Brand New Police Dodge Durangos Are Facing Total Engine Failure
A failure causing coolant and oil to mix sidelines almost all of the Indiana State Police Department’s lineup of Police Dodge Durangos.
For those unaware, Dodge produces vehicles specifically for Police use. You’ve more than likely seen a highway patrol or local officer behind the wheel of a Dodge Charger or a Durango. Typically, these models sacrifice a handful of creature comforts and instead implement provisions for hauling recently arrested suspects to the station, chasing speeding vehicles, and even hopping curbs. Naturally, one would expect them to be quite robust. However, for the Indiana State Police Department, the exact opposite seems to be true.
Fox 59 News of Indianapolis, Indiana, recently posted a story to its YouTube channel outlining the department’s issue with the Durano models. The title of the video describes an issue with the oil coolers on these particular models. However, in the video, the story states that “some sort of mechanical failure” has caused oil and coolant to mix and fatally harm the engines. Though we’re not entirely sure what exactly the issue is, we do have some details on the effect it’s having on the department. The accompanying article on the Fox 59 website states that the department anticipates 79 failures based on the ratio of current failures to in-service vehicles, totaling over $3.9 million in vehicles that are unusable.
Unfit for Police Use
As one would assume, a reliable and functional vehicle is extremely necessary for police use. Naturally, the potential sudden breakdown of their vehicles is taking a bit of a toll on Indiana State troopers.
“You just get anxious about it because…you’re anticipating it’s going to happen. You don’t want it to happen…when he had the Chargers, you didn’t think about this. There was no issue. You got in the car, and you went. The car performed great,” said ISP Trooper Nick Klinghammer.
Fox 59 reports that the department purchased over 500 of these special Durango models and has implemented the use of over 200 of them to date. So far, 18% of them have suffered from this issue. Naturally, the folks running the department aren’t too pleased about it.
“As an Indiana taxpayer myself, I’m angry that we have to deal with this issue. Brand new vehicles that aren’t reliable for our troopers. Everything is on the table to include conversations with other automakers to determine exactly what our best path forward is,” an ISP trooper told Fox 59.
Furthermore, Fox 59 reports that Stellantis hasn’t done much to help alleviate the issue. In a statement, Stellantis stated only that they are working to expedite service for these faulty vehicles and went on to state that the police service Durango has been in production since 2018 with largely positive reviews. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t exactly help the situation at hand. Millions of taxpayer dollars are sitting on the sidelines, entirely unusable. We’ll definitely be keeping track of this story to see how it plays out.
