When Ford->ke31 decided to finally lay to rest the 2007 Ford Crown Victoria, a huge void was left in the lucrative police vehicle market. In the resulting scramble to provide cruisers to fill that void, Dodge->ke28 ended up with a much bigger share of this market than it had had in some time, with the 2014 Dodge Charger Pursuit. Dodge knows that it will have to keep updating the car if it wants to keep its contracts. The 2016 Dodge Charger Pursuit is better than ever.

Keen students of the automotive industry will notice that there isn't a new generation of the Charger for 2016, so the car isn't entirely new for the model year. Indeed, the updates for 2016 primarily focus on the redesigned Uconnect system. This is really a big thing, but we'll get into that in a bit. It is worth a look at the car in general though, even the parts that aren't new, if for no other reason than to see just how different and utilitarian the police version of the car is. The differences between it and the civilian model are striking.

Continue reading to learn more about the 2016 Dodge Charger Pursuit.

Exterior

The most obvious difference between the regular 2015 Dodge Charger and the Pursuit is going to be the livery, although this will clearly be different from one department to the next. The usual exterior police equipment will be found on the Pursuit, from the push bar to spotlights and the light bar.

Thanks to LEDs, the top light bar is more inconspicuous than in years past, but these have been standard for some time now. There are also a couple of smaller light bars mounted behind the grille. The differences aren't really that huge, and depending on how they're painted by the local PD, you might have to be pretty close in order to tell that it's a cop car.

Interior

This is where you'll notice the biggest difference, not only between the regular car and the Pursuit, but also between the 2015 Dodge Charger Pursuit and the 2016. This centers around the new Uconnect screen, which is now a huge 12.1-inch touchscreen display that integrates with all of the police computer systems. That means that the central-mounted laptop that has been standard in police vehicles for many years can finally be done away with, replaced by a system mounted entirely in the dash. That means more interior space, but what Dodge has found is that it also makes for a safer interior.

Laptops and their mounting brackets can be hazardous or even deadly in a crash, and less cabin clutter is always safer. The system can also use a split screen to simultaneously display the usual Uconnect features, although there are redundant knobs and buttons for climate and radio controls mounted under the screen for when it isn't convenient to use the split screen. The screen manages to fit in with the overall design of the interior, but the interior is very stripped-down and utilitarian, and there aren't many other design elements for it to blend in with.

Drivetrain

As with the regular version of the Charger, you have some options when it comes to drivetrain, although there is no Hellcat Pursuit, much to the disappointment of no small number of police officers, I'm sure. The car is available with a V-6 and front-wheel-drive for the cost-concious departments, but there is also a V-8 front-wheel-drive option and a V-8 all-wheel-drive option. The V-6 is not a very popular option though, so you can generally expect the car to have the same 5.7-liter Hemi V-8 as the Charger R/T, here producing 370 horsepower. It's the cheapest way to get a V-8 cop car in the U.S., and also the most powerful engine available from any of the Big Three's fleet lineups.

Prices

Prices are difficult to pin down. Dodge doesn't release exact pricing info to the general public, and the $30,000-$35,000 figure you generally see is far from what police forces will actually pay. All the police-specific equipment adds a lot to the price, but just how much is not always understood. So I called a cop buddy of mine, Andrew Perna, a firearms instructor with the Ohio Peace Officer Training Commission, and asked him for some more realistic figures. He told me that $47,000 was more accurate ballpark for the base model with the V-6, but that it could go up by quite a bit.

He went on to say that Chrysler Fleet will vary prices a lot depending on how many cars you order, so some larger departments might be paying somewhere around that $47,000 figure for a V-8 all-wheel-drive model. This partially explains why the V-6 has never been very popular; the price difference as a percentage of the total isn't that much once you factor in the cost of the lights, cage, push bar, etc. You might as well just have the V-8, since you won't save that much optioning down.

Competition

2012 Ford Taurus Police Interceptor

Ford's replacement for the Crown Victoria, but much more fuel efficient. All-wheel-drive is standard on these, and there is a choice of I-4 or V-6 engines, both of which are turbocharged. The price, again according to my cop buddy, is much higher; starting at $85,000 for the V-6. That price does include a lot more standard equipment and probably about evens out for similarly equipped car, but the Dodge does give you the option to leave stuff off if you're looking to save money.

Read our full review here.

2014 Chevrolet Caprice PPV

The Caprice->ke3664 isn't sold to the general public in North America and is available only as a police car. Chevy->ke199 likes to hint that the car was built just to be cop car, but the reality is that it is a rebadged 2007 Holden WM Caprice imported from Australia, where it serves as a regular full-sized model available to the public. GM->ke1024 Fleet buyers have the option of an Impala cop car if they want one, but the Caprice PPV is the law enforcement flagship model.

Read our full review here.

Conclusion

There are already a lot of reasons to like the Charger Pursuit if you're in law enforcement, but the new Uconnect gives it a real advantage. It seems like a small detail, it's just a bigger screen, but it could absolutely be a big deciding factor for any police force trying to choose between the three main models available. If you're like me, you're probably wondering whether or not the bigger screen will become available anytime soon on standard versions of the Charger, or indeed the rest of Fiat-Chrysler's lineup. I don't have an answer for that, but it would be cool, and the Charger Pursuit proves it can be done. For now, Dodge is still making law enforcement vehicles safer, and that's a good bragging right.