Last of the Crown Vics.

[jetmechmarty]

I don't think the taxpayers own Ford.

[latexeses]

Ford was the "Last Man Standing" when it came to full size rear wheel drive platform for most of the police agencies. I have a friend in the CHP out here back when when all of the other manufacturers started to go to front wheel drive cars. They were to the point of looking to Volvo for a while, trying to find a suitable replacement when Ford made noise about ending that line..

AS for the Carbon. Specs and real life are two different things. When they get a fleet of cars that they sell for one purpose and they last for 250,000 miles that is so trouble free, what are they going to do while they are waiting for them to wear out so they can sell them another car?

Sounds good on paper.

Wasn't there a Real hot deal on a Solar Panel company recently?

Just some thoughts...

I know plenty of Police, Sheriff etc. None of them that I know ever did gripe much about their patrol cars. Except when the AC didn't work well.

[natemoen]

AS for the Carbon. Specs and real life are two different things. When they get a fleet of cars that they sell for one purpose and they last for 250,000 miles that is so trouble free, what are they going to do while they are waiting for them to wear out so they can sell them another car

One department I was a part of had a loose mile limit of 200 miles per week per car, this department was replacing the crown vics they had at 75000 miles. This was a state patrol and the cars were and were only used by 1 person for one shift per day.

Different department, the cars were pool cars, used 3 shifts a day, replaced every 65000...they replaced cars about every year and a half.

NYPD alone has almost 9000 cars. How long do you think it would take them before they replaced all their cars? I bet they would be a pretty much constant rotation still.

it would definitely be hard starting and hard convincing of switching to those cars (especially if they also got into the suv market). It would always be a rotation though of replacements. No one is going to switch all their squads at once.

Also, because it is a very specific market they really need to watch how much they expand, because like you point out there may be a large influx at the begining but then it would taper off an basically level of and the probably stay ready steady.

Sorry this seems real random and disorganized but I don't feel like going back and organizing it

[latexeses]

Nathan,
I realize that it would take as loooooong time to get all of the cars rotated out and the new cars in.
You are right. Someone, Carbon in this case, is going to have to be small enough to be busy and big enough to meet demand. Ford decided that it wasn't worth their time and money to keep building the cruiser for both the public and law enforcement and they are already building them.

Carbon can't be building their own components. What happens when the company that is making widgets for their car decides that they aren't a big enough concern or the contractor that makes the widget fastener goes under.

It just seem to me that it is the saying "specialization is for insects" applied to the auto industry.

It would be awesome if they can pull it off and succeed. It will certainly help that they are the only game in town.

I would be affraid to commit to a long term venture that has no history. I might wind up with a bunch of vehicles I can't maintain.

Maybe they are hoping that they might wind up being a business that it "too important" to fail and the Govt. would prop them up if times go bad.

The government is as they say on the website.

"The Department of Defense spends billions of dollars funding specialty vehicles for the military. Fire departments, emergency medical services and mail carriers all operate task-specific vehicles. Carbon's E7 is the world's first purpose-built law enforcement patrol vehicle."

Problem solved..

[crazy steve]

I'll admit to being skeptical about the E7 too...

One thing conspiciously absent from their webpage is any mention of price. While there's so-called 'purpose built' vehicles in use in a variety of 'public service' applications, most of those are based on commonly-available truck chassis, with just a 'specialty' body installed. The few 'true' purpose-built models generally feature six-figure+ price tags, not a price most police departments will be willing to pay. I'm reasonably sure that the Crown Vic had a very attractive price (particularly at fleet pricing), as with a 32 year production run probably nearly all of the engineering and most of the tooling costs had long since been paid for.

While an interesting idea, the American automotive landscape is littered with dead 'niche' manufacturers (anybody remember the Checker Marathon?) who couldn't hit volume or price numbers good enough to survive...

[natemoen]

The price thing is something that is a bit worrisome. All they ever say is that the price will be competitive to current options. Thing is though how are they figuring the price of a current squad car? I guess is that they are taking the base price of the car, adding in the cost of all new add on parts (lights, siren, computer, partition, etc), and then tacking on an estimated hourly wage for some worker to install everything. If that is how they calculate that then that is a problem, cause all departments see is the base number for the car, and that add on stuff is used for a long time and just moved from car to car till it breaks. If that's the case they are going to scare many departments away with that number whenever it finally comes out.

I do agree niche markets are hard, I do hope they can make it though.

[latexeses]

Nathan,
You are obviously much closer to this issue than most of us. This is going to be interesting to follow.
Have they actually sold one of their platforms? Are they waiting to get enough orders to start some sort of production. I may have missed that in the website. I really wasn't looking for that though.

Hopefully they wont be calling it the "Carbon Tucker". The best car never produced.

[natemoen]

I think last time i heard something they had around of 20k in orders for the car. They just started building their manufacturing facility I think last fall but only have their couple of prototype and show cars so far.

Never thought about compairing it to the tucker, hopefully it never comes to that.

[madmax-im]

Oh...Wait.....thats right, there was a bail out wasn't there. Hmmm...wonder why??

Yes there was and Ford didnt take any of it...they were the only ones that didnt...

[natemoen]

Yes there was and Ford didnt take any of it...they were the only ones that didnt...

But ford was right there begging the government to give the other the money because if they all failed then fords supply chains would have failed and then Ford would have failed.

[madmax-im]

But ford was right there begging the government to give the other the money because if they all failed then fords supply chains would have failed and then Ford would have failed.

But they themselves did not partake directly like GM and Chrysler have...
But back to the original topic...There are plenty of former Crown Vic police cars out there for relatively cheap $. If you shop around you can find some really clean non patrol use cars with reasonable mileage.... A shame to see Ford out of the Police Interceptor line..much like Chevy before them. Thier Caprice 9c1 Police cars were even better than the Fords with their big block Vette motors... Today's Dodge Chargers and Chevy Wimpalas wont be as durable even with the police heavy duty pkgs installed...quality just aint there.