The Caprice has a larger body, longer wheelbase than the terminated Pontiac G8 from Down Under.

The police car market in the United States amounts to around 75,000 units a year, and Ford’s Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, CVPI, the mainstay of police fleets for years, has managed to command 60% or more of that market since Chevrolet ended domestic rear-wheel drive car production in Texas 15 years ago.

Dodge has been nibbling away in the market for the last five years with a smaller, less costly and perhaps more fuel-thrifty Charger V8 entry, while Chevy has had fair luck with its also smaller V6 Impala.

The CVPI has been a holdout of what some critics call dated design – a rear-wheel-drive V8 with the body bolted to a separate frame.

This year, knowing that CVPI production ends in another 12 months, Ford, Chevy and Dodge are each scrambling for this market niche, a scramble that doesn’t make any obvious financial sense in a town where money is tight, but could make sense from an image point of view. But let’s put the money angle aside for the moment, and come back to image later.

Ford is defending its turf for 2012 with an extensive battle-proofing makeover of the front-drive V6 Taurus sedan, called the Ford Police Interceptor. With Crown Vic sedans limited the last few years to taxi and police customers, Taurus has become the top of the Ford passenger car line, what people might consider a near-luxury car.

Ford also will be offering for the first time a dedicated “utility” type police vehicle based on the forthcoming new Explorer. The news media are literally (required non-disclosure form) sworn to secrecy on details of that police vehicle until next week. Geez, you’d think there was something important, as opposed to mundane, being held back.

Chevrolet’s entry meantime also is unusual: an imported (from Australia) rear-wheel-drive V8 sedan based on Opel/Holden architecture, called the Caprice, a vintage Chevy name. In April, Chevrolet said it had no plans to sell a “civilian” Caprice in North America, only police versions. The Caprice has a larger body and longer wheelbase than the terminated Pontiac G8 sedan from Down Under.

Most of the above was spelled out in this space a few months ago, following TDB’s coverage of the National Association of Fleet Administrators (NAFA) annual meeting in Detroit, where domestic carmakers proudly showed off their new police wares – except Dodge which was promises, promises, and promises. The Dodge rep at the NAFA meeting merely hinted that big changes were coming, while withholding any details.

Amusingly, though, when Dodge learned that Ford planned a dog-and-pony media show for its police cars on Wednesday (August 25), the Chrysler LLC division rushed to put out a no-news announcement the day before, complete with a singularly unidentifiable, doctored photo of what it claimed was its forthcoming new Charger Pursuit police car, but still provided next to no details. Talk about being coy.

Dodge’s problem is that a new model Charger with extensive changes is in the offing, but won’t be revealed until late in the fall, along with a new Chrysler 300. In the meantime, they’re keeping mum and playing a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t game, all the while trying to play in Chevy and Ford news reports.

Chevrolet so far has been silent on the police car subject or it least lately. But its Caprice media announcement in the spring also was a bit coy, devoid of such interesting (to car nuts and Chevy fans) information as its Australian origin.

So, why all the interest this week in police cars, a niche market heavily subsidized by fleet discounts?

Aha, it turns out there is a big Police Fleet Expo meeting in St. Louis this weekend where municipal authorities will be wooed by fleet sales folks from Detroit to order their new police cars. Amazing, considering the Crown Vic will still be in production for another year. Just getting their ducks in a row, one could surmise.

Chevy and Dodge no doubt will be pushing their rear-wheel-drive V8s, long the police standard. Chevy’s news release last spring even named Crown Vic as its target. Time was when neither Chevy nor Ford would mention the other’s name in polite company.

Meanwhile, the point of Ford’s demonstration for the news media this week was how much better the new Taurus-based Ford Police Interceptor (FPI) will be than the familiar CVPI it replaces. Ford engineers showed that the six-speed automatic transmission in the FPI gives it considerable performance advantage over the four-speed CVPI, especially in urban emergency-run and chase situations.

In addition to such crash safety measures as multiple air bags and a police-car-only 75-mph rear-impact test, the FPI also will have standard “ballistic” front doors to protect cops in shoot-out situations, as well as anti-shiv shields in the backs of the front seats to keep prisoners in the backseat from stabbing through. Finally, the FPI is promised to have a 20% improvement in fuel economy over the CVPI. It will be offered with two different V6s but no V8.

Now, why so much attention to this niche, amounting to less than one percent of even a lousy new vehicle market? It’s about product exposure. Publicity. Free Advertising. Think about all the cop cars you see in movies and on TV dramas. A western Ford dealer explained to me the obvious, that “people see how tough and fast Ford police cars are, so that’s what they want to buy for themselves and their families.” Who cares about fuel economy, anyway?

In many states, there is a single-bid process for all publicly owned vehicles. So if the State Police opt for a certain make at a fleet-negotiated bargain price, all the other public agencies, police and pool cars alike, can buy in. In hardscrabble Detroit, one of the outrageous perks for city council members is each one’s police-spec Crown Vic. Twenty years ago, the city car perk was a Dodge in line with the Dodge cop cars of the day.

I had a chance to examine the window price sticker of a CVPI last spring at the NAFA conference. Base price with all kinds of special heavy-duty equipment was $27,260 while options such as two-tone (black-and-white) paint and dual spots, plus delivery, brought the MSRP to $30,140. That’s considerably more than a civilian Mercury Grand Marquis, but it doesn’t reflect the actual fleet discount transfer price. I heard–unconfirmed and probably un-confirmable in anything less than full-press investigative reporting–that 2010 Dodge Charger police cars were being sold to agencies for about ten grand less than CVPIs.

Still, I have to wonder if the huge investment in police car development is worth it to Ford, GM and Chrysler. Maybe it’s just a case of Riding the Tiger. And Pride. No, wait, that’s about lions, not tigers.

Anyway, tune in next week for details of Ford’s second new entry for the police market. We’ll have a full report.