Ford Crown Victoria

The Ford Crown Victoria (commonly nicknamed the Crown Vic) is a rear-wheel drive full-size car first produced by the Ford Motor Company for the North American market in the mid-1950s. Its current incarnation has been in production since 1992 at Ford's St. Thomas Assembly plant. While the Crown Victoria shares its platform and components with the Lincoln Town Car, it shares almost no exterior sheet metal or interior parts. Beginning with the 2008 model year, it has been available only for fleet sales, mainly in police and taxi form, but also for rental car companies.

The Crown Victoria, and its Mercury and Lincoln stablemates, are the only full-frame rear-wheel-drive passenger cars built in North America and also three of the few surviving US vehicles still in production with features such as the column-mounted gear shift and a two-bench, six-passenger seating layout, which has otherwise largely been replaced by the two front-bucket layout popularized by imports.

Since the exit of General Motors from rear-drive full-size cars with the Chevrolet Caprice, it held a near-monopoly as a pursuit vehicle in North America, despite front-wheel-drive offerings such as the Chevrolet Impala. However, the Chevy Impala, and Dodge Charger despite their smaller trunk size, have started to challenge this dominance with some significant adoptions among police and taxi fleets since their introduction. While newer front-wheel drive platforms may have been popular among consumers, they have not challenged the Crown Victoria's dominance as a taxi cab, fleet vehicle and police car where durability, cost and performance rather than efficiency are top requirements. The Crown Victoria remains popular for these applications due to its conventional rear-wheel drive and V8 power, both beneficial to police driving techniques. As one of the few remaining passenger cars with body-on-frame construction, it is rugged, and enables repairs after minor accidents without the need to straighten the chassis – an important benefit for a car frequently used by police forces for PIT maneuvers, a maneuver in which the back left or back right corner of a fleeing vehicle is gently pushed with the front left or front right corner of the chase vehicle, disrupting tire adhesion on the fleeing vehicle with the goal of causing the fleeing vehicle to rotate and decelerate.