Photo: davidsonscott15/Flickr
Ah, the Crown Vic. It's synonymous with the police car, grandpa's car .. and now, just as Ford has stopped production, the Crown Victoria is becoming a very hip car. Gale Holland of the Los Angeles Times explains:
Like a cockroach, however, the Crown Vic is resilient. It's already begun quietly colonizing civilian car culture, notably in Los Angeles County, where the number now in private hands — 38,000 — is second only to that in metropolitan New York, according to auto information company Edmunds.com.
This is confounding on multiple counts. The Crown Vic, the last of the roomy, rear-drive American sedans, is the ultimate grandma and grandpa car. Like the trucker cap before it, is irony its appeal?
The Crown Vic is dead. Long live the Crown Vic.
Perhaps the mystique of the Crown Vic can be summed up in this comment by a car forum commenter: "It just ... tickles me that there's a group about an ex-police vehicle modified for almost the exact opposite type of drivers and purposes."
So there are a lot of things you can do with the basic platform, and a lot of parts out there for gearheads to tinker with.
As an added bonus, the Panther platform was comfortable and practical. Certainly miles ahead of its GM equivalent.
Pretty sure it wasn't a Crown Vic, but the police car used in The KLF's video for Doctorin' the Tardis was pretty sweet. A friend recently bought a surplus police car for his art business. They decked it out to look like art police, though they couldn't add a lightbar.