Ford Introduces an 'Industry First' Hybrid Pursuit-Rated Police Vehicle

Being first is a tricky business. As we all know, Columbus was the first to discover the Americas but we also all know that is an utter falsehood. In addition to people already living on the continent, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Viking and Chinese sailors made the trip by boat long before Spain was even considered a country. However, Columbus is the smug-looking gentleman getting most of the exploratory credit in Western textbooks.

It’s a similar story with Ford’s new Police Responder Hybrid Sedan. The automaker is calling it the “first pursuit-rated hybrid police car,” but that’s a little like saying you are the best athlete in a sport you also invented.

There doesn’t seem to be any official guidelines on what makes something a “pursuit-rated” vehicle. Ford says it means the car is certified by police agencies to be tough enough to handle police pursuits for longer periods at different speeds and over obstacles (such as curbs and flooded intersections). However, there is no clear maxim of what that entails between departments and no minimum requirement.

Typically, pursuit cars are any versatile platform already in an automaker’s law enforcement fleet that boasts the best acceleration. The vehicle is then equipped with some additional safety features, a light bar, upgraded brakes, suspension, and the hardware necessary to let it idle all day as the officer kills time between speeding violations. Automakers have been calling regular patrol cars “pursuit vehicles” for decades.

Pursuit is actually a term more synonymous with Chevy’s fleet offerings than Ford’s. Had Chevrolet bothered to designate its Tahoe Hybrid Special Service Vehicle differently, perhaps General Motors would be the one bragging about having the industry’s first hybrid police car.

Furthermore, some departments have already been making use of hybrid vehicles for a while. The NYPD uses the Toyota Prius for traffic and parking enforcement. It has also repurposed the occasional Ford Fusion Hybrid for light patrol duty — which is exactly what this new Police Responder Hybrid Sedan is. But the NYPD doesn’t bother calling its hybrid cars “pursuit vehicles” because it knows they won’t be nearly as fast as the Taurus-based Interceptor Sedan, with its 3.5-liter twin-turbocharged V6.

This is just another opportunity for Ford to announce how progressive and technologically superior it is. Hats off to it for producing a police package on a platform that could save departments serious gas money, but using careful wording to make it seem like it was the first to develop a hybrid cop car is a little grimy.

Ford’s new hybrid “pursuit vehicle” comes with the standard Fusion Hybrid’s Atkinson-cycle 2.0 liter inline-four and 1.4 kWh lithium-ion battery, and will debut in Los Angeles and New York City — where we’ve already seen them for years.

[Images: Ford Motor Co.]