When it was time to purchase new police cars for the city, the choice was no longer the obvious one. For decades the Ford Crown Victoria was crowned the best overall police car; it could do it all, it was the Earvin “Magic” Johnson to basketball. To all you young folk, “Magic” was an outstanding player for the Lakers when they coined the expression “three-peat,” a player that could play guard, forward, and center not just good but great winning three championships. Today Ford no longer makes the Crown Victoria; “Magic” has retired, so we needed to find a new franchise player to crown. Enter King Lebron “Tahoe” James, a recently introduced Police vehicle that is rugged, priced right, great resale value, and commanding presence in the “paint” (basketball expression, you are tough) for us on the streets. We didn’t set out to buy Tahoe’s. We had every manufacturer demo their vehicles for us; we looked at vehicles at other police departments. We basically looked at two things; owner-ship costs and will the vehicle do the job. Ownership costs, based upon 6 years 100,000 miles of service we project that it will cost less to operate Tahoe’s than other models. When it came to attributes, the Tahoe was the only vehicle that could do everything we needed. The Charger is a great vehicle, but for marked police service the trunk is extremely small and limited prisoner space with a cage installed. The Caprice is narrow further complicated with a floor mounted shifter limiting laptop space. The new Ford Sedan has a great layout and a unique front wheel drive allowes it to pull right on hard acceleration. Pulling would be good for NASCAR especially if it was to the left, but for police cars it is a problem! Basically you could say we put every vehicle through a thorough assessment center. The franchise player, I mean vehicle was our selection to lead our franchise. We ordered 58 Tahoe’s and hope to have them in service by the end of the first quarter of 2013. You should see the reaction on people’s faces when we tell them our price considering what they go for new at a Dealership and they get better fuel economy than the Crown Victoria. I have already been asked to start a list now for people who want to buy them used when we are done.
