Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 2003 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor
Ford replaced the squared-off LTD Crown Victoria with the more aerodynamic new Crown Victoria for the 1992 model year. The chassis under those flowing body lines remained the late-1970s-vintage Panther, but a good old body-on-frame design with coil springs all around and massive suspension components turned out to be just the ticket for law-enforcement use (especially when combined with the money-saving benefits of low aerodynamic drag, weight-reduction tricks, and a modern overhead-cam V8). Sure, some civilians bought the 1992-2011 Crown Victoria, but fleet sales of the P72 (taxi) and P71 (police) versions were what made this car such a sales success for two decades. Here's a low-mile (relatively speaking) second-generation P71, found in a self-service yard just south of Denver.
This car's other siblings were the Mercury Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Car; production of the Grand Marquis continued all the way to Mercury's demise in the 2011 model year, while the Town Car got the axe the same year. Allegedly, some Crown Victorias were built in late 2011 for the 2012 model year and exported to Saudi Arabia; the final model year for North American Crown Victoria sales was 2011.
I had an ex-cop 1997 Police Interceptor as my daily driver for the second half of the 2000s. It had been a parole officer's car in California's Central Valley and wasn't used for many arrests, so it had a lot of low-stress highway miles, no urine smell (though it did come with a bunch of unused urine-test kits in the trunk), and a non-black-and-white paint job. I liked that car a lot, with its painfully cold air conditioning, 25 mpg highway fuel economy, and flat handling.
A lot of police P71s had the factory rear seats removed and replaced with pee-proof fiberglass units, with the original seats getting swapped back in when it came time to auction off the car. The nice condition of this seat suggests that's what took place, though this car may have been a private-security patrol vehicle, into which few fluid-leaking perps were cuffed-and-stuffed.
A very useful feature of the P71 was the thick rubberized carpeting, which formed something of a waterproof trough inside the car. If any objectionable substance ends up on the carpeting, you just hose it out.
This one has the extra-luxurious CD player in the dash, something most police departments wouldn't have been willing to pay extra to get. Perhaps someone swapped in this radio after the car got auctioned off by its initial fleet owner.
