Here’s How Much Damage A Police ‘Hood Slide’ Really Does To A Car

You’ve probably seen police “hood slides” on TV in The Dukes of Hazzard, Rush Hour, Starksy & Hutch, and who knows — if you lived in 1980s New York City, maybe even in real life. It is universally considered the coolest way for a police officer to get around the extremely long hood of their 1970s land yacht police cruiser as they exit/enter, but one thing that you don’t often hear discussed is: How much damage does it actually cause the vehicle? The answer, as my colleague Jason Torchinsky — an out-of-shape, 5’5″ man in an LAPD costume — found out as he tried sliding over a tall Nissan Murano Crosscabriolet convertible SUV is: A Lot.

This is all part of our partnership with XPEL, purveyors of the world’s greatest Paint Protection Film, PPF. XPEL not only let us purchase our dream car, a 2014 Nissan Murano Crosscabriolet, but they detailed it and covered half of it with PPF — specifically, the driver’s side. XPEL then let us loose on a quest to put our Crosscab through a barrage of grueling tests to see how much worse the damage will be on the passenger’s side.

Our first test? The police “Hood slide.” Here’s the video of Jason doing the worst cop-slides of all time, and yet still doing an absolute number on the Nissan’s hood:

To prepare for this highly scientific and critically important real-world test, Jason and I had to find a police outfit, and given that he was with me here in The City of Angels, this proved more fruitful than we thought.We found a closing costume store in Arcadia called “Pok-A-Dots Costumes,” and it’s simply amazing. Run by two rather eccentric and fun women, the place is stacked floor to ceiling with costumes of every type. When we asked about police outfits, they smiled and told us something to the effect of: Oh, you’ll want to come with us.

They then showed us six or seven amazing police outfits — we’re talking the whole getup, from hat to shirt to badge to club to pants to handcuffs to sidearm. It was amazing:

Did we spend almost $200 on the outfit? We sure did, but it was too good not to, and the shop’s owners made it seem like they could really use the business. With our amazing find in hand, we headed to a parking garage, where Jason suited up to serve the Autopian community by providing useful (ish) consumer advice.

 

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Now, before I turn this article over to Jason, who is the only one who can truly describe the events that followed, I should note that the police hood-slide is a precision tactic — something that Jason definitely did not realize upon agreeing to all this. In fact, it’s such a complex maneuver that Gear Patrol‘s excellent host Bradley Hasemeyer did an entire how-to video on it:

It is worth mentioning that neither Jason nor I watched that clip prior to our shoot, and that will be painfully obvious upon watching the video at the top of this article. If you do not have time to watch that video, then this clip by the Vancouver Police Foundation should give you an idea of just how Jason performed:

Anyway, let’s hear it from Jason:

Hi, It’s Jason Here And I’d Like To See David’s Fat Ass Do Any Better

Man, right out of the gate, David is over here revealing my ultra-secret true height (my slightly-doctored driver’s license says 6’1″) and calling me “out-of-shape.” The hell, David? Okay, sure, I could be in better shape, but for fudge’s sake, I’m an old man with an aorta patched up with Flex Seal and gaffer’s tape. The hell do you want from me?

Also, I maintain that David’s fat ass, a solid two decades younger than mine, wouldn’t really have done any better. Ok maybe a little, but only since he was born genetically predisposed to have a few extra inches of height on me, which would definitely have helped; the height differential between me and the car hood and my stature was by far the largest impediment to me managing to perform even one single acceptable cop slide, and I think this must be a known issue. For example, take a look at the first and many of the other hood slides in this supercut of hood slides:

See how they frequently start from a point that’s above the hood? That’s crucial! You have to be able to get on top of the hood to pull off a good hood slide, which means that if that hood height line is too high in relation to your frame, you’re kind of doomed.

Like I am.

Look at this:

Oy, that’s terrible. Look up there, and note how the LAPD’s lil’est Junior Coplet there, in his baggy, oversized uniform, finds himself with that hoodline nearly at armpit level, perhaps nipple level. That’s not ideal at all. You really need a hood at about waist level or so, meaning I should have been using a Lotus or a Mini as a hood-slide car instead of this bloated beast.

Again, this is well-known and understood, and perhaps we should have been more aware of the challenges here. Look at how the hood slide from the Beastie Boys’ famous video for Sabotage was done:

The Chief there starts the hood slide from a good foot and a half above the hood! Hell, a wombat could do a good hood slide if you dropped them onto the hood from that height!

And look at Starsky there – wait is that Hutch? No, Hutch was the blond one, I think, this must be Starsky – anyway, Starsky pretty much runs across the hood, and I’m not even sure this can be considered a slide, strictly, but the point is the hood line was way lower than the situation I was forced into here.

What I’m saying is, I don’t think David has enough extra height to compensate for the Crosscab’s very tall hood, and, as such, would have looked as much like a doughy chump smacking gracelessly into that hood as I did.

Though, to be fair, David isn’t wrong here – my hood slides were absolute, unmitigated garbage. A towering pantload of failures, one after the other. And it’s not like I wasn’t trying! I wanted these to be good, and the hood slides in my head played out with far more grace and athleticism, unlike the unflattering, sad footage you watched up there, as a strange little hydrant-shaped homunculus debasing the uniform of a police officer repeatedly flung himself over and over into that unfortunate Nissan.

My technique was simple: run hard at the car, jump as high as possible, roughly aiming my butt at the hood (this never worked, btw), and then leave the rest to physics or fate or, more likely, let the two of them fight it out and shove me wherever they want. I would focus on a point over and past the hood which is where I wanted to end up after my slide, and for all the good that did I may as well have focused on the moon, because I proved to be as likely to land there as I was the point I saw just past the car.

The heavily-laden cop belt proved a big part of the problem, in part because it wasn’t really doing much to hold up those too-big pants and also because there was so much bulky crap on it, it made it really hard to get into and out of the car, which David insisted was a crucial part of the cop slide, which is, of course, BS.

The nightstick was especially difficult to deal with, always getting in the way as I tried to sit down and getting slammed in the door. One of the belt-things even smacked my glasses to the floor, breaking both earpieces, and that’s the same pair of glasses I’m wearing as I type this, crudely repaired with wire.

I realize that what I was wearing was just costume crap, and real cops have actually heavy stuff on that belt. How do any cop’s pants stay up? How do they get into and out of their cars?

The good news in all this was that the fundamental goal of the whole endeavor, damaging the car, was a resounding success. While I never really pulled off any decent hood slides, I did cause a lot of damage to the paint of the car, leaving gouges and scratches and rub marks and all kinds of havoc.

The amount of damage to the car that these hood slides caused was genuinely alarming. I mean, I suppose if one gave it even a tiny bit of thought, it shouldn’t really be alarming at all, but somehow actually seeing it gave me that uneasy stomach feeling, even though that was the whole point of this exercise.

I mean, look at this mess — lots of plastic left over from the club on both sides, lots of deep gouges on the non-ppf side, some scratchy-looking marks from where the utility belt gripped and stretched the PPF, and I think I put multiple dents into the car, too:

I’d particularly like to point out this damage — those scratchy-looking stretched-PPF marks I mentioned before. These vertical lines:

Impressively, the XPEL’d side actually seemed to protect the paint from all the brutality, though, to be fair, I couldn’t tell until we got it back and poured some hot water over some of the aforementioned scratches (those shown above), which actually disappeared. Yes, I’m talking about all this because they’re our sponsor, but it also really happened, because I saw it. I was impressed.

Getting the plastic smudges off the PPF side was a little tricker than on the non-PPF side, but it all came off, and aside from a tiny half-inch slit in the PPF, the driver’s side of the hood is going to look as good as new with some time in the sun and some elbow-grease. Or we could just peel the PPF, but we have lots more brutal testing to do.

I do think I managed to do one decent hood slide, at least:

Hood slides are non-trivial. They take real practice and skill, and even if you master it perfectly, I’m not really convinced all that much time is being saved, overall. I’m also not convinced that David would have done any better in my cop-pants, and, I think it’s worth noting, he never once volunteered to try.

Candy-ass.