Top 10 police cars of all time
Say ’ello ’ello ’ello to history’s greatest cop cars
What makes a great police car? Is it an air of solid dignity that conveys the full majesty of the law in a sober, bell-ringing fashion? Or is it the opportunity to inspire motorists with dreams of legally piloting a sports car at top speed – with the bonus of other drivers pulling over at your command?
It could, of course, be watching a Daimler Dart chasing bad boys along the North Circular, or seeing a Ford Zephyr Farnham estate attending reports of a family having a picnic on the hard shoulder of the M1 – a not uncommon occurrence in the early years of British motorways.
Let’s travel back to the Seventies when everything was brown, excepting this particular Reliant.
Reliant fielded a number of small cars between the brand’s inception in 1935 and its demise in 2002. One of the more popular among its offerings was the Scimitar. Introduced as a dedicated sports coupe in 1964, the successful Scimitar morphed into a few different offerings over its impressive 23-year run.
The Scimitar GT coupe that entered production in 1964 (the SE4) was a fresh visual design from a company called Ogle, though the chassis underneath was borrowed from Scimitar’s predecessor, the Sabre. Reliant ended up with the Ogle design after Reliant’s director saw the company’s SX250 coupe at an auto show. Based on the Daimler Dart SP250, Ogle built a couple of examples for a private buyer and offered the design to Daimler. They declined, but Reliant was very interested. They hired Ogle to change up the design slightly and make sure it fit on the Sabre chassis, and the Sci