New Ford Taurus to replace Crown Victoria police cars by 2011?
About two months, FoMoCo invited the leaders of some of the nation’s largest police fleets to Dearborn to tell them that the Crown Victoria will be discontinued after 2011. “But Ford also made a commitment to support departments with a new vehicle” said Larry Tagawa, commander of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Motor Transport Division. After a little meet and greet, Ford took the group out to its test track and handed them the keys to the 2010 Ford Taurus. Many would be glad to get rid of their Crown Vics for Ford’s new Taurus. It looks better, gets better gas mileage and it’s faster and safer. However, the new Taurus lacks some features that the police have come to love in their current cruisers. For nearly 20 years now, the Crown Victoria has become popular with police departments around the nation for its reliability, toughness and utility. Nonetheless, Ford has no intention of walking away from its share of the market said Jim Farley, head of global sales, marketing and service. ”We’ve got some big decisions to make, and we’re making them,” he said. As mentioned earlier, we just picked up the 2010 Ford Taurus SHO for our Weekly Test-Drive this week. Coincidentally, the only thing we kept talking about while taking our first ride in the car was that it would be the perfect cop car. What are your thoughts
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We took delivery of a 2010 Taurus SHO this week and it’s performance is dramatic to say the least! With AWD, traction control and the turbo-charged power plant, it easily outperformed our Crown Victorias without question in acceleration. Handling and occupant safety are about as good as can be found in any automobile, foreign or domestic but the unibody design doesn’t lend itself to some of the fleeing vehicle stopping maneuvers police vehicles may be called upon to perform. Perhaps an after-market reinforcement array can be adopted to compensate for this weakness. Once the center console is removed and the shifting arrangement changed to permit police equipment access between the front bucket seats, this vehicle may prove to be an even better design for police service then even the venerable Crown Victoria but we’ve yet to see Ford actually build a Taurus with typical equipment a police agency would expect to see in a model being considered for purchase. When that is finally accomplished and the vehicle has begun to be shown at law enforcement seminars and shows, we will then be able to make a more intelligent buying decision but until that time, the Crown Victoria is still hard to beat.