This Mexican hearse, submitted by SoCalMetro, begs the question: is this the vehicle in which you’d want to be driven to the graveyard? Surely, a Malibu Maxx could’ve been sourced for a cleaner conversion, one without a ’95-’99 Maxima’s door handle on the rear gate. Just kidding; this is just an example of making due with what’s around, something genuinely hard to criticize. Besides, there’s joy in beholding something so clearly hacked together.
What an oddity. I’ve never seen such an animal, there used to be all sorts of non-Cadillac hearses back in the day. I do have a geeky interest in professional cars, so it’s cool to see, are there any more photos from other angles?
Very clean job. It’s a Town Car, right?
No, it’s a Malibu, a Town Car hearse isn’t that odd. The rear section does look like the one they add to cheaper Town Car hearse conversions
Those aren’t Malibu Maxx doors. Sure look like Town Car doors to me.
In my book, that makes it that much more impressive that the Chevy parts are so well integrated into the rear of a big Lincoln.
The character line gives it away – this is definitely a Malibu. The rear door window frame looks like it came from the standard Malibu of that generation, not the Maxx. FWD offset wheels with Chevy center caps also are a hint.
Pretty sure that’s a Sinaloa (Mexico) license plate, which might help explain why none of us have seen something like this before.
Yeah they’re Malibu sedan doors, that appear to be extended on the lower portion for wider entry.
Thanks!
This is weird. It’d definitely a Malibu, I’d say it started out as a sedan, not a Maxx. If you look at the fender line, it looks like they filled in wheel well and took door straight down. The Maxx doesn’t have quite the same “hip” the sedan does.
I also see where the hearse cap looks very similar to the ones used on low roof Town Car hearses. Interestingly, I was looking online to see if maybe I could ID manufacturer, of just the top and door if not the whole thing, and I noticed this one has the rear door opening to the passenger side. Every other North American hearse I found pictures of they open to the drivers side. Plus the door on this one doesn’t appear to fit well. Combined with the random, non-matching door handle, I wonder if this a custom one off somebody built from what they had laying around?
And google imaging “chevrolet coche funebre” turned up this even less dignified way to go out…
On most non-Accubuilt coaches the rear “hearse section” is usually a fiberglass modular unit, which I guess could be adapted to something like this, as far as I can recall, Accubuilt is the only hearse maker that actually has a stamping facility to make their coachwork.
Yeah, that was what I was looking for, too see if any pre-built common ones matched up with this, but I came up blank. I’m leaning towards junkyard special…
Since many folks drive Town Cars in their retirement, they may as well get the send-off in them.
“Earth bath” — old British slang for burial (according to Robert Hughes)
“He has a garden on his belly”. That’s what I hear. Comes right after the Earth Bath.
Good one. Speaking of morbid matters, I hear both the Dutch & Swiss, for lack of space, effectively recycle their graves. I don’t know what the Dutch do with past occupants, but Mark Twain said the Swiss store the bones for the sake of relatives.
BTW, he also said the Swiss Alps were a big tourist trap, even in the 1860s. His account sounds no different than what I saw there.
Not necessarily so. Depends on the time limit of the “grave rights” (no idea what the English word for it is). Your family or descendants will have to take care of that. But regardless the time limit agreed upon (and that can be “indefinitely”), there’s no such thing as a guarantee for an eternal well-kept grave.
The father of a colleague said, when he was a dying man: Cremate me. No one is gonna play soccer with my head !
And that’s how it is.
By the way, for the English speaking crowd this small town nearby must be a spooky place to enter.
People must be dying to see it.☺︎
If I’m the one being driven to the graveyard to be planted, I’m not in a position to care what kind of car gets me there. As long as the undertaker doesn’t drop the casket, it’s all good.
Wrap me up in newspaper and throw me in the back of the pickup. At that point, I won’t care and even this Malibu would be fine.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a “service car” or whatever they call the car they use to pick up the bodies from where the person died. Lots of times those are cheaper cars (or just vans or older hearses) since nobody really sees it.
Here (in the wild west) funeral homes pick up bodies with plain minivans at least from assisted living or nursing homes.
In partial CC-effect fashion, yesterday I saw a hearse like I’d never seen before: a white-on-white late-model Chrysler minivan with the large landau irons like this one on white vinyl side panels. I can’t say I’ve ever noticed a white hearse here in California before … is this a new trend?
White hearses are not that uncommon, there are several funeral homes down here that have used white for years, there is a local home that uses white Cadillacs with a dark blue vinyl top, its a very nice combination. Silver is not an unusual color for hearses either. There is a chain in Ft. Lauderdale/Palm Beach that has metallic light blue hearses with white tops, though overall, the most common color remains black, or course.
A lot of traditional African American family-owned firms are known for having a distinctive fleet color. The one a few blocks from us is a champagne metallic similar to that found on late ’70s Fords. They have a mid ’90s Fleetwood-based Superior in primo condition and several late model standard DTS sedans painted to match.
Yep, I’ve seen a southern black owned chain that had black hearses with RED vinyl tops. That’s a pretty shocking combo.
The minivan “hearse” is probably a service car, which is used for removals, usually a van is used for that job, most homes save their hearses for hearse duty, plus a white van is more discreet than a hearse. The landau irons appearing on service cars is a newer trend, most service cars have laurel wreaths on the rear quarters instead of landau bars.
This role used to be filled by a sedan delivery, some hearse builders used to offer what essentially was “stripper” hearse as a service car, usually based on a lower priced non-Cadillac chassis, Superior still offered a Cadillac based service car until 1977 or so, it was like a van version of the regular Cadillac hearse.
Yep, Carmine’s spot on. You see a lot of Suburban’s used for service cars nowadays as well. Sometimes even with the vinyl/landau bars too.
I really wonder why we still affix giant Landau irons to hearses. It’s not like they serve any purpose, and a limo-length car with a high back and blanked out rear windows is obviously a hearse whether it has them or not.
Then again I’ve never really liked them on anything, even the mid and late 60’s Thunderbird landau looks kind of silly to me.
probably mostly to break up the monotony of what would otherwise be a huge expanse of padded vinyl.
We use them for both aesthetic value, and to signify the vehicle is a hearse. I, as a funeral director, believe it adds a touch of old school class as well.
A minivan hearse?I wouldn`t be caught dead in one.
Insult is right! I’d rather be subjected to an SCI “central prep” embalming and go out in one of their old Buillacs (a Roadmaster hearse with Cadillac rear quarters, wheels, and other trim) than that hack job.
Please don’t start with this again, oh no, a Buick hearse, such a shame,…..didn’t we already go over this?
My Grandpa was a Buick man his whole life, at his funeral I was very disappointed to see he got one of the few Lincoln hearses around, even a Cadillac would have been more his style. I wish I’d thought beforehand to try to help my uncle find a funeral home still running one of these Roadmasters, he would have loved it.
Quite a few of them were built. They weren’t all “entry level” cars like the Eureka-built SCI Buillacs and the Buick-trimmed version of the same coach. S&S and Superior (the badge-engineered 800 pound gorillas of the funeral coach business) also offered Roadmaster-based coaches as a less expensive (but still considered “high end”) Cadillac alternative.
The problem I have with that car isn’t that it’s a Buick. The version of that same car with the Buick trim and rear quarters looked just fine. Before they got out of the coach business in 1964, Flxible used nothing but Buick chassis.
IMHO, the whole point of the Buillac was SCI trying to save a buck (usually while charging the family more than the locally-owned firm down the street) and deceiving the people in the procession into thinking they were following a Cadillac. It’s not like SCI couldn’t afford a real Fleetwood or DeVille/DTS-based car. They sure as hell have them (usually an S&S Masterpiece no less) for the “prestige” firms they own like Frank E. Campbell in Manhattan, Gawler’s in DC, Gates Kingsley Gates in SoCal, or their “flagship”, George H. Lewis in Houston.
To be fair, every hearse I’ve seen in recent years with a “Dignity” sign has been a Cadillac or the occasional Lincoln.
I guess what it comes down for me is that the Buillac was a rolling metaphor for SCI itself – dishonest and cheap. And if you eliminate the backstory and judge the car on its own merit, it’s not bad looking at all!
License plate seen on a `63 Cadillac hearse in Freeholod NJ- GO-N-Style.
I don’t know how to add pix here or I would add my idea of a car that IS NOT a hearse….but looks like one and it comes from the factory that way: the Mercedes-Benz “R class”. If you have never seen one, it’s Daimler’s answer to the Chrysler Pacifica. In other words, it’s a minivan trying desperately to look sporty. It did so poorly saleswise M-B no longer sells it here in U.S….perhaps it’s still sold in Canada?
However, it’s weird hatchback styling is also used on a smaller platform in the new “B class” Mercedes.
That’s a late model El Camino Crew Cab with a removable hardtop.
“You just ask it, we’ve got the casket”. Something like that was on one of Face’s (The A-Team) many business cards. That would suit this truck well.
If it works, go for it.
I’m a bit of a weirdo taphophile too. I had the enjoyment of attending the Old Car Festival at Greenfield Village last weekend and of course was smitten by a Model A hearse signed with the name of a Dearborn undertaker just up Oakwood Blvd. This got me to thinking about the indignity of poor Henry Ford having to take his last ride in a Packard. I’d think the family would rather have him go to the cemetery in an old Model A hearse than a competiter. I know, I know, Ford did not make commercial chassis for service cars and all of that, but he was Henry Ford.
It was my first time at the Old Car Festival and I vote we have a meetup next year.
You would have thought that they would have had something planned, especially since Henry Ford was getting up there in years, maybe some sort of Lincoln based hearse that they could have had stored for such an occasion, I imagine that Edsel Fords last ride in 1943 was also in a non-Ford hearse, I wonder what they used when Hank the Deuce kicked off in 1987?
I’ve never quite heard definitively what happened to Henry II other than he died of pneumonia at 70 or 71 and was not planted with the rest of the family. I’ve read he may have been baked and shaked in the Rouge river without ceremony. I get the feeling he was a private person. He’s O.K. in my book – “never complain, never explain” works for me. He had a lot of weight put on his shoulders as a young man and carried it for the rest of his life.
Whats interesting is that when the longtime head of VW, Heinz Nordoff died in 1968, they used a somber black VW Transporter truck as the hearse. The web does show that Hank was cremated, interesting, unlike most of the other members of the Ford family.
This extremely unusual (for both hearse and W123 standards) W123 hearse popped up on the German equivalent of CL a while ago (dog not included). Not only was it stretched by 20cm/8in, but it actually wasn’t based on the wagon in the first place, instead they used the sedan. The sedan rear doors fit it so well, I’m inclined to say that’s what Mercedes-Benz should’ve been doing all along. And at only 3550€ it was almost worth buying and storing solely for your own funeral. I’m still heartbroken because I had to give it a pass.
But a big and swanky W140 would be okay, too. There don’t seem to be a lot of those around, either. In any case I want my final ride to happen in a Mercedes-Benz (vans don’t count).
That’s an oddity, a very American style landau hearse on a foreign car, usually European hearses are the big glass box kind.
Some parts of Europe seem to have found a liking in landau hearses. The funeral procession of flight MH-17 in the Netherlands for example was absolutely full of them.
I work in the funeral business and I never understood why it was a good idea to slap the landau bars and vinyl on a service car. The point, as I’ve been told, was that a van or SUV was more “discrete” than a hearse. Well, that kind of goes out the window when you gussy it up like a hearse or put the name of your funeral home on the rear windows like my place does.
I think the real reason is that a done up van or SUV is just cheaper. A new hearse is awfully expensive, and using it for the more basic transporter jobs subjects it to more possible damage and wear and tear. Getting an old hearse is a crapshoot for a service car because they generally are expensive as well and only get driven short distances and low speeds. Considering a good number of used hearses are Cadillacs with Northstar engines, I don’t think they’d be a good investment as a service car.
Here in Illinois they’re never completely discrete, as all funeral home-owned vehicles are required to have special ‘FH’ plates. One of our local firms has a black Ford Flex as a service car. The extra-dark tint behind the B-pillar and FH plates give it away. Other than that it looks like any other black Flex – you know, a hearse!
That reminds me of a Photoshop I’ve made a while ago. I wish they had offered them like this officially, it looks pretty cool in my opinion.
Holly Hell! the only thing that came to mind. I just typed “Mexican Hearse” and just saw a Ford Mustang hearse on the Google Machine from Mexico, and a Toyota Prius one from California, telling by its plates. What ever happened to the Superior Cadillac hearses?. —–>
http://hooniverse.com/2013/01/30/wagon-y-wednesday-ford-mustang-hearse/
And the only hearse to ever make use of the landau bars! —–> http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_TK2jeULtrc/USu7ahVRhCI/AAAAAAAABzs/pIz9fLgbj5I/s1600/20130223_152342.jpg
From this blog,
http://brokenlegsanddreams.blogspot.com/
That’s a flower car (an S&S to be specific) Newer ones (since the ’80s at least) double as a coach as the stainless steel flower compartment is just high enough for a casket.
The few coachbuilders still offering them only build a handful each year. They were once fairly common, (it wasn’t a proper Sicilian Mob funeral without several of them) but today are primarily found with African American-owned firms (the one in the photo is from the O.H. Pye, III Funeral Home in Detroit) and in the Northeast.
Ah! Thanks for the explanation, as I had not seen a convertible hearse before.
http://capillasdelcarmen.com.mx/carrozas/
Holy Hell II I have never seen BMW or Mercedes hearses here in LA. And they have those cars in old Mexico? Old Mexico is moving up the economic ladder. 😉
The Cadillac flower car isn’t really a convertible, it just looks like one.
The third awful looking car in that group is actually a Lincoln pretending to be a Mercedes, and its not really good at it.
Ah, like Don Corleone’s funeral, with all those 1955-1956 Cadillac flower cars, a few years back when John Gotti bit it, they had about 7 or 8 Cadillac flower cars of varying vintages in his procession, and one El Camino, guess they ran short of Cadillacs. I assume that they were borrowed from other funeral homes.
There was a home down here that had a very nice black El Camino that they would use as a flower car from time to time, it even had wire wheel covers to match the hearses and limos, it didn’t look out of place the few times I saw it on the road in a procession.
Speaking of hearses.. There’s a latest-generation Voyager or Town and Country hearse here. I have no idea why someone would dare make one into hearse.. but.. here goes.
It’s a service vehicle. Used for general duties of the home–driving surviving family members, running errands, etc. In the day of Beige Blobs, the landau bar simply makes it easily identifiable for a grieving family. “This is the vehicle we get into”. This isn’t a hearse.
It’s either a service car of the sort used to pick up the deceased from the place of death, transport to the airport etc, or a very low budget hearse. A lot of people are creeped out by hearses and no self-respecting FD would ask their clients or family members to ride in one.
Funeral directors know they have to be discreet about a lot of things. That’s why Mortuary Management magazine has long had nature photography on the front and back covers and no mention of the articles within. The last thing a lot of grieving families would want to see on the FD’s desk while they’re making arrangements is a magazine with with articles about how new EPA clean air rules would affect crematory operators or the latest advancements in embalming fluid.
Then there’s Jim Wilson. If an FD needs to call American Airlines about transporting the deceased, they don’t ask for Cargo or for the mortuary division or anything like that, They just ask for Jim Wilson. Jim Wilson is an AA trademark, but has become so synonymous that throughout the airline industry, the protective shipping containers that caskets are placed in for air shipment are known as “Jim Wilson trays”.
https://www.aacargo.com/learn/humanremains.html
Vans like this usually have had all the rear seats taken out of them. They are usually used to pick up bodies, run errands, transport flowers and the like.
You usually cannot fit more than 3 people in a hearse (if its a Caddy or Lincoln with a bench seat) anyway because it also doesn’t have any back seat in it. No one uses them to transport family, sometimes clergy prefer to ride in them though.
Forget steel, plastic and a combustion engine. THIS is how you leave in style.
And if real horsepower is too expensive, there’s always manpower.
that thing is unholy. I’d rather be transported in an igloo strapped to the roof of a Smart fortwo.
There’s a badly rusted Mercedes Diesel Hearse in Los Angeles , it was made from a 240D Sedan with manual box , NO AC , I looked at it but it’s close to unsafe because of the rust issues .
I’m not remembering where it was imported from , maybe Newfoundland ? the seller imported it for some kids Cable TV show then wanted to dump it after .
I hope it doesn’t get junked but it needs BIG $ to save .
-Nate
A local dirt nap provider uses a Clamshell Chevy as a hearse Ive been trying to catch it out of its stall for some pics mintest clamshell chev Ive seen in a long time
Nothing less than The Standard of the World will do. To quote Bruce Springsteen,
” Well buddy when I die throw my body in the back
And drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac.”
Uh, that wasn’t what the song was about…It wasn’t regarding Cadillac as the Standard of the World…It was about dying (and not giving a shit about his remains).
I agree with you. I didn’t phrase that quite right. For me , my last trip would have to be in a Cadillac, not in anything else.