Vehicles get left behind all the time, forgotten, overgrown, and rotting away until someone stumbles upon the lucky ones years later. That was the case for a collection of Ford Crown Victoria sedans, which were left abandoned in a garden in the UK, forgotten for years until they were recently unearthed by Jonny Smith of the Late Brake Show on YouTube.
Smith explains that the owner of these vehicles had a particular obsession with American cop cars, especially the Ford Crown Victoria, which he calls “the archetypal American cop car.” There are quite a few Crown Vics starting to become part of this garden’s landscape, and most of them are police interceptors. The collector’s brother joins the show to discuss the collection, and says that they all ran and drove as recently as one year ago.
One such model is the Ford Crown Victoria Michigan State Police interceptor. This vehicle features an illuminated sign mounted to the hood which helped troopers stop traffic, and it also sports a pillar-mounted searchlight, a hallmark of police cars to this day. A different Crown Vic was purchased from Purgatory Sheriff Department – whether that’s a real place or not – but is a surprisingly accurate descriptor for the current state of the vehicle.
There’s more than just police interceptors included in the collection, though. There’s a Ford Crown Victoria taxi, which features a longer wheelbase than its production or police-rated counterparts. According to the owner’s brother, it spent 230,000 miles on the road pulling taxi duties before winding up in the UK.
Surprisingly, it’s rather easy to fire up one of the Ford Crown Victoria sedans. It turns right over, running like it was never abandoned. Smith calls its naturally aspirated 4.6L V8 engine “the smoothest V8 ever,” as proven by its thrum. One by one, Smith does some “cardening,” as he calls it, loosing the sedans from their overgrown parking spots, proving that you really can’t keep a good Crown Vic down.
While this collection is rather large, it has nothing on the world’s biggest Crown Vic collection, which belongs to a collector in New York.
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