Page 384 - NIXBOOK

Those Chevys were huge boats to drive. Lots of room inside though. Massive bench seat in the back. We outfitted all of them
with push bars on the front to remove stalled and blocking vehicles from the roadways. As you can see, the graphics on the side
were pretty basic; one color city shield on the doors and a blue pin stripe and yellow pin stripe taped above. Sad that I took so
few pictures back then, this is all I have.
So a search of the innertubes revealed this generic Caprice interior, long after it was taken out of service. See what I meant about
the dashboard being just huge? Also this model had two spotlights; one on each side.

Below: you can see what the instrument cluster looked like. Again, such a kind of mundane everyday sort of view that it never
occurred to me take a photo of it during the years that I stared at this every day. My photo version would include the radio and
siren set up though, so you could see what that looked like. I found these photos online; showing a good example of what they
looked like on the inside. Yep, complete with the fancy plastic woodgrain paneling to give it a little extra class. Those Chevys
were so popular that when they went out of production, a large refit company in Michigan did a good business for a few years
of rebuilding old ones for police departments that wanted to keep them going. I remember seeing on the internet this company’s
parking lot and warehouse where they replaced the engines, seats, shocks, struts, etc…they had literally hundreds of cars lined
up there being refurbished to get another 5 or 10 years of service out of them.
One of our department’s Chevy’s, retired from active duty, got transferred to our citizen volunteers for them to patrol around
in. They never did any high speed driving of course, just slow cruising around town, so they were happy with an older car. To
make sure nobody confused them with one of police patrol cars, we changed the lightbar covers on top from blue and red to all-
amber. Here ‘tis: