14 DAY TRIAL // Several police departments across the US have changed or enriched their fleet of police cars with hybrids, in an attempt to reduce the amount of money they have to spend each year on buying gasoline at high prices. Police chiefs say that the new vehicles do not feature the massive V8 or V10 engines of their predecessors, but, rather, only four-cylinder engines, which allow them to go twice the mileage of, for example, a standard Ford Crown Victoria or Dodge Charger car. Some officials are requesting federal grant money to help them convert existing vehicles to hybrids, by installing electric engines.
“To some degree, everybody's looking at alternatives,” Algonquin, Illinois police chief Russell Laine,who is the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), argues. He says that gas prices such as last year's $4 per gallon could come back at anytime in the currently-unstable economic climate, and that departments across the US could be caught off-guard by a potential new surge in prices.
In Cahokia, Illinois, police chief Richard Watson purchased a four-cylinder Pontiac Vibe GT, which he wants to put to the test, to see if it handles police work. “I thought this is the time to do it,” he says. If the car performs according to expectations, than, most likely, the chief will apply for federal money to change all existing models with the new ones, because he says he can spare the department as much as $20,000 yearly for each of the vehicles.
“They [the FBI] wanted to get all my statistics once we start running this car and see how it performs and all that. Nobody wants to jump out there and do it; they don't want to take the effort, time and money. We all anticipate that it'll have great performance. But until you actually test it in real-life conditions, you don't know,” Watson reveals. When he first proposed the initiative at an FBI training program last year, he was met with skepticism.
“There's an unlimited supply of used police cars. The Crown Victoria, for us, is a suitable police car, a suitable platform. If we can retrofit the vehicle power supply as opposed to changing everything, we'd have the performance, the size, and be more economical,” Gulf Breeze, Florida police chief Peter Paulding adds.