How Fast Your Car Needs To Be To Outrun A Cop

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

You’re watching TV, a show is on with a name like America’s Most Inbred: High-Speed Pursuits, and you notice a trend. Anytime you see a police chase, the fugitive is driving a vehicle woefully inadequate for the task. There is a 100 percent certainty that if you see a Pontiac LeMans in a police chase, it’s the crappy Daewoo-sourced hatchback from the 1980s. You almost never see anything good making a desperate run for it.

Ah, but what if? At what point do you have a car that’s fast enough to actually outrun the police? To find out, we’d need a collection of variously capable civilian machines, plus a cop car, a cop-car driver, a track, Racelogic GPS-based data loggers, and handcuffs. Sure, we already had the handcuffs, but the rest of it took some doing. Nonetheless, one fine morning we convened at Carolina Motorsports Park (CMP) in Kershaw, South Carolina, to find out which cars are fit for a life of crime.

Watch this feature video from Car and Driver.


(story from: Car and Driver)