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Fangs, your sports car may be more capable than a minivan, and you may be younger and have better reflexes than the soccer mom with a minivan full of kids, but you both have to share the same road, and that there is the problem.

Posit: Mom is driving east coming toward you as you are heading west. You have the late afternoon sun in your eyes. Between you, on your side of the road, there is a gray colored piece of sheet metal, a foot square, with one corner folded upward like a shark's tooth, right in the line of your left front tire; and you, with your better reflexes and younger eyes can't see it because of the glare in your eyes and it kind of blends with the color of the road. Mom is going 55 in a 60 zone, you're going 110, fully in control. Suddenly, your left front tire blows, losing pressure so fast that your steering wheel pulls hard to the left and before you can regain control and ease your car over to the right shoulder, the closing speed of impact is 165 mph. Mom is killed instantly. Some kids are ejected and killed by the impact with the ground. The rest die in the fire which consumes the van. You're quadded, leaving you to live the next 20 years in complete disability before you die at age 40 something of pneumonia - having left your family with both the weight of your own medical bills which have far outstripped your insurance coverage, and a multimillion dollar judgement entered against you in court for reckless driving and multiple vehicular homicide.

Now I ask you, was the 110 mph worth it?

If you want to go fast, there is a place to do it. It's called a racetrack. I used to race my motorcycle - a well set up sport bike - up and down the Angeles Crest Highway in California, dragging my knees in the corners, on a road shared with hippies in VW microbuses and families in SUVs. I knew that road like the back of my hand, and I was good. I once got followed down the mountain by Fred Merkel - 2 time world superbike champion of the day - who complemented me afterward on how smooth and efficient I was.... ....and I still caught some unexpected sand in a corner one day and low sided the bike. As soon as I let go of the bike as we were sliding along, it began to tumble and destroy itself.

I took the lesson learned and took my sorry butt to a racetrack and learned to race. You want fast? Go to the racetrack. Join the SCCA or some other sanctioning body and go race. Slow on a racetrack is faster than fast on the street by a good deal. A) It will make a better, more skilled driver out of you; and B) it will make you more respectful of the laws on the street. And, it will scratch your itch. Because the bottom line is this: no matter how good you think you are, you are not good enough to anticipate the undefined danger and deal with it; and no matter how much you wish it were otherwise, you still have to share the roads with other people. Whereas, the racetrack is a pure laboratory where you get to find out exactly how good you are, and good your car is, in a relatively safe environment, with medical response right there, God forbid you should need it.

Fangs wrote:And speeding's a dumb law anyway.

I disagree strongly. Go work in an emergency room for 5-6 years like I have. If you can repeat that statement after that, then I'll disagree, but I'll respect your viewpoint for being more fully informed. The car versus bike thing is a separate issue. People get killed both ways. That the laws are written and applied unevenly for different means of transportation is irrelevant to whether or not excessive speed is involved in an extremely high percentage of accident fatalities. Besides, if you don't want to get tickets, don't break the law. It's pretty simple, really.

jsimmons wrote:The P71 also has a transmission cooler that the civilian cars don't have.

Thanks, I had forgotten that detail.

srothstein wrote:You are correct about the plates, but there is one other area that marks almost every cop car Ford makes. You need to get close to see it, but on the left corner of the rear there is a little plate that identifies the model of the car. Cop cars all get marked as "Police Interceptor" in a rectangular emblem. The non-cop cars get a script plate reading "Crown Victoria LX" or something similar. I have always laughed at having that on an unmarked car. Nothing stops a department from using the civilian cars, but they are not certified for police use or chases and do not have the suspension and brakes beefed up.

Until a couple of months ago, my son drove a 2003 Crown Vic Police Interceptor (a P71 to the cognoceti). It was all white with black trim across the back, with the "Police Interceptor" in small chromed letters on the left side of the rear panel, below the trunk lid. It had a blacked out grill, and a spotlight on the front left pillar. And the windows were all tinted - from the factory.

The great thing about driving a cop car is that Texans finally remember to use their turn signals.

The cars do indeed have a few advantages over the "civilian" versions:

1. They have a different chip in the engine management system which bumps the power up a bit. Still not huge numbers, but more — noticeably more powerful than my wife's slightly older Crown Vic LX (which we no longer own either).
2. They have better brakes.
3. They have stiffer suspension components, and cornering in a P71 is very different from cornering in a civilian model.
4. They have extra bracing and gussets all over the frame to make it stiffer so that it can support the additional cornering forces. And both the stiffer shocks and the bracing and gussets also help it to better handle being driven off pavement, over rough terrain (railroad tracks, open fields, etc.).
5. They have a higher output alternator, to support all the extra electrical stuff found in modern cop cars (lights, computers, radios, etc.).

I actually thought it made a great car for a teenaged boy to drive. Enough juice to be "entertaining", but a very safe car to drive. He never got a single ticket in it. One time we were driving past a high school near our house, two very pretty, tall, athletic, blond, high school girls wearing nothing but volleyball shorts and jerseys who were walking ahead of us turned to face his car and waved flirtatiously at us. I doubt if they could see us through the tinted glass, but my (then) 18 year old son turned to me with a grin and said, "Dad, I love this car!" I always got a chuckle out of that.

In July, he traded it in on a used 2009 Pontiac G8 GT. Now that is a pretty neat car.

Have lived in Texas for 3.5 years, and haven't even received a warning yet. The last ticket I had was 10 years ago in the Malibu mountains, from the CHP. It was Christmas eve, 1999. Avoiding tickets just isn't that hard. My only encounter with a traffic officer in Texas was when reporting a hit and run accident in which my wife was the victim.