The Ford Crown Victoria was a large old-school American saloon most famously used by taxi firms and the police. The 27-litre Rolls Royce Meteor V12 engine, on the other hand, was designed to power army tanks during WWII and the second half of the last century.
It’s almost certain that no one in human history had mentioned the two in the same breath until a crazy car enthusiast from Sweden embarked on the world’s daftest engine transplant project.
Called the Meteor Interceptor, this project car started as a 2006 Crown Vic Police Interceptor, the version of the car sold to law enforcement in the U.S. until production ended in 2011. Back when it was catching criminals it would have been powered by a 4.6-litre V8 producing around 250bhp.
Now it’s fitted with 27 litres of Rolls Royce V12 that makes 550bhp in standard form, but will have an estimated 2500bhp when owner Daniel Werner is done with it, thanks to the addition of two huge turbochargers and a custom ECU. Werner hopes to hit 200mph when the car is finished.
But first he has to get it finished. And, as you’d imagine, this is no straightforward build. Compared to the small four-cylinder engines fitted to most European cars, even the Ford’s original V8 engine is a physically large unit. But the Meteor V12 is enormous, and heavy with it. Werner had to remove the windscreen and hack out most of the metal below just to get it to fit. And he had to add metal to the car’s old fashioned separate chassis structure to cope with the engine’s weight.
A previous video on the build’s YouTube channel showed the engine being started several years ago, but this is the first time it has been fired up since being relocated to the car. It takes a couple of attempts while the team tweaks the fuel mixture before it bursts into life sounding suitably menacing, after which a thermal imaging camera checks to ensure it’s firing on all 12 cylinders.
Werner says the next job is to connect the turbo hoses and begin tuning the engine with an eye on reaching that 2500bhp goal. There’s plenty of work still to do, but this ridiculous project looks like it’s definitely worth following, which you can do on YouTube and via Facebook.
Keyword: Watch this 27-litre tank-engined Ford saloon fire up for the first time