Down with Crown Vics
As an expat I don’t do much driving in the U.S. these days, but in May I went back for a visit, and after a little drive through 5 states, I was reminded of a problem that needs to be addressed: civilian Ford Crown Victorias.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone wants one anyway; they’re huge, unattractive, gas-guzzling beasts, and unless you’re getting the policeman’s special in a used car auction, they’re not especially fast or nimble, either. As far as I can tell from my admittedly unscientific study of the situation, three groups of people buy Crown Vics: police departments, NY taxi companies and old men.
Image courtesy of JLaw45
So, I have a message for my fellow Americans: stop buying Crown Vics. Like the picture above, leave them for the Secret Service and police. You’ll be doing a service for the rest of us.
Why, you ask, am I making this request?
I love driving. I’ve never been a commuter, stuck in traffic every day, but I’ve done a lot of freeway and back road driving. Across the U.S. and Canada, east to west, north to south and lots of places in between.
Over the years, just like any sentient creature trying to survive in an evolutionary system, I’ve developed certain specialized skills to aid me behind the wheel. One of them is a keen sense for spotting a Crown Vic from distance. It’s a basic survival instinct for those of us who like to actually get from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time, rather than remain hamstrung by the far-too-low speed limits.
I know I’m not the only one with this talent. With only one speeding ticket since being an ignorant youngster of 16 or 17, and an awful lot of driving in the intervening years, I credit that special “Crown Vic-sense” for helping, because I don’t think that “not speeding” has a whole lot to do with it.
It’s like pattern recognition…once you become attuned to it, all of a sudden you just “see”. Your third eye opens up, and you can spot a Crown Vic from a mile away. The distinctive shape…in an instant, your brain scans it, and recognizes the mind-numbing aura of mediocrity that can only emanate from a Crown Vic (or, it should be said, Chevrolet Caprice). The length of the wheelbase is another dead giveaway that one of Ford’s blasé battleships is lurking nearby. Or the awkward angle of the back window down to the trunk, just a touch too steep, like one of those cars you drew in crayon when you were 7.
It doesn’t even need to be daytime. You become attuned to the headlights in the rear view mirror, or the tail lights off in the distance in front of you; you recall the spacing of those two lights with millimeter precision. Admittedly, it takes more time to calculate, but four or five glances in the rear view mirror is enough to distinguish a Crown Vic from something like a Buick Skylark…or anything else for that matter.
That’s why…say, at 2:00 AM on I-84 in Connecticut, when I’ve deduced a Crown Vic has appeared in the road behind me from an on-ramp, I slow down, instinctively sensing The Fuzz is catching my scent. Then, while doing around 60 MPH, I start looking around for something to do, since this is obviously much too slow to be driving on a straight, empty road. Maybe I can calculate pi in my head, or dictate a blog post into the voice recorder in my iPhone…anything to be productive while I have to drive like a snail.
And so I wait, and I wait…and finally the Crown Victoria, in all its unexceptional nothingness, crawls by. I glance over, and see a fairly average middle aged man and woman riding in the car. Obviously not cops, so I just let out an annoyed sigh and leave the jalopy in the dust.
Come on, people, there are really much better cars to buy. Leave the Crown Vics to law enforcement.