Remember the seemingly generative AI-altered Cadillac someone tried selling on Bring A Trailer in January? That was deeply strange and unsettling, partly due to the deceptive role that generative AI may play in the car world, but also partly due to the failure of guardrails to prevent the listing from going up in the first place. I much prefer real cars that look like AI hallucinations to poorly edited photos of a car, which is why a hearse recently auctioned on Cars & Bids immediately caught my eye.
For the past century or so, if you died and weren’t cremated, liquified, or dumped in the sea, you’d probably end up in a special car. Sure, there were horse-drawn hearses before the rise of the motorcar, but there are some distinct benefits to the internal combustion age. It’s a lot harder to spook an engine than it is to spook a horse, which means the recently deceased are now less likely to tip over. Anyway, if a loved one was indeed loved, mourners probably want to see the deceased in something dignified and comfortable, which is where Cadillac comes in. If you’re only going to get one last ride, might as well do it in a luxury car.
In North America, the vast majority of hearses are still Cadillacs, but the times are a-changin’. That old Fleetwood may have been several tons of chrome and grace decades ago, but car design has moved on substantially in the past 30 years. That brings us to this incredibly weird 1996 Fleetwood hearse, which has undergone quite the remodeling.
According to the auction description, “This Fleetwood has been modified in the style of a 2017 Cadillac XTS,” although we don’t exactly know why. Sure, an XTS is a more modern car than a D-body, but its proportions are completely different. Nevertheless, someone seems to have spent huge amounts of time and money on making this thing look less ’90s, and the results are amusingly out-there.
It starts at the front, with an attempt to round out a boxy face. Not only has someone grafted the grille and front bumper elements of an XTS onto this Fleetwood, but the 2010s Caddy’s vertical headlights also make an appearance. That’s rather odd, because while the Fleetwood has a hood long and flat enough to land aircraft on, the XTS doesn’t. Perhaps that explains the slightly kludgy overbite from the leading edge of the hood, although that might be more of a conversion quality thing. Don’t look too closely at how the front bumper’s held on.
Around the side, the extent of the work really starts to take shape. There’s an entire body line here that wasn’t there originally, sweeping from the rear quarter panel to the front wheel arch, a full four panels per side. Is it metal? Is it Bondo? Is it fiberglass? Who knows? The important part is how it means pretty much every panel on this Fleetwood’s been touched. Also viewable in profile, wheels that appear to have been lifted from a third-generation CTS, but aren’t anywhere close to the right offset for the old-school Fleetwood. Hey, if the bolt pattern and center bore line up, right?
Alterations are equally extensive at the back, with everything massaged to fit the taillights from an XTS. They even got the little chevron in the rear bumper. Sadly, there aren’t any before photos of this hearse, but the result is something that looks off in a fascinating way. Like scaling a photo without locking the proportions.
Besides the radical exterior treatment, the rest of this Cadillac Fleetwood hearse is pure 1996. The pillow-soft seats, the wide and flat dashboard, the 5.7-liter small-block V8 with “port fuel injection” proudly molded into the intake plenum. Not groundbreaking, but reliable. This is a working vehicle, and sometimes simplicity is key in keeping these things on the road. Pretty much all of the 44,500 miles on this thing’s clock are last-ride adjacent, which means this thing has some stories.
Still, the fact that someone went to such lengths to make a ’90s icon look like a sibling to the Chevrolet Impala is mesmerizing. This hearse certainly isn’t everyone’s style, but the paint alone likely cost more than this thing’s $5,100 hammer price. I can’t be mad at someone paying project car money for it, because this Cadillac’s a story of execution. It might not have completely nailed it, but it’s finished, and the world’s a little bit richer for it.
Top graphic image: Cars & Bids
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