Police BMW engine issues

[siremoon]

P0PC0RN said:

They are a pain when badly damaged and often just refuse to move when even slightly damaged. The fire brigade hate them due to their ability to start burning and just keep burning.

Cars used to TPAC need to be able to soak up the damage and keep on going - that car might need to take multiple impacts and then still be in a state to stay with and prevent the scrote going contraflow (as is the done thing now).

I go to low speed bumps involving EV's regularly and they end up being dragged onto a flat bed because computer says no...

The biggest issue is the range and inability to quickly recharge in the middle of no-where. We often stop for fuel mid shout or on the odd occasions mid follow/ pursuit.

Im sure there is a future in EV's for RPU use, I just don't think we are ready yet....

.. and the number of EV write offs after collisions is significantly higher due to the risk of undetectable battery damage resulting from the collision. Basically insurers are more reluctant to sign off that the battery is still safe. A replacement battery costs more than the vehicle is worth hence the write off.

[edthefed]

FiF said:

I went to uni with the engineer for the Met who had to sort that out. He had a 2600 with all sorts of brake mods and gauges recording pressures in the various circuits.

Back to the comment that Met use is not necessarily typical for other forces.

Though brakes can be an issue generally. Back in WYP during a period of austerity the budget wouldn't cover the normal spec traffic cars, eg Granadas, so boggers 2.0 Cavaliers were ordered. They had to be upgraded with brakes from the SRi 130.

Going back even further in a period of "austerity" WYP had 1600 Cavaliers as divisional traffic cars !

For years we had Transits as PSU carriers, finally they got changed to SWB Sprinters and then vehicle fleet decided the Sprinters were costing too much and gave us an Iveco to evaluate. It was awful, the build quality was shocking, bits of trim fell off in our hands the door seams were rusting (3 month old vehicle) it handled like a drunken Walrus and the rear step was far too high to get prisoners in the rear cage were some of the issues.

I wrote a damning evaluation report and then received a phone call "you were supposed to write that we are getting them as they are cheaper than the Sprinters and more reliable" the whole fleet was changed to Ivecos

Guess what, very unreliable. forever throwing Engine warning lights and build quality was appalling.

And the Ivecos were all eventually replaced by....... Sprinters !

Not helped by two things

1) The Police budget for the new financial year starting in April was not finalised until January the same year so with only 3 months notice of how much you had to spend in the next financial year it was impossible to plan very far ahead

and

2) and an obsession by the bean counters that best value meant cheapest, so buying wicking shirts that cost 70p each and maybe lasted 6 months rather than buying £2 shirts that might last 2 years for example

[FiF]

Talking of austerity, can recall one winter in SYP where a mileage limit of 14 miles per shift on beat cars was imposed.

[edthefed]

FiF said:

Talking of austerity, can recall one winter in SYP where a mileage limit of 14 miles per shift on beat cars was imposed.

1983/4 Huddersfield A division (town centre and surrounding area) it was from memory 4 miles per shift

"Apparently" speedo cables regularly "fell off" and "rumours" of lots of reversing !

Then someone twigged that the MPG had dropped significantly !

[Earthdweller]

edthefed said:

FiF said:

Talking of austerity, can recall one winter in SYP where a mileage limit of 14 miles per shift on beat cars was imposed.

1983/4 Huddersfield A division (town centre and surrounding area) it was from memory 4 miles per shift

"Apparently" speedo cables regularly "fell off" and "rumours" of lots of reversing !

Then someone twigged that the MPG had dropped significantly !

Haha

Same in the Met where we had a 20 mile per shift allowance

But they took away all the cars/vans and left one panda at each station and one van divisionally

That changed when two PC’s at an outlying station went to a disturbance in the only car and called for urgent assistance and no one could go .. PC’s attended in their own cars and by the time they got their one of the PC’s was unconscious.. both were hospitalised and the most seriously hurt one was subsequently ill health retired due to his injuries

The next day .. all the vehicles were brought back to the stations

We had a “mail run” that had to be done each early turn collecting all the internal mail from the sub stns and taking it to the div station and distributing the incoming mail on the way back to all the outlying stations

The distance to the main station was about 16 miles .. so the mail would be dropped off and the new mail collected then the panda parked up 4 miles back into the return journey and the Pc would use the tube/bus to get back to their parading station where the late turn shift would be told where the car was parked

The late turn would then spend half the shift collecting the car and then once back at the parading station would only have about 8 miles left for the shift!

The same applied to the area car and one night I was driving it and got an urgent call to attend an address from east London in deepest Essex btwn Chelmsford and Colchester on blue lights to collect a force sniper which was a fairly regular occurrence back then

He was then conveyed to NSY and then onto an RVP in Croydon .. all on blues/twos

The st it caused and the explaining I had to do to justify the 200 plus miles I’d done was unreal

It was a mad period for sure

[FiF]

edthefed said:

FiF said:

Talking of austerity, can recall one winter in SYP where a mileage limit of 14 miles per shift on beat cars was imposed.

1983/4 Huddersfield A division (town centre and surrounding area) it was from memory 4 miles per shift

"Apparently" speedo cables regularly "fell off" and "rumours" of lots of reversing !

Then someone twigged that the MPG had dropped significantly !

Hellfire, one call from Castlegate up to, say, Almondbury and you're done.

[FiF]

Anyway, sort of back on topic, following on from Volvo stopping selling estates in UK, apparently they will still supply to UK emergency services but not civilians.

One wonders if they have thought this through properly.

[SteBrown91]

FiF said:

Anyway, sort of back on topic, following on from Volvo stopping selling estates in UK, apparently they will still supply to UK emergency services but not civilians.

One wonders if they have thought this through properly.

Its not unusual - Skoda are only supplying RHD Octavia Scouts to Ambulance Services. Surely its a negligable cost to allow the public to also order.

[Earthdweller]

SteBrown91 said:

FiF said:

Anyway, sort of back on topic, following on from Volvo stopping selling estates in UK, apparently they will still supply to UK emergency services but not civilians.

One wonders if they have thought this through properly.

Its not unusual - Skoda are only supplying RHD Octavia Scouts to Ambulance Services. Surely its a negligable cost to allow the public to also order.

I imagine they’ll just batch build to an utilities spec which is much simpler and cheaper than retail cars

They don’t have to worry about colours or multiple trim levels and options

[aeropilot]

Earthdweller said:

SteBrown91 said:

FiF said:

Anyway, sort of back on topic, following on from Volvo stopping selling estates in UK, apparently they will still supply to UK emergency services but not civilians.

One wonders if they have thought this through properly.

Its not unusual - Skoda are only supplying RHD Octavia Scouts to Ambulance Services. Surely its a negligable cost to allow the public to also order.

I imagine they’ll just batch build to an utilities spec which is much simpler and cheaper than retail cars

They don’t have to worry about colours or multiple trim levels and options

[dhutch]

SteBrown91 said:

FiF said:

Anyway, sort of back on topic, following on from Volvo stopping selling estates in UK, apparently they will still supply to UK emergency services but not civilians.

One wonders if they have thought this through properly.

Its not unusual - Skoda are only supplying RHD Octavia Scouts to Ambulance Services. Surely its a negligable cost to allow the public to also order.

Really odd.

[dhutch]

Earthdweller said:

It was a mad period for sure

Certainly sounds bonkers to me!

[FiF]

aeropilot said:

Earthdweller said:

SteBrown91 said:

FiF said:

Anyway, sort of back on topic, following on from Volvo stopping selling estates in UK, apparently they will still supply to UK emergency services but not civilians.

One wonders if they have thought this through properly.

Its not unusual - Skoda are only supplying RHD Octavia Scouts to Ambulance Services. Surely its a negligable cost to allow the public to also order.

I imagine they’ll just batch build to an utilities spec which is much simpler and cheaper than retail cars

They don’t have to worry about colours or multiple trim levels and options

Thinking about it a bit more, would this allow them to supply vehicles that have the intrusive driver assistance twaddle disabled and hinders some of the extreme use in particular situations as complained about in this and other threads?

[aeropilot]

FiF said:

aeropilot said:

Earthdweller said:

SteBrown91 said:

FiF said:

Anyway, sort of back on topic, following on from Volvo stopping selling estates in UK, apparently they will still supply to UK emergency services but not civilians.

One wonders if they have thought this through properly.

Its not unusual - Skoda are only supplying RHD Octavia Scouts to Ambulance Services. Surely its a negligable cost to allow the public to also order.

I imagine they’ll just batch build to an utilities spec which is much simpler and cheaper than retail cars

They don’t have to worry about colours or multiple trim levels and options

Thinking about it a bit more, would this allow them to supply vehicles that have the intrusive driver assistance twaddle disabled and hinders some of the extreme use in particular situations as complained about in this and other threads?

You would think so, but I suspect not, as the integration into the cars systems is too much, plus Volvo being Volvo, they wouldn't grasp why that would be desirable on safety grounds

[iDave]

Interesting (for total car nerds) noticing how the changes in the traffic/rrv vehicles are going.
I'm in the southeast and regularly around the motorways, noticed kent have now got a Toureg, also seen a marked up Tesla on blues but looked like a training car rather then responding.

I have also seen a couple of times now between M25 Junction 5-9 a liveried Mercedes C-class which I am sure was on a 68 plate!! Parked up on sliproad exits so was operational. Old stock being put to use due to lack of new stock in?
It did look rather nice, can't recall ever seeing MB being used outside of Germany!

Edited by iDave on Friday 4th August 18:29

[Strangely Brown]

iDave said:

I have also seen a couple of times now between M25 Junction 5-9 a liveried Mercedes C-class which I am sure was on a 68 plate!! Parked up on sliproad exits so was operational. Old stock being put to use due to lack of new stock in?
It did look rather nice, can't recall ever seeing MB being used outside of Germany!

Sussex used to run a couple (a few?) Mercs for RPU stuff. You can google some pictures of both E and C class in Sussex livery.

[Earthdweller]

Strangely Brown said:

iDave said:

I have also seen a couple of times now between M25 Junction 5-9 a liveried Mercedes C-class which I am sure was on a 68 plate!! Parked up on sliproad exits so was operational. Old stock being put to use due to lack of new stock in?
It did look rather nice, can't recall ever seeing MB being used outside of Germany!

Sussex used to run a couple (a few?) Mercs for RPU stuff. You can google some pictures of both E and C class in Sussex livery.

The original ML was widely used for traffic/motorway patrol in 320/350 form by numerous forces

Various Scottish forces ran quite a lot of Mercs as did a few English forces .. Durham springs to mind

Quite a few Vito’s used as divisional vans and specialist roles all over

Plus the Sprinter has been the default public order van for the last 25 years, the Met introduced a fleet of hundreds of them from 1995 onwards

[Stedman]

Strangely Brown said:

Sussex used to run a couple (a few?) Mercs for RPU stuff. You can google some pictures of both E and C class in Sussex livery.

A few went up in flames too. The W211 did look good though.

Sussex also had a few W203 in estate form.

[BlindedByTheLights]

Interesting article on the Czech police specific Skodas

https://www.skoda-storyboard.com/en/skoda-world/nu...

[FiF]

BlindedByTheLights said:

Interesting article on the Czech police specific Skodas

https://www.skoda-storyboard.com/en/skoda-world/nu...

Picked up on the "metal rims, more durable than alloy"