How Cabbies Get 300K from the Ford CVPI
By PFM Staff

While many police fleet managers keep their police sedans on the street until 100K miles, most also treat that number as the edge of the flat earth. Much more than 100K miles and they are in strange and uncharted territory. Unknown hazards, dangers, and expenses may lie ahead. For their part, some patrol officers and police unions consider police cars with 100K miles a real officer safety issue; high mileage police cars may put both the officer and the public at risk. And for their part, the auto companies are totally silent. No one in the auto industry knows how long a police car can or should last, or if they do, they aren’t telling.

Well, the waters beyond 100K miles, and even beyond 200K miles, have been fully charted and documented by many of the nation’s taxi companies. To find out at what mileage the super durable police sedan turns into a money pit, exactly when it goes “high maintenance,” we called a cab. Not just any cab, but Checker Cab, one of the largest taxi companies in North America. Checker Werks in downtown Chicago is the outfit that services all these cabs. We spoke to Mike Puccia, the shop supervisor. Checker Werks maintains a total of 1300 retired police cars until odometer readings of between 200K and 300K miles.

The relationship between the police and cabbies may be closer than you think. Police officers work as cabbies as a second job. Police officers ask cabbies for intelligence on crime and criminal activities. And the police occasionally borrow cabs as invisible surveillance vehicles.

100K Miles is New

Virtually every car in the Checker Cab fleet is a used police car. The majority are Ford CVPIs, with some Chevy Impala 9C1s and a few Dodge Intrepids. All of the cars come to Checker with between 70K and 110K miles, which is obviously when most police fleets dispose of their units. To Checker Cab, a police car with 100K miles is new...this is where they start.

According to a Police Fleet Manager survey, 43% of fleet managers keep the Ford CVPI in-service between 80K and 100K miles and another 43% hold the cars to between 100K and 120K miles. From here, Checker Cab puts another 200K miles on the car without extraordinary maintenance, and without profit-robbing break-downs.

Taxis pound the miles on a car far faster than the police. According to the survey, 49% of the police fleets get 25K to 50K miles per year put on the police car. Around 37% of the police fleets put just 10K to 25K miles per year on the cars. Less than 2% put more than 75K miles on a police car per year. Yet taxis see a minimum of 75K miles per year and 100K miles a year is common.

The taxi companies find the Ford CVPIs just how we leave them. Definitely in need of front suspension work, probably in need of routine brake work, spark plugs, and oxygen sensors, and perhaps in need of body panel replacements and catalytic converters. With less maintenance than you may think, these “worn out” police cars get an additional 100K to 150K miles in taxi service or until their model year is too old for city statutes.

While the argument for well-maintained police cars involves some aspect of officer and public safety, the taxis are kept in dependable shape for an arguably equally important reason: money. If the taxi doesn’t run well, it loses money...and taxis with 200K can be maintained economically enough to be reliable enough to make money.

While these taxis are not driven at high-speed or under pursuit conditions, they driven hard in stop and go traffic, and in extremes of temperature over all kinds of pavement, potholes, and railroad tracks. And cabbies are every bit as aggressive and as abusive on the taxi as the average police officer.