Police Lane

The Most Outrageous Statement

Written by Ed Sanow

I couldn’t believe my ears. It was one of the most outrageous statements I have ever heard about fleet management: One excuse that officers use for not checking the oil on their police cars is that they haven’t been trained to do it. Outrageous or not, this comment from Lt. John DeRousse, which was made during a session at this year’s Police Fleet Expo – West, has a solid ring of truth to it. In fact, it was among the best points made during the entire expo.

What do you mean, you don’t know how to check the oil? Lift up the hood, look for the stick with a yellow handle and pull it out of the engine! Well…not so fast. Many of us fleet managers are car people; we grew up working on cars. Some of us built race cars and rebuilt engines. Many of us changed the spark plugs every 15,000 miles. Most of us have been changing our own oil since we were in our teens.

To anyone with that background, it may be a real culture shock that few of today’s officers have done any of that. No one changes their own oil today. It is a fact that some officers are too embarrassed to tell anyone they don’t know how to check the oil. They would rather run the car out of oil, or hope against hope that the engine has enough oil to last between oil change intervals.

So, excuses aside, they indeed may not know how to check the oil. They may not know how to pop the hood or even to look for the rod to prop up the hood. They may not know where to look for the dipstick or what to do with it once they have found it. They may not know that after you pull it out you are supposed to look for the liquid mark from the oil.

Dipsticks are well marked and it’s easy to figure out whether or not you need to add oil. However, if oil needs to be added, that opens up a whole new quandary. Did you know that some people try to add oil thru the dipstick hole? So once the officer decides the vehicle needs more oil, he has to find the filler cap, which is conveniently yellow or has yellow markings.

Then he has to find the right oil—there’s another crisis. Fortunately, every filler cap has the correct oil marked right on the cap. All that’s left now is he has to find an oil funnel as well as add only the correct amount. Then he must get the cap back on, and finally make sure the dipstick is back in. This is actually a stressful maintenance ordeal the first time they do it.

Think back to the last airline flight you were on. The flight attendant showed everyone on-board how to do what? Fasten your seat belt. Who in the world doesn’t know how to do that? Same thing goes for checking the oil. Some people really don’t know how. It is your job as fleet manager to be sure they are trained to do it.

On a related hard-to-believe topic, one that may even be more important than oil level—some officers don’t know how to check the air pressure in their tires. So, while you are doing oil level training, do tire pressure training too.

They will need access to a tire pressure gauge and instructions on how to read it. They will need to know where on the vehicle to find the placard that shows the correct pressure. They will need to know the difference between maximum inflation pressure and proper inflation level. They will need to know to check the pressure when the tires are cold.

Why do they even need to check air pressure? Doesn’t the Tire Pressure Monitoring System in the all of wheels of today’s police cars do that? The TPMS only activates when the tires are grossly under-inflated, i.e., 25% less than the placard pressure. Before that amount of pressure loss, the handling of the car is already greatly affected, tire wear is accelerated and uneven and fuel economy greatly suffers.

In the era of $4 per gallon gasoline, a tire that is under-inflated by 5 psi causes a 15% loss of fuel economy. In normal use, the average tire loses 1 psi of pressure per month, and it loses 1 psi of pressure for every 10 degree drop in ambient temperature. Today’s V-rated and W-rated police tires have such stiff sidewalls that you really cannot tell a tire is low by looking at it.

All that leads me to the final maintenance crisis: If some of your officers don’t even know how to check the oil, how many of them know how to properly and safely change a flat tire? You could train them. Better yet, you could gain valuable trunk space with a no-spare tire policy. It is one or the other.

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