One of the biggest jobs of the US Secret Service is to protect the President of the United States.
This duty can be an extremely intense one.
As part of the job, Secret Service agents have to be able to drive extremely quickly.
And General Motors has been only too eager to help them in that quest.
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Secret Service is an extremely important organisation
Despite being well-known for the suits, earpieces and sunglasses, not many know the origin story.
The United States Secret Service was established by Abraham Lincoln in July 1865.
Following the end of the brutal U.S. Civil War, currency counterfeiting was a big issue.
So the Secret Service actually first existed as a sub-division of the Department of the Treasury.
Its role changed forever when President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.
Congress informally requested that the organisation provide protection for the President.
And it has fulfilled that role during the subsequent 124 years.
Agents have to be able to drive anything, anywhere
Naturally, the scope of serving as a Secret Service agent is extremely wide and vast.
Agents spend a lot of time protecting the President on overseas trips as well as domestically.
This means that agents have to be able to drive any type of vehicle with any transmission.
Recently, General Motors stepped in to help – by sending 10 of its cars to the Secret Service.
GM sent its cars to the James J. Rowley Training Center (RTC) in Laurel, Maryland.
Among the donated fleet were four Cadillac sports sedans – two CT5s and two CT4s.
US Secret Service
Two of those four cars had manual transmissions, suggesting that they could be the Blackwing models.
RTC instructor Mark Armstrong said not everyone was able to operate a manual shift so ‘having that platform here will enable us to give instruction on how to drive manual vehicles for overseas trips’.
GM was also kind enough to send a real variety of vehicles for training purposes.
For example, it sent a Chevrolet Suburban SUV, two Corvettes and a Colorado ZR2.
This variety should allow Secret Service agents to be more than prepared to drive whatever comes their way.
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