When I was touring around Trollhattan last month, one of my first stops was at ANA Specialbilar. There are two main facilities here, the recycling center (formerly SDCC) where they take cars to bits and then there’s the custom shop where they do a lot of special builds for various companies and agencies.
Alf and Martin were kind enough to give me a look through a Swedish Polis car. I’m such an exemplary citizen that my chances to see inside one the way some people to do are pretty limited 🙂
The cars come to ANA like this – plain white Saab 9-5 wagons.
And then the guys at ANA Specialbilar proceed to rip them to bits 🙂 Needless to say there’s a lot of custom stuff that gets installed in these cars so access to everything is necessary in order to do all the wiring.
Speaking of wiring, how’s this for organisation?
Each car has a trolley like this one that’s loaded up with all of the equipment that has to be installed or applied. Everything’s in there from the lighting, camera and radio equipment to the 90-or-so blue and yellow decals that get applied to each car.
Here’s a look from the back of the car. You can see much of the wiring going into the back here.
Here’s a completed interior, where you can see some of the gear that’s been installed.
The car features an infra-red camera, primarily for use at night when visibility is reduced. The nav screen displays the output from that camera, as demonstrated here with Martin’s hand showing on the screen.
This is the main control panel for the lighting and some other electronics inside the car.
The rear section of car can be set up to store various types of equipment, depending on the purpose of the car. Here you can see a storage cabinet in the back, including a full first aid kit. This car was mostly complete, but you can see there’s still some wiring at the back there that has to be connected.
These rear vision mirrors with lights included are made by Saab’s prototyping workshop, especially for use on these cars.
A look at the front of the car. When I heard there were around 90 decals on this car I was a little surprised. You can see from all these individual ones here that it’s easy for those numbers to mount up. Attaching these to the car must be a precision process.
The car in full regalia with lights on show……
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My thanks to Alf Persson and to Martin for showing me around ANA Specialbilar in general, and for this overview of the Saab 9-5 Polis car in particular.
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