The President's armored limo

All of the sudden a squad of batmobiles is in front of us. They appeared so suddenly it wasn't clear to me which one held the president. It's obvious which is the president's car now that I look at the pictures but it was happenning too fast at the time to sort it all out. I saw the SUVs with Secret Service agents hanging all over them. I saw Secret Service agents flat out running between those cars and the crowd and wondered how they did that for all two miles of the parade.

Maybe Bush was looking out through the five inches of tinted bulletproof glass but I never saw him.

The presidential limo is new, just delivered, a 2006 Cadillac DTS model which replaced the old 2001 Cadillac Deville Presidential Limousine. The new one's bigger, naturally, and probably costs somewhere around four million bucks apiece. It's not clear if Cadillac actually charges the government for them. They probably couldn't buy advertising as good as having the President riding behind the Cadillac signature egg-crate grill at the inauguration parade being televised across the world. Cadillac will begin selling its DTS models in February.

The limo is handbuilt and seats six. There are layers of kevlar and other high-strength, blast- and bullet-proof materials under all of the car's sheetmetal from roof to under-carriage. The windows don't open. It sports gun ports and tear gas cannons. The cabin is sealed against nuclear, chemical, and biological attack and refreshed with its own oxygen supply. There is no sunroof nor running boards for attackers to exploit.

Of course, most of this is inspired guessing about the features of the car are kept secret by the Secret Service. They won't even say how many of the limos they've got, though they probably have three of them. But these armored limos are a long way from the open top cars in which the presidents cruised Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1920s.