A hearse isn’t the most appealing car one can imagine. Take away the curtains, vinyl roof, and landau bars and it could have been an ambulance. Either way, this car started life as a commercial chassis Pontiac. A coach builder might also convert these chassis into limousines, not just hearses and ambulances.
Chalk this find up to the CC Effect, as I found this the day after the ’73 Grand Ville article.
This Pontiac wasn’t alone, as this ’70 Pontiac ambulance and Cadillac hearse were also nearby. I have no clue what is in the pole barn behind the copper Pontiac, but I suspect there are more hearses and ambulances. Seeing this got me to wondering about the abundance of commercial chassis Pontiac built.
If you watch enough 1970’s era television, it appeared Cadillac had the market cornered on professional chassis with Pontiac being an aberration. That would be a highly accurate assessment. How so? Let’s compare:
| Model Year | Cadillac | Pontiac |
| 1971 | 2,014 | 194 |
| 1972 | 2,462 | 320 |
| 1973 | 2,212 | 240 |
| 1974 | 2,265 | 113 |
| 1975 | 1,329 | 60 |
Cadillac was outselling Pontiac in this arena by huge margins every year, so this commercial chassis Pontiac is a very rare critter. For 1971 to 1975, the commercial chassis was classified as being in the Grand Ville series with a 126″ wheelbase. Every picture found revealed the Bonneville name on the grille; maybe the Bonneville name had more cachet than did Grand Ville.
What about Oldsmobile and Buick? No production numbers could be found, although a few pictures of Olds 98 based ambulances did show up in Google. Unable to find production numbers for anything more recent than 1975, it makes one wonder if Pontiac ceased production of the commercial chassis after the showing of 1975.
The gold one in the lead pic looks to be a ’72?
Yep, that’s a 72, with what looks like a Superior body. The Town Car hearse next to it is also pretty rare.
There were 98 and Electra based hearses, even a few Pontiac ones made after 1975, but they were always low in numbers, hearse makers offered these non-Cadillac hearses as lower cost options for smaller funeral parlors, and in some small towns where the funeral director also ran the ambulance service and medical examiners office, a Pontiac based combination hearse/ambulance car as a service car and removal car also would help keep the miles and wear down on your expensive Cadillac hearse.
I’ve seen more Pontiac ambulance/hearse combo cars than straight hearses like the 72 above, but car based ambulances started to disappear back in the 70’s as van based ambulances started to get more popular, so that probably started to cut down on Pontiac commercial chassis sales too.
This 1986 or so vintage Parisienne based rig is probably the last Pontiac chassised hearse made
The coach builder went through a lot of work to build this car when you think about it. Starting in ’77, all GM B-body wagons used the same Chevy based body with the exception of the front clip. They put some serious effort into putting the Parisienne sedan styling cues into this car. This would seem to have been just as custom as any Cadillac based car.
The super low volume custom shops make GM look just plain lazy with it’s one size fits all wagon bodies – on expensive full size wagons that pushed the top of the various brand’s price points.
Well they had more time and charged a lot more too, this was not that uncommon with these, I’ve seen some with Delta 88 rear taillights, and some just had a conventional GM wagon rear end, I don’t know what the dividing line was.
I can find no mention in the GM Pontiac parts catalog that Pontiac still offered a CC(ComercialChassis in parts book speak) for 1986 or even 1976 for that matter. I didn’t have any info for pre 1975 so I can’t say exactly when the last year was for the BOP divisions CC were. So with that I’m going to say that your 86 Parisienne is nothing more but a “glorified station wagon”(my qoute from the last 80 Lincoln Hearse CC). If you care to supply me with a VIN from the subject vehicle I would be more than happy to point out that it left Willow Run as, most likely a 2 seat wagon.
My thinking as to why Cadillac dominated this market is because of price. And I used to own a 69 Cadillac CC in the form of a Hess&Eisenhardt ambulance so I do have some experience in researching these types of cars. I know that sounds far fetched but my thinking goes along the line that it was easier to make a Cadillac as the CC’s were produced on a seperate assembly line than the cars. I can’t remember what line it was back in those days but IIRC it was on one of the truck assembly lines. Maybe the old Flint plant? After all GM considered the CC a truck and not a car. Now a days they call the Cadillac truck an Escalade and the CC is really a( or was) Deville DHS with a HD truck style suspension that the coach builder has to cut into pieces to form their desired model. But back to the topic. The Cadillac was the top seller because of price. Supply and demand. It might have been to costly to ship over the components to make a BOP CC. Why pay good money for the BOP when for just a couple of hundreds more you could have the best, a Cadillac. Just my observation. And of course the opposite happened after BOP dropped their CC line. It was cheaper to buy a “glorified station wagon” than the dedicated Cadillac CC. And than Cadillac was the only GM player after the B-Body was discontinued in 1996. BTW Cadillac must still consider their CC a truck. If you were to decypher a CC VIN you would see it is more like a truck than a car what with GVWR brake system characters and so forth.
From the looks of it I’d say that the Parisienne above left the factory as a 4dr sedan not a station wagon.
Look at the wheelbase though, that’s more than just a Parisienne Safari with a tall roof, the wheelbase is stretched, the door and all the glass is commercial “high roof” glass, they may have not listed a full commercial chassis, but there must have been a way to get these, as far as I know they never listed a commercial chassis version of the FWD H & C bodies, but they did make a few hearses out of those too.
FWD 87-88 LeSabre Hearse with commercial glass.
I always assumed anything like that was an entirely custom job by the coachbuilder starting with a regular car straight off the production line. That kinda work is certainly within the capabilities of those companies, not much different than most limos. The factory-supplied commercial chassis just made it way easier and was (most likely) a much better platform for these types of purpose-built vehicles.
Then again, GM was making that goofy Fleetwood 75 limo at the time, so I guess it’s a possibility!
Really surprised to see this. The winshield looks quite different in shape from the stock one’ thicker A-pillars, mych less curvature at the top and maybe the bottom also. I wonder if it was a commercial’glass windshield from something else.
For six years I worked for a company in Canada that built professional cars for the funeral industry. No station wagons were converted to coaches. The main chassis’s were two- door coupes. When coupes were discontinued, they were four-door sedans. Commercial chassis were discontinued by Cadillac by that time. The company also built B-O-P models from regular cars. As was mentioned by another letter, truly one size fits all.
In this case one mfr sources all. The original wheel base was not always the same, however, the finished units were the same to fit the coach body.
I used to work for a hearse builder. At no time did the company utilize a station wagon. A regular passenger car was converted to a hearse by a complex process that included lengthening the chassis, lengthening the drive shaft and wiring system. Suspension was upgraded to support the increased weight and commercial tires replaced the standard tires. A complete new body and doors were produced.
All glass was replaced by “high”
glass. As you can see, it became almost completely rebuilt.
A car collector here in my town has a 1985 Pontiac Parisienne limousine. I always assumed it was a Chev when seeing it driving around town, but I got to look all over it a year ago when he had an open day of his usually-private collection, and I discovered then that it was a Parisienne. It has about the same wheelbase as the ’86 hearse above, seems to have the same doors (below the windows), has the Parisienne front and rear clip and looks completely factory-built inside and out. It’s New Zealand-new too (ex-diplomatic embassy I think) which makes it even more rare. Wish I took photos of it now…
There’s a real interesting ’73 on E-bay right now. I find it very overpriced considering its awful paintjob (why did they even bother) but I’d so like to have it anyway. These builders really knew what they were doing — I’ve never heard of these buckling or breaking in half.
There’s a guy I know in Durham who collects “pro-cars” and he has an engineless white ’73 Ninety-Eight ambulance amongst his other oddities that I itch for. A ’75 Cadillac Ambulance he has is equipped with swivel bucket seats also — he told me the coach builder installed these on day one. They are both in pretty terrible condition though.
Pic is of the E-baymobile. If you go to the auction, you’ll see a shot of a much nicer ’71 model they are also hawking.
The ’73 appears to be Catalina based, judging by the door panel and front grille trim. The instrument panel pad is a ’71 or ’72 unit, although the car does maintain a correct ’73-’74 Rally Gauge cluster & bezel. She’s a bit rough — too bad they took the spray-bomb paint can to it.
That car belongs in the “car of one’s dreams” post. Trippy, dude.
There should be a racing series for these and the Checker Aerobus.
This thing needs to be on a Lemons track with a goofy team theme STAT!
That 8 door Pontiac is an Armbruster-Stageway built in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Love this airport shuttle cars.
I remember that the funeral home at the end of my road had a Pontiac Parisienne hearse as a back up to the standard Cadillac one. Also it was used for children, unfortunately. This was in the 1980s, and I’m pretty sure it was a B-body.
If I recall correctly, Superior built professional cars on Pontiac chassis for a long time. Superior was one of the bigger names in that business, and I think that Pontiac was the chassis of choice for buyers on a budget.
Cotner Bevington was known for their Oldsmobiles, but I think that for the most part, the Superior Pontiac was the lowest priced car from a high-end line that did most of its work with Cadillacs.
Many of these cars were “convertible” between hearse and ambulance, from the days when funeral homes commonly ran the ambulance service. This one appears to lack the seams in the rear roof quarter area where the landau bar panels would come out to expose some windows. By the time this car was made, ambulance services were well on the way to being taken over by county EMS agencies or by the hospitals, who all used specially outfitted vans instead of these hugely expensive vehicles.
I recall as a kid getting a ride in a 63 Pontiac ambulance – one of my aunts was a nurse in a small county hospital, and they had transported a patient to Fort Wayne. They came by and picked me up and I got a trip back home with her.
(EDIT) – I think Carmine and I were typing about the same time.
In a very strange coincidence, some friends and I once looked at a 1971/72 Pontiac hearse and a 1965/66 Cadillac hearse as possible purchases while in high school during the late 1980s. To make the coincidence even more comprehensive, the Pontiac was in a gold color very similar to the color of the Pontiac in the top photo, and the Cadillac was dark green, although much darker than the one in the second photo, IIRC. The Pontiac ran so-so while the Cadillac did not run at all, and they were both owned by a somewhat eccentric gray-bearded man whose description of the cars we did not really trust, so we did not buy either. Between us, we must have spotted a significant percentage of the gold 1971-72 Pontiac hearses that were produced.
Re. Buick ambulances, many will recall that there’s a 1960 LeSabre in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Not that attention-getting, though, given that there was a LeSabre wagon in this era anyway. What made the most indelible impression on me was the beautiful ’67 or ’68 Wildcat ambulance that appeared in a Rockford Files episode (as pictured). According to IMCB, one of these cars also appeared in the background in the 2005 Starsky and Hutch movie; apparently they were made by the Trinity Coach Co. out of Duncanville, TX.
I remember some Olds units, so did a Google search and came up with this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-ihyEvhWjQ
“COTNER BEVINGTON USED OLDS 98 CHASSIS FOR HEARSE AND AMBULANCES FROM 1959 TO 1975.
The 1973 EMS Systems Act – passed in 1974, implemented four years later in 1978 – required that communities receiving federal funds for their programs had ambulances that met new federal specifications. Three chassis styles meet the criteria and are still in use today: Type I uses a small truck body with a modular compartment, Type II has a van body with a raised roof and Type III has van chassis with a modular compartment. Passenger-based vehicles were purposely excluded from legislation and the last American-made automobile-based ambulance was built in 1978.”
Brochure is here.
http://oldcarbrochures.org/NA/Oldsmobile/1962-Oldsmobile/1962-Oldsmobile-Cotner-Bevington
Actually there were just a few 1979 Cadillac ambulances made.
Yeah the Cadillacs are so common the ones that make me look are the Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Lincolns. I remember seeing a few Roadmaster and Caprice hearses in the late 1990s but most of the funeral homes in the area I grew up in kept using early 80s Cadillac commercial chassis units until almost the turn of the century.
The 1971 GM big wagons with power clamshell tailgate and window would have made a decent low-cost hearse without conversion.
I’m not sure the roofs would have been high enough. Then, if you raise the roof, you have all kinds of nasty engineering work to do on that clamshell. By the time you get the rollers on the floor, you need a lot of height to fit both a casket and the spray of flowers that usually sits on top of it. For ambulance purposes, you need enough headroom for a guy on a stretcher. Plus, with the roof slope needed for the clamshell, any load with some height needs to be shoved way far forward to clear the roof slope. I think that there is a reason why none of the professional car makers or converters ever started with the clamshell wagon.
They did make a few clamshell hearses.
The hearse that took my Grandmother to the cemetery was a clamshell Chev. It was a standard wagon with the back seats removed. The majority of hearses here are older standard American wagons – not lengthened or heightened. Most of the clamshell hearses have now been converted back to seated wagons and on sold. The funeral director that handled my Grandmother’s funeral has now switched from clamshell to whale-body Caprice/Roadmaster wagons.
I saw this at a small car show & swap meet a few months ago. Imagine making a GTO hearse.
Love to see someone do a 368 Cadillac V8 build and then stick it in a Cadillac Hearse 🙂 . There’s an engine that doesn’t get enough respect.
Oh, just go with the 425, Dan!
Screw that… 500 cubes baby!
The bore of the 368 is puny, much better off with a 425 at least if not a 477, 500 or the older 429. Plenty of the larger Cadillac V8s out there which are more worthy of expensive machinist services and fresh parts on a $ per HP or more in importantly Tq basis.
My Goth niece would love this in black
I remember peeking in a Pontiac ambulance as a kid and seeing a plaque by the speedometer, “DO NOT DRIVE OVER 75 MPH”. Seemed rather slow to me. That thing gave me the willies!
The idea of tearing through intersections at 100 mph is an outmoded one…it’s killed a lot of victims as well as EMS personnel and drivers who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Today, when time is critical, most places have some sort of Life Flight medivac helicopter airlift service. Ambulances will slow to about ten miles an hour before busting lights; and even then there’s a lot of close calls. Even on the freeway, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one go faster than about 80…just a bit faster than traffic.
Remember, not only are those things heavy and more tippy…there may be a lot of work going on in the back as they try to stabilize the patient, have him ready for the next team in the ER.
You’ve never stepped outside the city, have you? Wide open spaces are a whole other story…… especially when the nearest hospital is 30 miles away. haha. Thanks though!
I live in rural Wisconsin.
In our community is a semi-famous author who’s written a book about his time as a First Responder on the local volunteer fire department. And one of his duties on rolling up was/is to size up the patient’s condition; determine whether Life Flight was in order, and then, when it was, ready a landing area. Often without state or county law enforcement to assist.
The nearest hospital to his region was forty miles; the nearest trauma center 110 miles.
I can’t say how it is where you are; but in the four states I’ve lived in in the last ten years, the ambulance drivers have been downright tame.
Maybe you haven’t seen ambulances booking it, I certainly know some EMS guys and volunteer fire dept guys and they tell of running the big Power stroke ambulances flat out and claimed they could hit over 120mph in rural upstate NY…
During my senior year of college in the mid-1980s, I had a part-time job at a small private hospital. Three days a week I sat at the front door from 3 to 11 pm as “security.” One evening I heard from one of the nurses that a patient had died and someone would be coming from a funeral home to pick up the deceased. The man who showed up was driving a 1959 Pontiac Safari that had been outfitted for hearse use, but it was a regular wagon with side curtains, not a professional car conversion. He let me have a quick look at it while he went to deal with the paperwork. It had been impeccably maintained and looked practically new.
That’s cool that something like that was still in service in the 80’s, there was a small funeral home up Ft. Lauderdale that still used a huge 75-76 Cadillac hearse well into the late 90’s.
It was probably an older unit that of course they wouldn’t use for funeral service for paying customers. Collecting cadavers and indigent burials are less-glamorous duty and an older, less-dressy wagon would be fine for it.
Leave the new hearse in the garage. Why ruin the wash job?
There is a parlor up in Daytona that has a 39 Pontiac hearse/ambulance combo that they actually take to shows, don’t know if its still ever used for its “intended purpose”.
Yeah – hanging onto an older hearse might make the most sense, unless there’s a ready buyer. They’re expensive new; and they’re nearly useless when in that gray area between fashionably-new and classic-old. Demand for aging hearses isn’t all that great…a few goth kids event-stagers might want one; not many other customers.
So…find a place to keep it and some way to use it or write off its cost…and then one day it’s as kewel as a 1959 Cadillac hearse is today.
Same goes for Limos. Just what would one do with a ten year to fifteen old Box Panther limo circa 2001-ish?
There is a ready market for Professional Cars among collectors. You might be surprised.
I take one of my cars to shows on a regular basis. I have driven a Hearse in more states than most people have driven a “normal” car…
I thoroughly enjoyed this thread.
Anyone remember Mother, Jugs & Speed?
The ’94 Federal Lincoln Hearse, ’72 Superior Pontiac Hearse, ’70 Superior Pontiac Ambulance, and ’66 Superior Cadillac pictured above are all my cars. Pontiac did not supply a true Commercial Chassis to Superior for conversion. They used a standard vehicle and modified it to suit their needs. I have numerous other Professional Cars.