Good Question: I’m looking for a used vehicle for less than $10,000 and am curious about used police cars.
I’ve heard that they’re built for durability, but how reliable are they as used cars?
A company I found sells 1- to 2-year-old used police cars with 71,000 miles on the odometer. Are these vehicles money pits, or does their build quality offset the beating they’ve probably been put through?
Matt
Danny (ME): It’s true that police cars – most notably the Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor and Chevrolet Caprice Police Cruiser are beefed up to some extent in important areas.
They have bigger engines. The engines are generally used in the performance line of said brands of cars. Let me quote the great Jake Elwood of the Blues Brothers, from the movie “The Blues Brothers”, “it’s got a cop car suspension, cop car engine and cop transmission”.
And their transmissions allow the engines to rev higher in each gear so that when the police need to pursue suspects, they can make dragster starts. And most importantly, they have external transmission coolers so the car can idle for hours in front of crime scenes. Or doughnut shops (apologies to our police reading today).
They come with sturdier cop car suspensions, for when officers have to drive up onto sidewalks to cut off or apprehend suspects.
They have beefed-up frame and body mounts so that when cops go over speed bumps at 80 miles an hour during a chase, the car won’t come apart.
These examples of how police cars are driven are all very good reasons not to buy a used one.
And 71,000 miles is a meaningless number. Most police cars never get shut off. When’s the last time you saw a police car that wasn’t idling? When one officer finishes his shift, another one gets right into the car and takes off. So the odometer reading doesn’t account for the huge number of hours the engine has been running.
However most police departments have their own service departments or they farm out the repairs, either way police cars get good regular maintenance and fixed when they break, ASAP.
So, it is possible to buy a few used police cars that just had a new or remanufactured engines installed.
They do have the advantage of being relatively easy and inexpensive to fix. That’s why cab drivers use these cars as well. In fact, they buy most of the used police cars. But unless the car is, say, in the half the price range of a comparable non-police Crown Victoria, I’d stay away.
For $10,000, you ought to be able to get a very decent used car, Matt. Ask for the maintenance records, see if any of the cop cars had a remanufactured engine installed in it..Good Luck.
