A friend of mine bought an ex-cop Crown Vic about eight months ago for $5,000 and sold it after owning it for six months for $6,500. He always said the most entertaining thing was watching people in the rear-view mirror obviously driving above the speed limit then QUICKLY slowing down when they (mis) recognize his car. We were both going to the same event one evening and here I am, in the left lane speeding when I fell into the same trap for about a minute. Once I recognized him I sped away.
Don’t you think that accusing RetroJerry of lying is a bit rude? And what reason would he have for lying about this?
Besides, the rate of depreciation — even that of a “depreciation whore” — slows considerably once a vehicle is several years old, which would be the case with a $5,000 car.
Depending on where he is, this also happens in some locales at certain times of year. For example, where I live you can hardly give vehicles away from about the start of the school year and into winter, but things really start to move once people start getting tax refunds, and the weather starts warming up.
Back in late ’08 I scored a clean ’05 P71 with 93k for $3990.00, put 60k on it and sold it last year for $3000.00. Anything’s possible. Hell, I scored another clean ’05 with 112k last month for all of $500.00 and I know I can flip it for $3000.00 easily.
Yes have experienced that paranoia lately, driving my unregistered Nissan while waiting for a replacement key for my Citroen every solid colour steel wheeled Commodore behind me looks like a cop car.
these are simply the greatest automotive bargain that exists. big, fast, comfortable, reliable, and cheap. and it IS fun when you can intimidate your way for lane changes by simply being on the road and putting your signal on…:)
I’ll differ with you on the reliable part. At least in Georgia. By the time the cops around here get done with them they ain’t even worth the scrap price.
One of my brother-in-laws is a retired state trooper. I thought about buying his old cruiser when he turned it in. He told me to stay away from retried cop cars. He wasn’t supped to do it but he let me drive his old cruiser just before he turned it in. The thing was a piece of junk. The front end was shot, it burned oil, and sounded like it was falling apart. And he told it was the best of the ones being taken out of service.
Most of that comes from being accelerated like a dragster, bounced across median strips, and driven well over 100 mhp to just to catch you going 76 in a 70 zone.
around here (az ) there are always a couple on Craigslist with under 100k. because they made them for so many years with interchangeable parts the pick n pulls are full of anything you need. I guess it would depend on how long your local officials kept them going before getting rid of them.
The GSP replaces there cars about every four or five years. Most the cars have close to 100,000 very hard miles on them. Most county and city cop shops replace their cars every eight to ten years with over 100,000 hard miles on them.
Steve
Posted April 24, 2014 at 7:34 AM
Most county and city cop shops replace their cars every eight to ten years with over 100,000 hard miles on them
Detroit Police cars were so battered, and the city so broke, that some of the local big shots donated new cars, and EMS trucks, to the city
Curious, was it a pre- or post ’03 CV? The post-’03 cars seem to hold up far better than the earlier cars, the coil-over suspension and rack & pinion steering is clearly more robust than the old front end. I sold a 165k ’05 CVPI that had all of its factory front end parts and it still drove straight and true. I currently have a ’96 civilian CV with 128k that has a pretty much whipped front end, and it was a legit lil’ ol’ lady car.
Doesn’t matter how “civilianized” a Crown Vic is, people will still slow down or get out of the way.
I’ve told the story here before of my grandparents’ ’89 Crown Vic LX. Padded vinyl top, wire wheel covers, thick blue velour seats, the works. They bought the car at a time when the Illinois State Police and nearly all of the county and local agencies on the Illinois side of the St. Louis metro were running Caprices and/or Diplomats. (IIRC, Belleville had a few Fords and the SIU-Edwardsville campus cops had one or two. That was it) Despite that, every time I drove that car other drivers would invariably slow down or move over.
Funny thing was that Grandma actually drove that thing like a cop! This was the woman who at age 84 traded the Crown Vic in for the ’02 Dakota Quad Cab 4×4 that I’m driving now. She regretted selling Grandpa’s F-150 when he passed away and missed having a truck for gardening supplies.
Speaking of wheelbarrows, my favorite Grandma Elsie story centers around just that. Christmas season of 1988 my Dad asked Grandma for some gift ideas. She had said that her favorite wheelbarrow was starting to rust through and that she wanted a bigger one.
A few days later I joined my Dad on a shopping trip which took us to several local hardware/DIY stores in search of the perfect wheelbarrow. Dad couldn’t make up his mind and in frustration looked at me and said …
“Who in the hell buys THEIR OWN MOTHER a WHEELBARROW for Christmas?!”
We then came across a rather large garden cart with big bicycle spoke wheels and removable side panels. It seemed well made and was not inexpensive. Dad was sure she’d like it. Christmas morning rolls around and the look on Grandma’s face when she ripped the paper off the garden cart box was priceless. She absolutely HATED it, and said so right then and there! She wanted a WHEELBARROW, not some fancy garden cart.
Dad exchanged the garden cart for a contractor-grade wheelbarrow that Grandma used right up until she passed away ten years ago. It was my honor to tell the wheelbarrow story at her memorial.
Now back to our regularly scheduled Crown Vic thread……
Yup, or at least it used to be so when most cop cars were Vics; about 10-12 years ago my mother in law had a fairly chromey civilian Vic and whenever I drove it I experienced the phenomenon.
Friend drove a Grand Marquis; if that wasn’t enough, he was a ham operator and had built a little X-band transmitter. Oh, you should have seen the brake lights flash when he hit the button…
No need to get paranoid here as all the really fast stuff the police drives is unmarked. And different colors. But it’s either German or Swedish, from Golf R to Volvo R. And that includes wagons.
Special Task Forces drive all black Teutonic top models with blinded windows like a BMW 7-series, X5 or a Mercedes S600. And I’ve read that these are also seriously souped up. A few years ago I was doing about 95 mph on the freeway and a few of them passed me as if I was standing still. Big Black Bimmers to the rescue !
Michigan State Police blue. I’d recognize it anywhere.
Exactly my thought. Surprised that it isn’t wearing a Michigan plate.
In Michigan, we don’t just have people driving retail Crown Vics, and people driving ex-police cars, there are police wannabes that option their cars into MSP cruiser lookalikes: same shade of blue, blacked out grill, little chrome hubcaps, dual spotlights on the cowl and a cow catcher.
My favorite thing about cruise control is I can pin it on the limit, then don’t have to worry about the speed creeping, like it did in my old Civic.
Jeff
Posted April 23, 2014 at 9:47 PM
it cant be a Michigan state trooper blue, their blue is quite distinctive ( so distinctive enough that i can feel its existence. which is necessary for living in Michigan ) lighter and brighter but not shiny.
Looks too dark to be MSP blue, but perhaps they used several shade.
Mark P
Posted April 24, 2014 at 5:59 AM
There’s only one shade of MSP blue, and that’s not it. IIRC, it’s a proprietary formula similar to UPS Pullman Brown, but MSP doesn’t go to near the lengths that UPS does (painting brown vehicles white prior to crushing them) to protect it.
In fact, the formula for UPS Pullman Brown is a corporate secret protected to the same degree as Coca-Cola syrup or KFC’s 11 herbs and spices.
jpcavanaugh
Posted April 24, 2014 at 6:37 AM
In my experience, the UPS brown paint was not that big of a secret. In college (around 1981-2), I worked for an industrial wholesale company that carried the DuPont automotive paint line. One of the paint mixers told me that he mixed UPS brown almost weekly, for which he would have needed the formula. The reason I remember it is that he told me that UPS was one of very few customers who were still ordering DuPont DuLux enamel, which was DuPont’s original automotive enamel that went back to the 1920s, coming out shortly after the Duco lacquer.) Almost everyone else was buying the acrylic formula paints by then (Lucite lacquer or Centari enamel).
Don Andreina
Posted April 24, 2014 at 6:56 AM
You can put a colour spectrometer up against a van to determine its breakdown. Very hard to protect a colour, Cadbury recently lost a case against another chocolate company that was using purple on its packaging here in oz. They didn’t win for various reasons, the main one being that the other company was not ‘passing off’ as Cadbury.
Steve
Posted April 24, 2014 at 7:20 AM
Looks too dark to be MSP blue,
The car was shot in the shade, makes it look darker. I was at an air show several years ago and got a good close look at the MSP cruisers parked at the gate, at close range, like the pic and in the shade. The color is that dark. My reaction to the color in the pic was instinctive.
Wonder what department this is from? If I ever buy an ex cop car I am tempted to get plates that read 8NTACOP. Here in Oregon nearly all cop cars have blue on yellow license plates which makes them so obvious. Either that or the cop car is a Caprice, Explorer, Charger, Crown Vic, or Impala so it is easy to tell. Also , they usually have an A-pillar spot light, antennas, little lights around the rear plate, in the grill, or some mixture of those.
Hmmm…I just stopped a little used car dealer east of here. There was a 2010 in this exact same shade of blue. 81,000 miles with an asking price of $7200 and it was immaculate. He’d probably take $6000 in cash.
Nah. I had an ’01 a lot like this one for 7 years. Been there, done that.
If anyone has ever seen the FX tv show, The League, there is an episode where one of the characters buys a dark blue ex-police Crown Victoria like this and he starts to enjoy the perks of everyone thinking he’s a cop, he starts getting free coffee at places, everyone moves out of the way for him in traffic, it was pretty funny.
The Crown Vic front end is one of the universal things you recognize as a habitual speeder, you learn it like WWII spotter learns the shape of enemy aircraft, even the Grand Marquis spooks me every once in a while until I see the chrome grille.
I do want to thank Dodge for adding the neon laser light show to the back end of the newest Chargers that makes rollers easy to spot from about 10 miles out.
Best bargain around but I can never get past the looks of these things. The 4.6 is kinda so so as engines go…might be a good upgrade for a Ranger.
Tell you what though, if I were building a street rods for a living, Id be on these like white on rice. Id pluck the rear axle (8.8’s are good bits) and the front suspension is a perfect upgrade for a rod that can go around curves. The engines/trannys could be sold off as a unit and crush that pig of a body for the scrap.
You want a pig? Ask any municipal mechanics how much they like Chargers… several here in the Cleveland area tryed to force Chrysler to buy them back due to severe rear subframe rot… on 4-5 year old Chargers. Junk. Pure, unadaulerated junk.
Elwood: “It’s got cop shocks, cop tires, cop brakes and a 440 cubic inch plant that was made before catalytic converters so it’ll run good on regular gas. Is it the new Bluesmobile or what?”
Jake: “Fix the lighter”
It’s an Interceptor, so it has more power under the hood. I think it would make a fine Bluesmobile…as long as it doesn’t throw a rod at an inopportune moment.
But I thought the whole point of driving a car like this is because everybody WILL think you’re a cop?
A friend of mine bought an ex-cop Crown Vic about eight months ago for $5,000 and sold it after owning it for six months for $6,500. He always said the most entertaining thing was watching people in the rear-view mirror obviously driving above the speed limit then QUICKLY slowing down when they (mis) recognize his car. We were both going to the same event one evening and here I am, in the left lane speeding when I fell into the same trap for about a minute. Once I recognized him I sped away.
thats pretty lucky, crown vics are usually depreciation whores. or you are just lying.
Or he bought it right – such things do happen.
Don’t you think that accusing RetroJerry of lying is a bit rude? And what reason would he have for lying about this?
Besides, the rate of depreciation — even that of a “depreciation whore” — slows considerably once a vehicle is several years old, which would be the case with a $5,000 car.
Depending on where he is, this also happens in some locales at certain times of year. For example, where I live you can hardly give vehicles away from about the start of the school year and into winter, but things really start to move once people start getting tax refunds, and the weather starts warming up.
Back in late ’08 I scored a clean ’05 P71 with 93k for $3990.00, put 60k on it and sold it last year for $3000.00. Anything’s possible. Hell, I scored another clean ’05 with 112k last month for all of $500.00 and I know I can flip it for $3000.00 easily.
This reminds me of an ex-cop Dodge that I once saw. A sign in the back window said “Yes it was, no I’m not, nor do I care to be.”
Yes have experienced that paranoia lately, driving my unregistered Nissan while waiting for a replacement key for my Citroen every solid colour steel wheeled Commodore behind me looks like a cop car.
In France, there should be a law forbidding deep blue station-wagons owners to park them next to rural roads or highways.
Every time I see one of these, I slam on the brakes thinking it´s a speed trap from the Gendarmerie.
It is very dangereux !
these are simply the greatest automotive bargain that exists. big, fast, comfortable, reliable, and cheap. and it IS fun when you can intimidate your way for lane changes by simply being on the road and putting your signal on…:)
I’ll differ with you on the reliable part. At least in Georgia. By the time the cops around here get done with them they ain’t even worth the scrap price.
One of my brother-in-laws is a retired state trooper. I thought about buying his old cruiser when he turned it in. He told me to stay away from retried cop cars. He wasn’t supped to do it but he let me drive his old cruiser just before he turned it in. The thing was a piece of junk. The front end was shot, it burned oil, and sounded like it was falling apart. And he told it was the best of the ones being taken out of service.
Most of that comes from being accelerated like a dragster, bounced across median strips, and driven well over 100 mhp to just to catch you going 76 in a 70 zone.
around here (az ) there are always a couple on Craigslist with under 100k. because they made them for so many years with interchangeable parts the pick n pulls are full of anything you need. I guess it would depend on how long your local officials kept them going before getting rid of them.
The GSP replaces there cars about every four or five years. Most the cars have close to 100,000 very hard miles on them. Most county and city cop shops replace their cars every eight to ten years with over 100,000 hard miles on them.
Most county and city cop shops replace their cars every eight to ten years with over 100,000 hard miles on them
Detroit Police cars were so battered, and the city so broke, that some of the local big shots donated new cars, and EMS trucks, to the city
Curious, was it a pre- or post ’03 CV? The post-’03 cars seem to hold up far better than the earlier cars, the coil-over suspension and rack & pinion steering is clearly more robust than the old front end. I sold a 165k ’05 CVPI that had all of its factory front end parts and it still drove straight and true. I currently have a ’96 civilian CV with 128k that has a pretty much whipped front end, and it was a legit lil’ ol’ lady car.
He probably put that frame on so he does not get arrested for ‘impersonating an officer”
Or to trick ya into thinking he ain’t a cop.
Ha!
Doesn’t matter how “civilianized” a Crown Vic is, people will still slow down or get out of the way.
I’ve told the story here before of my grandparents’ ’89 Crown Vic LX. Padded vinyl top, wire wheel covers, thick blue velour seats, the works. They bought the car at a time when the Illinois State Police and nearly all of the county and local agencies on the Illinois side of the St. Louis metro were running Caprices and/or Diplomats. (IIRC, Belleville had a few Fords and the SIU-Edwardsville campus cops had one or two. That was it) Despite that, every time I drove that car other drivers would invariably slow down or move over.
Funny thing was that Grandma actually drove that thing like a cop! This was the woman who at age 84 traded the Crown Vic in for the ’02 Dakota Quad Cab 4×4 that I’m driving now. She regretted selling Grandpa’s F-150 when he passed away and missed having a truck for gardening supplies.
That’s one heck of a wheel barrow!
What a grandma! I am impressed to say the least.
Speaking of wheelbarrows, my favorite Grandma Elsie story centers around just that. Christmas season of 1988 my Dad asked Grandma for some gift ideas. She had said that her favorite wheelbarrow was starting to rust through and that she wanted a bigger one.
A few days later I joined my Dad on a shopping trip which took us to several local hardware/DIY stores in search of the perfect wheelbarrow. Dad couldn’t make up his mind and in frustration looked at me and said …
“Who in the hell buys THEIR OWN MOTHER a WHEELBARROW for Christmas?!”
We then came across a rather large garden cart with big bicycle spoke wheels and removable side panels. It seemed well made and was not inexpensive. Dad was sure she’d like it. Christmas morning rolls around and the look on Grandma’s face when she ripped the paper off the garden cart box was priceless. She absolutely HATED it, and said so right then and there! She wanted a WHEELBARROW, not some fancy garden cart.
Dad exchanged the garden cart for a contractor-grade wheelbarrow that Grandma used right up until she passed away ten years ago. It was my honor to tell the wheelbarrow story at her memorial.
Now back to our regularly scheduled Crown Vic thread……
Yup, or at least it used to be so when most cop cars were Vics; about 10-12 years ago my mother in law had a fairly chromey civilian Vic and whenever I drove it I experienced the phenomenon.
Friend drove a Grand Marquis; if that wasn’t enough, he was a ham operator and had built a little X-band transmitter. Oh, you should have seen the brake lights flash when he hit the button…
Miss you, Tom.
No need to get paranoid here as all the really fast stuff the police drives is unmarked. And different colors. But it’s either German or Swedish, from Golf R to Volvo R. And that includes wagons.
Special Task Forces drive all black Teutonic top models with blinded windows like a BMW 7-series, X5 or a Mercedes S600. And I’ve read that these are also seriously souped up. A few years ago I was doing about 95 mph on the freeway and a few of them passed me as if I was standing still. Big Black Bimmers to the rescue !
While not a fan of the shade, I am impressed by what appears to be a very good paint job on an ex cop car.
That is probably the factory color.
Yes, it was probably a detective’s car
Michigan State Police blue. I’d recognize it anywhere. Still, the new owner is taking very good care of that paint!
Michigan State Police blue. I’d recognize it anywhere.
Exactly my thought. Surprised that it isn’t wearing a Michigan plate.
In Michigan, we don’t just have people driving retail Crown Vics, and people driving ex-police cars, there are police wannabes that option their cars into MSP cruiser lookalikes: same shade of blue, blacked out grill, little chrome hubcaps, dual spotlights on the cowl and a cow catcher.
My favorite thing about cruise control is I can pin it on the limit, then don’t have to worry about the speed creeping, like it did in my old Civic.
it cant be a Michigan state trooper blue, their blue is quite distinctive ( so distinctive enough that i can feel its existence. which is necessary for living in Michigan ) lighter and brighter but not shiny.
Looks too dark to be MSP blue, but perhaps they used several shade.
There’s only one shade of MSP blue, and that’s not it. IIRC, it’s a proprietary formula similar to UPS Pullman Brown, but MSP doesn’t go to near the lengths that UPS does (painting brown vehicles white prior to crushing them) to protect it.
In fact, the formula for UPS Pullman Brown is a corporate secret protected to the same degree as Coca-Cola syrup or KFC’s 11 herbs and spices.
In my experience, the UPS brown paint was not that big of a secret. In college (around 1981-2), I worked for an industrial wholesale company that carried the DuPont automotive paint line. One of the paint mixers told me that he mixed UPS brown almost weekly, for which he would have needed the formula. The reason I remember it is that he told me that UPS was one of very few customers who were still ordering DuPont DuLux enamel, which was DuPont’s original automotive enamel that went back to the 1920s, coming out shortly after the Duco lacquer.) Almost everyone else was buying the acrylic formula paints by then (Lucite lacquer or Centari enamel).
You can put a colour spectrometer up against a van to determine its breakdown. Very hard to protect a colour, Cadbury recently lost a case against another chocolate company that was using purple on its packaging here in oz. They didn’t win for various reasons, the main one being that the other company was not ‘passing off’ as Cadbury.
Looks too dark to be MSP blue,
The car was shot in the shade, makes it look darker. I was at an air show several years ago and got a good close look at the MSP cruisers parked at the gate, at close range, like the pic and in the shade. The color is that dark. My reaction to the color in the pic was instinctive.
One of my Uncles had a genuine ex-RCMP 1974 Dodge Monaco Bluesmobile. At the time (1979) I didn’t think much of it. Would love to have it now..
I miss the days of the RCMP blue color scheme. They looked more ‘official’ that the current white.
Are any of the RCMP “retro” Crown Vics still in service? They went to great lengths to make them as period correct as possible…..
Third Gen Camaro, Mountie style. For when your trusty steed just isn’t fast enough.
The RCMP has also run Fourth Gens, and currently has a Fifth Gen.
Wonder what department this is from? If I ever buy an ex cop car I am tempted to get plates that read 8NTACOP. Here in Oregon nearly all cop cars have blue on yellow license plates which makes them so obvious. Either that or the cop car is a Caprice, Explorer, Charger, Crown Vic, or Impala so it is easy to tell. Also , they usually have an A-pillar spot light, antennas, little lights around the rear plate, in the grill, or some mixture of those.
Love the tag frame. And the car. And the color.
Hmmm…I just stopped a little used car dealer east of here. There was a 2010 in this exact same shade of blue. 81,000 miles with an asking price of $7200 and it was immaculate. He’d probably take $6000 in cash.
Nah. I had an ’01 a lot like this one for 7 years. Been there, done that.
If anyone has ever seen the FX tv show, The League, there is an episode where one of the characters buys a dark blue ex-police Crown Victoria like this and he starts to enjoy the perks of everyone thinking he’s a cop, he starts getting free coffee at places, everyone moves out of the way for him in traffic, it was pretty funny.
The Crown Vic front end is one of the universal things you recognize as a habitual speeder, you learn it like WWII spotter learns the shape of enemy aircraft, even the Grand Marquis spooks me every once in a while until I see the chrome grille.
I do want to thank Dodge for adding the neon laser light show to the back end of the newest Chargers that makes rollers easy to spot from about 10 miles out.
Know thine enemy!
Seattle Crown Vics are baby blue and have a plastic chrome grill cover. They are rather distinctive.
Best bargain around but I can never get past the looks of these things. The 4.6 is kinda so so as engines go…might be a good upgrade for a Ranger.
Tell you what though, if I were building a street rods for a living, Id be on these like white on rice. Id pluck the rear axle (8.8’s are good bits) and the front suspension is a perfect upgrade for a rod that can go around curves. The engines/trannys could be sold off as a unit and crush that pig of a body for the scrap.
You want a pig? Ask any municipal mechanics how much they like Chargers… several here in the Cleveland area tryed to force Chrysler to buy them back due to severe rear subframe rot… on 4-5 year old Chargers. Junk. Pure, unadaulerated junk.
Elwood: “It’s got cop shocks, cop tires, cop brakes and a 440 cubic inch plant that was made before catalytic converters so it’ll run good on regular gas. Is it the new Bluesmobile or what?”
Jake: “Fix the lighter”
It’s an Interceptor, so it has more power under the hood. I think it would make a fine Bluesmobile…as long as it doesn’t throw a rod at an inopportune moment.