I’ve been in law enforcement 30 years. Mainly driven Crown Vics but also was assigned an Impala once (one word: pathetic) and my current agency uses only the Explorers for patrol.
I loved the room inside and the trunk of the CV. I knew its days were numbered when circa 2006 I was running moving radar on a flat, straight road. The cruiser was no more than two years old. A soccer mom in a minivan came at me doing only a little over 50 in the 35 zone. I could whip a CV around in a single-motion u-turn on any road, so I didn’t lose much time in reversing direction. But boy did that CV seem to take forever to catch up with the minivan. That’s the moment I started to realize why nearby agencies were phasing them out.
The Explorer is all I know today; my retirement gig is a campus cop and there’s no other choice except for the supervisors’ Tahoe. The Explorers honestly aren’t terrible but lack knee/leg room compared to the CV, and it seems ours eat front end and suspension components on the crappy roads we have. The seat padding and adjustment also wear out much faster than the CV did. Each Explorer in service certainly has a personality of what it “decides” to make wrong repeatedly. Haven’t seen that in any fleet before— it’s almost as if the dealership assigns certain cars to certain mechanics who can never completely solve a problem.
I loved the room inside and the trunk of the CV. I knew its days were numbered when circa 2006 I was running moving radar on a flat, straight road. The cruiser was no more than two years old. A soccer mom in a minivan came at me doing only a little over 50 in the 35 zone. I could whip a CV around in a single-motion u-turn on any road, so I didn’t lose much time in reversing direction. But boy did that CV seem to take forever to catch up with the minivan. That’s the moment I started to realize why nearby agencies were phasing them out.
The Explorer is all I know today; my retirement gig is a campus cop and there’s no other choice except for the supervisors’ Tahoe. The Explorers honestly aren’t terrible but lack knee/leg room compared to the CV, and it seems ours eat front end and suspension components on the crappy roads we have. The seat padding and adjustment also wear out much faster than the CV did. Each Explorer in service certainly has a personality of what it “decides” to make wrong repeatedly. Haven’t seen that in any fleet before— it’s almost as if the dealership assigns certain cars to certain mechanics who can never completely solve a problem.
