Junkyard Find: 2004 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, American Flag Option Package
Ford Panthers are easy to find in American self-service wrecking yards, to put it mildly, and the most common Panther of them all is the P71 Police Interceptor version of the Crown Victoria.
I daily-drove an ex-San Joaquin County Sheriff’s ’97 P71 for most of the 2000s and thought it was one of the best car-per-dollar-spent deals I’ve ever had. However, it takes a very special Crown Vic to stand out sufficiently from the junkyard crowd and get into this series.
I shot a professionally-painted stars-and-stripes ’89 Olds last year, but nicely executed American-flag paint jobs are quite rare on junkyard cars (badly executed flag paint jobs, on the other hand, are easy to find). This ’04 Crown Vic, which started life as a police car and ended it as a patriotic-looking San Jose taxicab, has a pretty good Old Glory costume.
You’ll find one in every car, sometimes in a puddle of rainwater.
It appears that this cab was operated by American Cab, which specializes in star-spangled vehicles.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Look under the hood, it still has the siren!
Yes 'Murica! I just found a Phoenix Suns car (click my name). Gotta love the strange paint schemes and wraps. Every once in a while you might even find an art car.