You won’t be getting away from the latest member of the Victoria Police Highway Patrol fleet.
The department has received a BMW M3 Competition for a temporary period “as part of the Police Highway’s vehicle evaluation and assessment process”.
This therefore appears to be a temporary loan rather than an indication Victoria Police will be filling its fleet with M3s. Sorry, Highway Patrol officers.
Victoria Police has developed a taste for the Bavarian in recent years.
It’s been using a fleet of BMW 530ds for its Highway Patrol unit since 2018, while also counting the X5 among its vehicles.
The M3 Competition won’t be the first BMW M to be used by the Victorian men and women in blue, with an M5 Competition also joining the force for an evaluation period in 2019.
Though not as powerful as that loan vehicle, the M3 Competition still boasts heady outputs of 375kW of power and 650Nm of torque from a twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre inline-six engine.
The Victoria Police vehicle is the rear-wheel drive model and not the recently introduced all-wheel drive variant.
Featuring a standard eight-speed automatic transmission, the M3 Competition does the 0-100km/h sprint in 3.9 seconds.
There’s an array of standard safety technology to keep officers safe, which includes autonomous emergency braking, adaptive cruise control with stop/go, front and rear cross-traffic alert, lane-keep assist, and blind-spot monitoring.
Victoria isn’t the only Australian state to use BMWs.
The New South Wales Police Force also uses BMW 530ds which, rear-wheel drive aside, are markedly different to the V8-powered Chrysler 300 SRTs also found on the NSW fleet.
The latter will evidently need to find a successor as the 300 – and the Chrysler brand itself – is being withdrawn from Australia.
MORE: Everything BMW M3
