While police officers in the Czech Republic were given the use of a compact Scala at the beginning of the year, their colleagues in New Zealand can look forward to a slightly larger vehicle. The Mladá Boleslav carmaker tailored their Superbies, of which they will receive almost five hundred by the end of this year.
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New Zealand police have new cars – they took over the first Škoda Superb. | Video: Facebook / New Zealand Police
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The Czech middle-class model will replace Holden Commodore cars in the police fleet. At the end of last year, the Australian carmaker stopped production and disappeared, which is why the police started looking for a replacement for it. However, this is not the only reason why Škoda won the tender for new emergency vehicles.
“For front-line workers, the car is the primary job. And the Škoda Superb offers them a safer and more comfortable environment, while the entire fleet is generally greener and more economical,” said Police Commissioner Andrew Coster.
From his words, you would probably expect the police to choose the plug-in hybrid Superb in a tender, which, by the way, seven companies took part in. However, partial or full electrification of vehicles proved to be unsuitable for police use during tests at the end of last year. For example, due to performance issues and higher total cost of ownership.
Emergency vehicles will thus run in two versions with a classic internal combustion engine. The part will have an output of 162 kW in combination with front-wheel drive, the part will then have an output of 206 kW with all-wheel drive. All cars will have a station wagon body.
Although it may not seem to us from a European perspective, when carmakers are withdrawing powerful engines from the markets precisely because of emissions, according to representatives of the New Zealand police, their emissions will improve in terms of emissions with the new Superby. The weaker design releases 162 g per kilometer into the air, which is almost 19 grams less than the average of all used cars so far. The stronger variant then reduced the emission to 176 grams.
However, the New Zealand police would like to reduce their emissions even more and within ten years have had their car fleet completely emission-free. He states that he has started negotiations with Škoda on this topic. So it is quite possible that in the future, Enyaqy, for example, will run around New Zealand in police colors.
By the end of June, Škoda will deliver the first 101 Superbs to the police, and another 386 by the end of the year. This means that from the end of this year, almost a quarter of the more than 2,000 police car fleet will have a winged arrow logo on the hood. Within four years, police officers want to replace the entire fleet of used cars.
“The police officers who tested the car praised the space in the rear seats, the easy-to-read instrument panel, the good view from the car outside or into the wide-opening door,” Coster calculates other benefits of the Mladá Boleslav car.
The first Superb delivered, which you can see in the video above, is equipped with a number of prototype solutions that will be tested in the coming months – for example, plexiglass barriers to protect police officers or monitoring the real position of the car to quickly send any reinforcements.
At the same time, New Zealand is far from the first country where police Škoda cars will serve. In addition to the Czech Republic, it is also possible to meet them in Great Britain, where they recently unveiled the new Octavia RS in police colors, Austria, France and now also in Kosovo, where they ordered 49 new Octavia last autumn.
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