Holden Caprice – The star spangled banners new favourite Police Car
A very big congratulations goes to the Australian Motor industry, GMH more specifically. The Holden Caprice has pushed aside two other contenders to now be the car of choice as the American Police Pursuit vehicle. Re-badged as a Chevrolet, this car will soon replace Ford’s venerable Crown Victoria – a car that’s been used by the US police force for over 30 years.
The two other front-runners for the title were a turbo-charged Taurus V6 and Dodge’s V8 Charger. The annual Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s police vehicle trials was used to decide which car was going to take the crown from the “Crown”.
Some of the key results of the trial were:
- The Holden built Chevy scored a clean sheet of perfect 10’s in all categories, including steering, body lean, bounce and brake fade, pull an operation
- The Taurus closely followed (and surpassed) the Chevy in some areas: it registered the highest average speed and scored 9/10 for brake fade
- The hemi-powered Dodge scored mostly nines and tens but only 4/10 for the brake fade test.
- The Holden had the best performing brakes of the trio. From 96 km/h, the Holden stopped in 42 metres, the Charger in 43 metres and the Taurus in 44 metres.
- Performance to 96 km/h: Ford Taurus was the fastest at 5.83 sec, Holden second at 6.01 secs and Charger at 6.14 seconds.
Holden has not revealed how many orders it has received from the US police departments and other law enforcement agencies.
Whatever orders have been placed , this is a mighty fine effort from the Australian Motor industry. The really disappointing aspect of this however is that there are strong rumours that all local manufacturing of motor vehicles is looking like moving off-shore. I really hope that this remains as a rumour – how can this occur when such milestones are achieved is totally illogical. But this topic of conversation can be had another time……