Why Ford Dominates The Market For Police Vehicles

There are about 12,000

police

departments patrolling jurisdictions across the United States, and more than half of those

police

vehicles

driving through neighborhoods and cities are

ford

s. The second largest US automaker in terms of sales is also the largest supplier of police

vehicles

, so you know, it's not a big part of Ford's business, but you know it's generally considered a pretty big part. of the business, especially since it's an area they've dominated for a long time, you know, since at least the automakers of the mid-1990s. It doesn't publish detailed share and sales figures for its police fleets, but Ford claims that has about two-thirds of the

market

, with much of the rest made up of Detroit's two other automakers, General Motors, the largest U.S. automaker, and Fiat Chrysler.

Much of Ford's stake belongs to the Ford Police Interceptor Utility, which Ford says is the best-selling police vehicle in the United States and alone accounts for half of all new police vehicles sold. The Interceptor Utility is based on the Ford Explorer, the best-selling SUV of all time in the United States, the success of the Interceptor Utility and the introduction of similar vehicles from its closest competitors shows how US police departments. All over the country are making some of the same changes to their fleets that regular customers are making to their own garages specifically. Police cars are now increasingly police off-road vehicles and there are some pretty practical reasons why this is happening.

There are several types of typical police vehicles used by departments. There are patrol cars. Cars without identification. Special purpose vehicles such as vans, sport utility vehicles, trucks and motorcycles. A lot of policeman. Departments have even acquired military equipment in recent years, which has sparked controversy, but the vast majority of police vehicles are basically modified versions of those purchased by the average consumer. Police departments purchase their vehicles according to a fairly standard government purchasing process, although the details may vary depending on the size of the department or other circumstances. Typically a department determines how many vehicles it needs and then solicits bids from at least three dealers.

Contracts usually opt for the lowest offer. There are some exceptions, such as hard-to-find vehicles that are only available from a single source. For a long time, police mainly drove sedans equipped to meet the needs of law enforcement officers. The first known motorized police vehicle was an electric car deployed in Akron, Ohio in 1899. It had a top speed of 18 miles per hour and could travel 30 miles in charge. The vehicle was specially designed by the Collins Buggy Company, a local coach manufacturer. Costing $2,400, it came equipped with siren lights and a stretcher was first used to pick up a drunk man in the city and was then pushed into the Ohio Canal during Orion until the mid-20th century.

Police cars were either purpose-built vehicles or ordinary cars custom-equipped with after

market

upgrades, but in 1950 Ford saw an opportunity to serve the police market and became the first automobile manufacturer to offer dedicated police service. package the company debuted under the name Interceptor in 1951. Its strategy took off quickly by 1961, Ford cars made up 58 police vehicles in use in the 50 largest US cities. Ford's American competitors had taken notice and started to offer their own police packages and at different times. In history, it even controlled the market, Chrysler in particular dominated from about 1969 to 1985, primarily through its Plymouth and Dodge brands.

All Chrysler divisions. Chrysler, Plymouth and Dodge were really strong players in the world of police vehicles for a long time. I think Chrysler Corporation. They presented themselves as a high performance company very effectively at that time in history and I think that appealed to police departments and that's why they were able to get so many police contracts during that time in 1983. Ford introduced an interceptor version of his crown. Victoria, a large and spacious sedan that was also a popular choice among taxi drivers. There was also a police package for the Mustang that ran from the early 80s to the early 90s.

Another popular sedan was the Chevrolet Caprice, which at one time was equipped with a corvette. engine and was a top choice from 1986 until the Caprice was discontinued in 1996. The Chevy Caprice was the choice of the car that we refer to as a kind of spaceship that looks like a bubble police car, um, that actually took over um, because of his speed. You know it had a Corvette engine if you had the right package and a reinforced suspension and it had a lot of room, um, and the belief with all this size and extra metal around it that it would be safer when you got in. a car accident For much of that time departments owned SUVs and pickup trucks, but they tended to be special purpose vehicles not used for patrol, but as Americans in general began ditching their sedans and co-ops for sport utility vehicles and crossovers, police-badged SUVs began to appear around the world.

The country's changes in vehicle manufacturing made them more popular as patrol vehicles. One problem that led to the change, according to some police officers, is that passenger cars began to shrink at the same time that departments began filling police vehicles with increasing amounts of equipment and technology. Cars got smaller, particularly the interior some of that had to do with fuel efficiency some of that had to do with safety, right, we built it to absorb but crash a little better, but when they started to shrink in the interior, at the same time, we are putting in more equipment. in police cars before maybe it was a radar unit in the dashboard um and that was it, then we started putting partitions between the front seats and the back seats, all this equipment goes inside a car at the same time, police sedans.

Vehicles are shrinking compared to those of the 1980s and early 1990s. SUVs seemed to better meet the need for more interior space and offered other advantages such as ease of entry and exit. However, SUVs have their drawbacks and it mainly comes down to a matter of physics. The key advantage of traditional passenger cars, such as sedans, is that their shape gives them a lower center of gravity than an SUV or truck and makes them more aerodynamic. The size and shape of an SUV makes it more likely to roll over and generally more difficult to handle than a comparable sedan, this is potentially a problem for police officers who need to drive at high speeds, whether chasing a suspect or in response to an emergency, but there have been many changes in vehicle design and engineering, even for consumer vehicles, that have greatly improved the driving experience. and fuel economy for SUVs SUVs used to be built the same way pickup trucks still are: the car body, roof doors, side panels, etc., were bolted to the frame that housed the wheels , the powertrain and other engineering components that made the car.

This move is called body-on-frame construction and, in fact, for most of automotive history all cars were built this way, but innovations in manufacturing led to the introduction of unibody construction, where the Frame and body are part of a single hole. This type of manufacturing was first common in passenger cars, while sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks retained the body-on-frame approach, but over time manufacturers began making SUVs and, in some cases, pickup trucks with construction unibody. Unibody construction offers several advantages: it can make vehicles lighter, easier to handle, and even safer. Because it can better absorb the impacts of crashes, today many SUVs like the Explorer are made with unibody construction and drive more like cars despite their different shapes and sizes.

The key word is more like cars. There are still some differences. They continue to be higher. Had a higher center of gravity for years, the purpose of having a sedan was so you could hug the road a little better and the chance of a rollover was much less compared to an SUV, that's the sway bars and stuff inside. The vehicle the manufacturers have put there to enforce the law helps with that, but you know the Ford Explorer doesn't do the same thing as a Ford sedan police car, it just doesn't operate the same way, so the car manufacturers Cars adjust their police SUVs differently.

Those sold to consumers, for example, vehicles such as the Ford Police Interceptor Utility, the Chevrolet Tahoe Police Pursuit Vehicle and the Dodge Durango Chase, sit lower on their wheels than comparable consumer versions and have specially designed suspensions and brakes. tuned to improve agility and handle the several hundred pounds of additional equipment on the vehicle, the other problem with SUVs and large vehicles in general is that they tend to burn a lot of fuel In October 2019, Ford said orders for its hybrid version of the utility interceptor already accounted for 19 of total orders for the For the 2020 model year, which was revealed earlier in January, the company said it is the first pursuit-rated hybrid vehicle.

The hybrid gets a combined 24 miles per gallon of gas, which may seem modest given what some vehicles can achieve in 2020, but it's a 41. An improvement over the current utility police interceptor equipped with a conventional gasoline engine 3.7 liters at the time, Ford estimated that departments could save between three thousand five hundred and five thousand seven hundred dollars per vehicle annually in fuel costs, which is based on a fuel price range of 2.75 cents to 4.50 per gallon and an average of 20,000 miles driven in a year for large departments, this can save a tremendous amount of money, for example, the New York City Police Department has 36,000 officers, making it becomes the largest local police force in the United States. claims in 2019 that the NYPD said its goal was to make all of its 10,000 cars hybrid or electric within five years.

All police cars are either SUVs or come with standard upgrades that make them better suited to operating at high speeds and improving their durability. These are vehicles that are used heavily every day for the two to three years they are typically in service. One of the modifications they do on some of them is actually changing the design of the hinges on those doors to allow them to open wider. They did this on the Taurus and Explorer. to allow, in particular, the rear doors to open at a wider angle to make it easier to get in and out of the rear seats of those vehicles, that's one of the practical changes and they also do things like improve cooling.

Systems and brakes that you know to deal with that different duty cycle that those vehicles go through over the course of a day compared to what regular consumers have to deal with with improved cooling systems keeping engines from overheating and High-performance alternators handle the power demands that come with radios with running lights and a cockpit full of computer equipment, as with many police cars, the Utility Interceptor's seats are specially made with smaller bolsters on the sides to make it easier for officers to enter and exit the vehicle. The seat backs have anti-stab plates on them to prevent people in the back seat from stabbing officers.

In the rear there are also bulletproof panels on the sides of the vehicle and a reinforced rear to protect it from collisions at high speeds A lot of radius lighting and computer systems and even grille guards are installed by other manufacturers, but some models now come standard with low-profile lighting systems that are integrated into the rear spoiler and the vehicle's visor grill to improve visibility. There have also been many other recent innovations, you know new police cars with the connectivity you know in the dispatch center, we could look on a map and see where all the cars are at the same time while the dispatcher enters the information he is looking for according to the nearest vehicle addresscan answer, there are now cameras in cars that record not only the activity in the car but also what is happening in front of the vehicle, in addition to the cameras we now have in police cars.

You know, we can convey that real image. Life is like real time, so in a dispatch center I can see what the police officer can see on his dashboard right now, so the collapse of a building, the robbery, whatever it is, when the vehicles stop, that data can be transmitted, so police cars actually have their own modems. The rear technology of these police cars is really impressive. In 2020, Ford installed a system on the Interceptor called Police Perimeter Alert Motion Sensors that monitor a 270-degree area extending up to 80 feet away. If the system detects something, it turns on the vehicle's rear camera.

Audibly alerts passengers by raising the vehicle's windows and locking the doors. Officers inside can observe their surroundings through motion traces displayed on instrument panels. Cars are also preparing for a pandemic. Ford debuted a software update in 2020 that raises a vehicle's cabin temperature to 133 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes, the idea being to basically sterilize any surface that may have been exposed to the coronavirus. Fleet sales represent a relatively small part of an automaker's total, but some police say Ford has a fairly long history of serving law enforcement, which could partly explain the police. The Explorer's popularity could also have benefited from some good luck in the transition from cars to SUVs.

The utility Interceptor seemed to hit a sweet spot: It was larger than the cars offered at the time, but smaller than the other police SUVs available. The advantages of a larger vehicle say the Tahoe has 70 cubic feet of cargo storage in the rear, more than 18 feet over the next largest competitor. The Interceptor Utility also has some key statistics in its favor, e.g. testing by Michigan State Police determined this. It was the fastest vehicle in its class, of course, it is not the only player in the market and its position is by no means secure. Even after the police interceptor utility was introduced in 2012, some sedans continued to sell well, such as the Dodge Charger, which will be launched in part from large contracts with large agencies such as California Highway Patrol and Ford competitors General Motors and Fiat Chrysler, also offer police packages for several of their trucks and SUVs.

In 2019, sales of utility interceptors were 18,752, down 44.6 percent from the 33,839 sold in 2018. They increased 2.3 percent in 2018 over 2017. Police in the United States have been targeted After serious criticism from critics, many of whom call for reform and some of whom call for defunding law enforcement or outright abolition, according to a report by the automotive blog Jalopnik, a group of Ford employees circulated a letter asking The company has been told to reconsider its manufacturing of police vehicles and employees have raised the issue elsewhere. Employees cited concerns about associating the Ford name with police at a time when officers are coming under fire for the way they treat police. black Americans in response, CEO Jim Hackett circulated a memo in which he acknowledged that people inside and outside the company had asked him to end Ford's police vehicle program.

In the memo, Hackett condemned racism, expressed his support for the Black Lives Matter movement and said he is reviewing Ford's diversity and inclusion practices, but he also said so. It is not controversial to sell vehicles to police, that the criticism that plagues police has nothing to do with the cars they drive, and that law enforcement plays an important role in the vitality and safety of society. Ford was not available for an on-camera interview for this story, but told CNBC that the drop in sales in 2019 was due to the shift to a redesigned Interceptor utility, the company added that it expected Interceptor utility sales to the third quarter of 2020 were high regarding the letter to Ford employees, said CEO Jim Hackett's response speaks for and you know that these conventional police vehicles are not really the problem, in fact, the bigger problem is the military militarization of police forces and you know, giving them surplus military vehicles, you know, armored vehicles, you know, that's a much bigger problem than you. know if they are driving in a Ford Explorer or a Dodge Charger or if you know of any other conventional vehicle.

The Minneapolis city council recently voted to disband its police force, and New York is reportedly taking steps to cut about $1 billion from its $6 billion. Police department budgets across the country are potentially at risk, raising serious questions for the companies that supply them.