Which cars should be used as police vehicles

Last weekend, I took my family to the new outlet shopping mall, about an hour drive from Tokyo. Because it was the weekend, lots of families were there like us. Lately, people tend to spend their weekend at large shopping centres and outlet malls out of town. It must be something motorized society has brought in.

Most shops there sell clothes and fashionable sport gears. My wife and daughter went back and forth to several brand shops they had wanted to go to. They were trying desperately to get what they liked. At first I was helping them decide which ones to get but to be honest I do not like shopping, so when I got sick of standing around, I decided to go to a café and to read books.

They spent about 5 hours doing shopping and were quite contented. Although I did not really care what they had bought, seeing them happy I felt relieved that I had done something nice for them as a husband and father; I sometimes feel bad when I am too busy to do anything with them.

Because it was getting dark outside and to avoid a traffic jam, we decided to stop at a public bath nearby and had some local “Soba” for dinner. After having a bit of alcohol myself, my wife was driving home. She just followed back the same motorway we took in the morning at a steady speed for eco-driving. Then out of nowhere, a red “Ferrari Modena” came right behind us with booming roar and flickering his light up & down he was asking us to get out of his way. Panic-stricken, my wife changed the lane without indicating. (This is extremely dangerous, you know… I felt my blood freeze!) On a weekend night, motorways in Tokyo get very busy with large numbers of cars heading back home. I was wondering what was going to happen next. Then within a few seconds, I heard a police car “Skyline GT-R BNR34” with a blast of a siren, was following the Ferrari. The police car overtook us too and the two cars disappeared from our view instantly. They must have been doing around 200Km/hour.

Japanese police cars are usually black & white but motorway patrol vehicles are called “undercover”. There is nothing to tell if they are the police. They look like any private vehicles to detect noncompliance on motorway. When they see an offensive car, the police man in the passenger side rolls the window down to put the siren on the roof, chase the car while asking the driver to stop with a microphone. Seeing a GT-R police car for the first time, I was very excited. I personally like GT-R the best among sport cars. When you drive one, the engine has strong enough power to push you back into the seat. It has a very attractive sound from its exhaust pipe: listening to it you can guess it has a high performance engine, which you can truly enjoy. However, you can feel it better when you drive at high speed, what I saw was only at the “speed limit” allowed on motorway. I envied the policemen who could legally drive at 200Km/hour, feeling the GT-R’s high performance to chase the non-complying offender. If you like cars and are a policeman, you are lucky to have a job which combines fun and profit.

After a while, we saw the Ferrari got caught at a toll gate a few kilometres away. Thinking it overtook us at incredible speed, I thought he will not be released tonight with just a speeding ticket and fines but stay in a jail overnight. (The Ferrari driver looked like a nice middle-aged gentleman. Maybe his car changed his personality and made him think he could outrun a GT-R easily. I have not driven a Ferrari yet but I can tell you that I might find it hard to keep the speed limit…)

I, the other day, heard news that some “Lamborghini Gallardos” were delivered to the police in Italy. A new one of them costs approx. JPY24,000,000!

I guess if you see a Gallardo, you will not venture into a race against it. But aren’t they lucky to be in one of them? Motorway policemen might be a bunch of speed maniacs…


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