Ford Mach-E may have passed Michigan State Police Testing, but it didn’t do very well

Earlier this year Ford provided a purpose-built Mustang Mach-E to the Michigan State Police for their annual vehicle evaluation testing.

The selected cars are put through their paces in top speed runs, acceleration and braking tests, tests of emergency response handling, and more.

Ford later announced the Mach-E had become the first electric vehicle (EV) to pass the rigorous testing, saying the full results would be released later in the fall.

The Michigan State Police have now published those results, and while the Mach-E did pass, it placed last among a group of gas-powered SUVs and sedans.

While the Mach-E did perform well in acceleration and braking tests, in most other tests it was near the bottom of the pack.

When it came to vehicle dynamics testing, the Mach-E had the slowest average lap time around the two-mile Grattan Raceway.

The Mach-E clocked an average time of 1:42.19. That was between 3 to 6 seconds slower than the competition, even including the F150 pickup truck that was tested (1:39.07).

The bad news didn’t end there, with the test drivers noting the performance of the Mach-E degraded “as the [battery’s] state of charge declined and battery temperature increased.”

This was even though the Mach-E was topped up for 40 minutes using a 47kW charger between runs, with the state of charge never dropping below 75% during testing.

The Mach-E also scored considerably lower than the competition in terms of how accommodating it is for police equipment.

On a scale of 1-10, with 1 representing “totally unacceptable”, 5 representing “average”, and 10 representing “superior”, the Mach-E averaged 5.33 compared to a high of 9.78 for the Dodge Durango.

The lowest score for the Mach-E was just 3.67 for ‘Dashboard Accessibility.”

Credit: MSP

Even though Ford is synonymous with police vehicles in the U.S., the results show they have a long way to go to make the Mach-E a viable alternative to their current gas-powered Interceptor cars and trucks.

It is worth noting that the vehicle tested was a pilot program and the results will likely be used to create the official Interceptor version of the electric SUV.

You can read the full test results below.