stupid.
The car was an anachronism, and it’s gone.