BlueBrixx Police Car USA SUV Set 101867

BlueBrixx's Police Car USA SUV is a BlueBrixx-Specials model built from 242 blocks. Designed by Alex, released 2018. No stickers or prints. Instructions are supplied as a free download after registering.

American police cars stopped being cars

For forty years an American patrol car meant one thing: a large rear-wheel-drive sedan, and for most of the 1990s and 2000s that meant a Ford Crown Victoria. Departments bought them by the thousand.

Ford stopped building it in 2011, and there was nothing to replace it. The body-on-frame sedan had disappeared from American showrooms, because private buyers had moved to SUVs and pickups and manufacturers followed them. A police force cannot order a car nobody is making.

So forces moved to SUVs, and then discovered that they preferred them. An SUV carries far more equipment — and the amount of equipment in a patrol vehicle has grown enormously, with computers, radios, weapons, medical kit and increasingly a prisoner cage taking space a boot no longer had. It sits higher, which helps in traffic and in snow. It is easier for an officer wearing a duty belt and body armour to get in and out of quickly, which sounds trivial and is not when it happens forty times a shift.

Within about a decade the sedan had essentially vanished from American policing. It is one of the clearest cases of a whole professional fleet being reshaped by what private consumers happened to want.

In the BlueBrixx range

Sets 107587, 107415, 108027 and 108137 are the BlueBrixx Play city buildings and vehicles this fits alongside.

Specifications

Pieces: 242 · Designer: Alex · Series: BlueBrixx-Specials · No stickers · Instructions as free download