New Police Vehicles Get Brains As Well As Brawn, And Better Mileage, Ford Says

Ford special-built police vehicles are getting many of the same modern technologies as mass-market cars and trucks for civilians, like gas-saving battery-electric and hybrid powertrains, and driver-assistance features like blind-spot monitoring and automatic emergency braking.

“We don’t design it just for high-speed chases,” said Lindsey Bertino, police brand manager for Ford Motor Co. Police cruisers can still do that, too, but increasingly, they will run on battery power, she said.

Some features are police-only, she said, addressing the New York-based International Motor Press Association in a recent webinar.

Ford says it’s the nation’s leading provider of police vehicles. Its workhorse is the 2023 Police Interceptor Utility, based on the redesigned-for-2020 Ford Explorer SUV.

Police-only features and options include Anti-Stab Plates in the seat backs that can foil a knife attack from the rear seat, and added high-strength steel, to withstand rear collisions up to 75 mph.

That’s beefier than required for civilian vehicles, which are crash-tested up to 50 mph, Bertino says. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that police vehicles on the side of the highway get rear-ended at high speeds, more often than other vehicles, she said.

“We design it to keep anybody in the vehicle safe, whether you’re in the front or the back,” she said. “To us, that matters.”

Another police-only feature is what Ford calls Police Perimeter Alert. It uses the same sensors as Blind Spot Monitoring, to detect anyone in a 270-degree arc behind a stationary vehicle.

It provides a visual and audible warning, and automatically rolls up the windows, if someone approaches the vehicle while the officer inside may be distracted while filling out paperwork, watching a screen inside the vehicle, eating a meal, or simply taking a break, Ford says.

Ford offers a variety of police vehicles. The most common is the Police Interceptor Utility. Ford says it’s the first purpose-built police vehicle with a gasoline-electric hybrid engine as standard equipment.

The hybrid gets an EPA-estimated 23 miles per gallon city/24 mpg highway/24 mpg combined. That may not sound like great mileage, but Ford says it’s a 41% improvement over the previous Police Interceptor Utility, which has a conventional, 3.7-liter gas engine. The difference can save taxpayers $3,500 to $5,700 in fuel costs annually, Ford says.

New to the lineup is a police version of Ford’s new, battery-powered, fullsize pickup, the all-electric 2023 Ford F-150 Lightning Pro SSV, for Special Service Vehicle. It also offers the more conventional Ford F-150 Police Responder model.

A police pilot program uses the battery-powered Mustang Mach-E GT. It has an extended-range battery and electric all-wheel drive; gets an EPA-estimated range of 270 miles; generates 480 horsepower, 600 ft.-lbs. of torque; reaches 60 mph from a standing start, in around 3.8 seconds.

Bertino says her family has a long police tradition. “For me, police isn’t just a job,” she said. “It’s something that runs pretty deep in my family.”