No one’s ever happy to be pulled over by a police officer, especially if they were driving a bit faster than the speed limit. Earlier this week we asked our readers which cars are magnets for police. The comments section featured a variety of responses ranging from specific models to just general aesthetics. There was even a nod to the recent traffic stop of a Miami Dolphins wide receiver. Without further ado, these are the cars that law enforcement can’t stay away from
In my experience, anything I owned that was painted red. I bookended a green Mazda B3000 with 2 red vehicles. I didn’t alter my driving habits in the red cars, but I would drive quite a bit faster in that truck as it was virtually invisible. When the lease ended, bought something else in red and was pulled over for 5 mph over the next day and that continued until I got rid of it. Bought another red car (GTI) years later and sure enough I was pulled over 6 times for various stupidities in the 3 years I owned it.
Submitted by: mentec
My FRS was orange. I never once got pulled over in that car. I tend to keep in less than 10-over and haven’t gotten pulled over for speeding many times in my life in general, but not once in the 9 years I drove the FRS. I did always figure that if I was in a group of 2 or 3 cars going fast, I’d get picked out of the group so I was generally conscious of the fact that I was pretty visible.
Non-speeding related, though, I got pulled over 3 times in 2 weeks once with my 2001 Kia Spectra right at the end of high school. A kinda shitty blue car driven by an 18 year old at 2am is far more a magnet than a shiny orange sports car with a balding 30 year old behind the wheel. And it was the shitty you’d expect, too. Stops for window tinting, license plate brackets, and my personal favorite – “you made that turn a little wide”.
Submitted by: Bags
Sporty looking coupes. Years ago used to have a 93 BMW 325is coupe with larger wheels and a slightly sporty exhaust. Not a rust bucket at all (car was like new, actually), and not full of aftermarket parts. Got pulled over at least once a year for things that were clearly made up (running a stop sign I stopped at, for example).
Submitted by: Adam
Brightly painted, loud cars in general, but my specific experience was my 1994 Ford Lightning in red.
351W, GT40 Heads and headers, 3″ true dual exhaust with a crossover pipe, it made for a noisy truck at any level of throttle, but especially WOT.
By modern standards, it was a lot more sound than speed, but I would get pulled over 1-2 times monthly without really speeding or street racing (too thirsty to waste fuel.) Almost all of the stops were for silly reasons like crossing a yellow line (with no proof) or “Driving aggressively” when the cop was in a C-store and I pulled away from a light. Other times it transitioned quickly to “This is a sharp truck, what year is it?”
Either way, it drew a lot of attention. The guy I sold it to was pulled over less than 2 hours later on the highway when he was headed home. He claimed he wasn’t speeding, but I wasn’t with him to know. It would have been consistent with my experience.
Submitted by: PotbellyJoe and 42 others
I can speak from personal experience: the Subaru WRX. By god I got so much more LE attention driving that car than I have in any other vehicle I have ever owned.
Honorable mention: when I was borrowing my dad’s patinaed Dakota pickup with bed racks I used to get a lot more cops just lingering in my general area than in almost any other car I’ve regularly driven. It looked the part of a workman’s truck and so I’ll let your mind fill in the blanks of why the cops would pay extra undue attention there.
Submitted by: TheSchrat
Ever since Maseratis have been hitting the secondary market in Atlanta en mass, I’ve seen quite a few pulled over to the side of the road for a chat with the local constabulary.
I think the exhaust sound draws attention to the car.
Submitted by: Earthbound Misfit I
Out of state station wagons and minivans. The cops love those, because no way are you gonna fly back to contest the ticket. It might as well be free money to them.
Submitted by: skeffles
Based on my experience riding in my wife’s car? Political stickers, especially particularly strong opinions that are the opposite of the opinions shared by most in the region you’re driving through.
I can drive a car with an expired license plate across the entire country and nobody bats an eye. Heck, I drove a car through downtown Chicago without doors or windows and CPD did nothing.
But my wife used to get stopped everywhere often and has a terrible ticket record to prove it. Her car had more than one sticker on it that suggested the reduction of police funding. People also vandalized her car somewhat often and once even siphoned her gas. For context, we live in a deeply red part of Illinois.
As an experiment, I tore all of the political stickers off of her car. Suddenly, she stopped getting pulled over and nobody messes with her car. She’s kept the car that way ever since.
I wonder if the local who flies the Confederate flag from his truck has a similar experience…
Submitted by: Mercedes Streeter
It will definitely be personal, discriminatory things. We know that it is not a specific color or make/model because then insurance companies would charge more money for those things, they track everything! We also have data that shows non-white people getting pulled over at exorbitant rates compared to white people. I’m sure there will be a lot of anecdata in the comments that says otherwise, but we also have real data on who cops are actually pulling over.
Submitted by: engineerthefuture
A 2020 NYU/Stanford study covering a dataset of 100 million traffic stops found that Black drivers were 20 percent more likely to get pulled over compared to white drivers.
The least pulled over vehicle of all time is of course the plain white 250 pick up truck with a work bed or not. If it looks like a work truck, it won’t get pulled over unless you are doing something egregious.
Submitted by: Markoff8585
