GM in pursuit of capturing police car sales from Ford’s Crown Victoria

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For the first time since 1996, Chevrolet will be offering a high-performance, rear-wheel-drive, V-8 powered sedan for the 2011 model year.

The catch: You have to wear a badge to drive one.

At a police convention in Denver on Monday, Chevrolet announced that the all-new Chevrolet Caprice PPV (Police Patrol Vehicle) will be available to police departments in early 2011. The Caprice PPV will be offered with a 6.0-liter, 355-horsepower V-8 engine, as well as a V-6 engine in 2012.

“The new Chevrolet Caprice police car is the right tool at the right time for law enforcement,” said Jim Campbell, general manager for GM Fleet and Commercial Operations. “We asked for a lot of feedback from our police customers, which helped us develop a vehicle that is superior to the Ford Crown Victoria in key areas.”

The future of the Crown Victoria, longtime staple of police service, is year-to-year. It is expected that Ford will offer a police package for the new, larger, front-wheel-drive Taurus.

In addition to the Crown Victoria, the most popular police vehicles now are the rear-wheel-drive Dodge Charger and the front-wheel-drive Chevrolet Impala, which has been in police service since 2000. The Impala police package will survive, at least for a while.

The new Caprice PPV is based on a similar platform used for the Australian-built Pontiac GTO and G8, as well as for the new Chevrolet Camaro. While General Motors insists that the Caprice PPV will not be marketed to the public, many in the industry suspect that if the demand exists, it eventually could, much as the company marketed what was essentially the police-package-equipped Caprice as the Impala SS in the mid-1990s.

-- Steven Cole Smith