For most of us, our last car ride will be in something we can’t choose. We’ll spend our last moments above ground in a moving vehicle of indeterminate make and model crawling along at ten miles an hour creating a traffic jam composed of our loved ones. Surprisingly, there is a way to make it even more depressing.
I do hope I can amass a modicum of wealth before my demise, at least enough to close the roads between the place where we’ll hold the wake and the burial grounds. The hearse will then be driven as fast as possible and the mourners will race between themselves to see who can get there first without overtaking it. Winner keeps my stuff. For that something like the very lovely Jaguar XK8 Hearse pictured above would be ideally suited.
Even the ordinary non-specialty hearses that are so very frequent on my neck of the woods would be adequately suited to the task. It helps that they are mostly GMT400 Suburbans. Sure the casket will have more space to roll and bounce about around the corners than in the Jag but It’ll still do. Suburbans are very popular as hearses around here. It already looks like a hearse, for one, and can carry even the most corpulent of the recently deceased. Problem is that the newest GMT400 Suburban is pushing 16 years now and new ones are hideously expensive so nobody buys them anymore. Long gone are the days when you could buy it in what GM calls the ‘WT’ trim. Instead they find similar vehicles that have the same functionality with lower operation costs, enter the Hyundai H1.
In many respects, it’s the ideal car for the job. It’s just as capable as the Suburban of hauling a pine box with a guy inside. With a 170HP 2.5L Turbodiesel engine it may even more adept at doing it than the big Chevy. Its smaller footprint means it’s better-suited for narrow city roads and you can easily cut fuel bills by half when compared with the venerable old 350, let alone the 454. Accounting-wise it’s a dream come true, there really is just one problem with it.
Look at it, it’s a van. Even if you’re not a car guy, you can at least agree that you don’t want your last ride to be the same as the one commonly used by DHL to deliver their packages around or as a microbus. Don’t get me wrong, the H1 is a very practical and sensible car. And Funeral homes are in the business of making money of the mourners and not the vehicle preferences of the mourned, but I don’t think I can find a more inappropriate vehicle to use as a hearse.
Oh dear Lord.
The H1 is capable of tyre smoking exits from roundabouts while cornering flat dont bother with junk like Burbans if you want fast delivery, a launch from a traffic light is almost impossible in the H1 with traction control off and they are nice and ugly like a VW Kombi.
The front grille on that H1 looks a lot like a VW grill, too.
All midsize vans look like that these days. The 1986 Ford Transit was the first with a sloping front, from bumper to roof. All brands followed. Here’s another one, a Mercedes Vito.
‘Burbans are ANYTHING but junk, sir 🙂 !
Why not ? Anything is possibe these days. The usual hearse, vans, trucks, buses, bicycles, motor bikes, horses. And this is mourn-cow Leentje.
Excellent points indeed except for one detail and I rather have the Baja/Prius mashup than that Prius Hearse. When I die in about 100 years I want to be carried to the cemetery in one of my favorite vehicles, a 94-95 Plymouth Voyager which I hope to buy by the end of this decade.
Good night, that’s an ugly hearse!
If you look at the building they selected for the business it makes more sense, though. Faux stucco, huge cross framed with wood trim dominating the facade, abutting squat segmented-arched windows and yellow ochre all aver. Perhaps they’er trying to shed the dour image of the undertaking business, but the effect is ghastly.
I’m getting cremated.
Since you mentioned “accounting” and “accountant” is a recurring reference in these pages of CC one might consider the what the accountant would want to do with all that money saved nickel-ing and dime-ing his or her way through life.
There is your very last chance to do some real damage to your account. Do it with style!
Unlikely. If anything he’ll just move it to a more lucrative investment opportunity. Then he can finally lease that lovely Mercedes E-class.
As an accountant, I gotta stick up for my profession; here’s what happens when automakers don’t listen to accountants:
Here is another way to deplete your SKI account. What’s that? “Spend your Kids’ Inheritance”.
The Munster’s was nicer.
I like Lily Munster’s ride
Cremated and buried in the back yard with the cats.
I’m getting cremated. If I have a family and property, I’ll ask them to dig a deep hole for an apple tree (this IS Washington) toss my cremains in there and then plant the tree over me. That way, in a few years, they can take an apple, eat it and comment about how good I taste that year…
Cremation is how I want to go too. Ashes to be spread at the summit of Mt. Timpanogos, Utah. Some lucky bugger will have to hike up there for me.
Is the Priurse from Eugene? Just the thing when it’s too hot and muggy or cold and snowy to use the bicycle hearse.
Unless I am mistaken the Priurse comes from some unspecified part of California.
My former employer had some H1 vans – one of which I had for a month. Like Bryce said, they are certainly capable of lots of exciting tyre-smoking with next-to-no effort. It was fast but economical and big and comfy, so I thoroughly enjoyed driving it – with one exception: it was noisy enough in there to wake the dead, so maybe not the ideal hearse… 😉
Is that black Jaguar hearse the new one they came up with for the remake of “Harold and Maude”?
That Jag looks like you’d have to either be really short or they’d have to prop you up to ride shotgun in the front…
This hearse looks strange to anyone who grew up in the US but coming from Israel where the burial business is at the hand of religious societies (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevra_kadisha ) a van is what provides you with transportation on your lat trip…
I’ve seen a black Mercedes Vito van hearse with large side windiws like the VW Paul posted yesterday. More common are converted Ford Falcons or Fairlanes, which are also cnverted by Coleman Milne in the UK. If they were smart they would put in a large order while Ford is still making Falcons with the 2L Ecoboost and ZF auto, which would be easy to keep running in Europe.
I actually work a few blocks away from the city’s almost exclusive burial company (we use the modern word “tanatory”) and they all use Mercedes E-Class station wagons conversions such as this late model…
But I’d rather be cremated and stored anywhere, the most beautiful cemetery in Barcelona, overlooking the port on the side of Montjuïc mountain is already full.
I think every hearse I’ve had the misfortune to be around has been a Cadillac. Grandpa always used to joke “Just stuff me in a Hefty bag and throw me in the back of the pickup, and don’t forget to drop me off at the dump!”
Never in a million years. Miss you.
Toast me and flush me down the toilet.
Job done.
I’d like my last ride to be in a ’58 Edsel Amblewagon. Black, of course!