Ford Edge ST Makes The Perfect High-Speed Camera Car

Offense, they say in football, sells tickets – but defense wins games. The same could be said of the cars that appear on film and the ones that capture them. Like the new Ford Edge ST.

That’s the vehicle that the camera-car specialists at Pursuit Systems chose as their new platform, set up specifically for the purpose of filming high-speed chase scenes for movies and commercials. And with good reason.

“Speed, acceleration, braking, handling, even roominess – Edge ST has it all,” said Pursuit Systems CEO Mike Johnson. “Our shoots often demand a lot of the equipment we use, and especially the vehicles. In every way, Edge ST measures up.”

The first SUV from Ford Performance, the Edge ST packs a 2.7-liter EcoBoost twin-turbo V6 kicking out 335 horsepower (250 kW) and 380 lb-ft (515 Nm) of torque to all four wheels through an eight-speed automatic transmission.

That’s 20 hp and 30 lb-ft more than the old Edge Sport, and puts it in league with some of the more powerful versions of the Porsche Macan. And lower-spec versions of the Cayenne, for that matter, if not quite the Cayenne Turbo the company runs alongside its BMW X5 M and Mercedes ML63 AMG.

That made the Ford Edge ST a solid choice for Pursuit Systems, with mounted a thousand-pound, gyro-stabilized, remote-control camera rig on the roof. It also retuned the engine, added an individual-wheel air suspension to keep it level, stripped the interior and fitted a roll cafe, and wrapped the whole thing in black vinyl to avoid reflection on the vehicles it’s shooting.

“We’ve never done anything like this before with an SUV because there’s never been an SUV like Edge ST in our showroom,” said Ford spokesman Mark Grueber. “It has the performance chops and utility to keep up with fast-paced moviemaking.”