The long demise of the stretch limousine

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/business/limo-service-decline.html

by lxm • 3 years ago

68 82 3 years ago

nytimes.com

neonate• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/AQvCW

http://web.archive.org/web/20230429165712/https://www.nytime...

finnh• 3 years ago

Crawling around inside a long, low-ceiling car. Not an experience i equate with luxury.

smitty1110• 3 years ago

That’s what a stretch Hummer is for! All the luxury, twice the headroom.

zamnos5• 3 years ago

Deluxe decked out Mercedes sprinter van. All of the headroom!

bediger4000• 3 years ago

If you're not going to senior prom, you're not the stretch limo demographic. Welcome to adulthood!

cratermoon• 3 years ago

I remember back in the early 2000s I worked for a company that "rewarded" developers with a ride around the city in a stretch limo to end up at a company party at a bowling alley. Seriously, this was the company's high school mindset. I was glad to get out of there after a short time.

mjevans• 3 years ago

At least American culture, driving used to directly equate to FREEDOM. However as more people tried to grasp that freedom, as the suburbs expanded and the roads bogged down, driving is increasingly associated with gridlock and traffic rule crackdowns.

Gone are the days of fantasizing about driving a supercomputer AI car into a mobile truck base.

Gone are the days of driving to some club or restaurant and the vehicle as a proxy of status.

In today's world luxury comes to the rich. Personal chefs, international air freight anything, parties at their resort sized mansion mini-city. Short of a state level police motorcade for the politically connected, why go to some remote event at all?

No, the limousine is seen as some high school prom or other pedestrian event and a thing for shows on TV.

foobarian• 3 years ago

Yes, and gone are the days of unincorporated land free for the taking from indigenous peoples, where one wouldn't have any laws or governments to worry about /s

bluGill2• 3 years ago

The stretch limo always included a driver so you could be seen getting of the backseat in front of someplace nice and not have to figure out how to park it.

flybrand• 3 years ago

Is the drought blow back from the previous boom? There’s no mystique once you’ve done that awkward climb over your fellow passengers.

hot_gril5• 3 years ago

The idea is the one or two important people sit in the very back, and the less important people (if any) do the scooting/crawling.

jccalhoun• 3 years ago

Totally agree. I feel the same about private jets. Most of them are too small for a tall person like myself to stand up in.

Multicomp• 3 years ago

These will be back at some point... And there will be flabbergasted news articles talking about how Gen z or Gen AA want to see them for their novelty and there will be gray beard Gen x and Gen y talking about how back in their day everyone used to stretch limos.

But it will be a stretch limo cyber truck or a stretch limo SUV, there aren't very many land yacht style sedans left over yet, except for say the Lincoln Continental.

doubled112• 3 years ago

I wonder how much more difficult it is to extend a unibody chassis vs the old body on frame.

CydeWeys• 3 years ago

I mean, they won't be back if they can't easily be constructed by modifying existing production vehicles. The market for them is never again going to get big enough to support from-scratch production as a new model line.

zamnos5• 3 years ago

Never mind the novelty of it, it's a bigger space inside, so instead of being limited to 4 or 6 of your friends (plus you as the driver), you can have 8+ people in a limo, plus (by the time gen AA or AB is ready for it) a robot for driver. The glory days will be back as soon as self-driving cars come around and people come to appreciate all the extra interior space, and are able to afford such a luxury.

this_steve_j• 3 years ago

I could see the stretch limo coming back into vogue as influencers on the whatever platform embrace 1990s prom culture as the new currency.

It used to be the vehicle that unequivocally would declare your arrival, but I think that spot unfortunately has been claimed by the private jet.

User233• 3 years ago

The stretch jet does have some interesting aerodynamics.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

Is that a 737 Max reference?

lotsofpulp3• 3 years ago

I would not step foot nor let my kids step foot in a limo type car ever since I found out they are completely unregulated (in the US).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoharie_limousine_crash

toast0• 3 years ago

That article lists lots of regulations that weren't followed; that not all operators follow the regulations, and that regulations aren't always enforced doesn't indicate the category is completely unregulated.

Avshalom• 3 years ago

No hits for "ladder" or "frame" but an important though less direct cause is simply the difficulty of stretching modern cars.

hot_gril5• 3 years ago

Modern stretch limos seem to all be SUVs. I guess cause they're body-on-frame. The old ones were body-on-frame sedans like the LTC, which are no longer made.

ComputerGuru2• 3 years ago

Unibody has been taking over the SUV world too, of late.

sammalloy• 3 years ago

During the height of the Great Recession, you could get your hands on used stretch limousines for fairly cheap. There was even a time when homeless people were buying them to live in, and it wasn’t uncommon to see them parked on the side of the road.

zoklet-enjoyer• 3 years ago

I see one in a trailer park I drive by sometimes

User233• 3 years ago

I saw one that the new owner lifted.

hot_gril5• 3 years ago

And the non-stretch limos (Lincoln Town Car etc) went from sorta expensive to cheapo.

jeffbee• 3 years ago

Shoot, that was true long before any given recession. A stretch limo is a rapidly depleted asset that nobody wants after its a few years old. When I lived in Oklahoma City many years ago, I bought a limo off Doc Severinsen, who owned a nightclub there. It was built from a 1983 Grand Marquis, basically an extra-long police car. Didn't cost me a dollar, I just had to get it off their lot (it didn't run, until I fixed it).

debian3• 3 years ago

How was the fuel economy? What happened to it?

kazinator• 3 years ago

“When a stretch pulls over, everybody turns around to see who’s getting in or getting out,” Mr. Rose said. These days his clients prefer the discretion of a black sedan or S.U.V.

Ah, because these days, everybody turns around to see who's getting in and out, and a good portion of those everybodys can be expected to take videos and pics, immediately posting them online.

rootusrootus• 3 years ago

The most carsick I can ever recall being was while riding in a stretch limo. Never again, good riddance.

xeromal4• 3 years ago

I never really considered it until this article, but I think socially stretch limos are kind of a "poor people thing" now. The article kind of mentions it but once it became to accessible, it lost its allure. I think a bentley is a better indicator of wealth now if we're talking about cars.

GreedClarifies• 3 years ago

"indicator of wealth"

Maybe. I think it is an indicator of multiple things, one being wealth.

Another thing that comes to mind is of someone that needs to signal, badly, that they have wealth. Some people may be interested in those signals, but I hope/guess not too many.

PS: I'm all for people having wealth and spending it on things that make their lives better, but conspicuous consumption/Veblen goods/positional goods seem like some kind of ancient software in humans that hopefully will pass in time.

xeromal4• 3 years ago

I'm with you on your PS but I don't think it will pass. I feel like humans are inherently comparative beings. We weigh and measure all humans we come in contact with and most are weighed by looks for a first impression. Some people are always going to measure by perceived wealth.

lotsofpulp3• 3 years ago

There is conspicuous consumption, but it is not in the form of cars.

Who cares if a car is a limo or a Bentley? The comfort and quality and safety is relatively all the same, whether it is a $50k car or a $500k car. You are going to sit in it looking at your phone all the same.

But the higher bar to achieve is real estate, time, and professional network. Where you live, where and how you spend your time, and who you work with are all easy ways to determine socioeconomic status, so there is no reason to waste money on cars/jewelry/etc if you get no extra utility from them.

nimbius• 3 years ago

wealth and class are two separate things. You can very much be lower class wealthy (Donald Trump) and upper class poor (every post-doctoral barista.) the need to signal wealth, affluence, and success however is very much a middle class eccentricity as cited by Paul Fussel.

Middle class people put stickers on their car to indicate their college, drive luxury vehicles that stretch them to the brink of their finances and insist on an almost suffocating degree of verbiage in their conversations. best summed up as $15 word people with $5 ideas they picked up on cable TV. They read, but they cant read positionally to determine a counterargument to a narrative theme. They rent limousines, they buy luxury goods and they conspicuously follow trends in fashion and thought (magnetic bumper stickers for the troops or plastic fitness bracelets.) the baby-on-board sticker is in prominent display because you need to know their importance.

the upper class do not. Instead the only conscious acquisitions they make align to their personal preferences, which are largely sacrosanct. Marketing may inform their choices, but appeals to gender and attempts to undermine their confidence will generally fail. They went to college, but its none of your concern. They dont get to the airport in a bentley or a rolls if they are wealthy, because they do not drive. They drive slowly because the well planned day revolves around them, not the other way round. They are quick to apologise, listen intently, and speak directly. what you see is largely what you get.

the lower class are largely the same as the upper class. they never went to college, but they dont care if you know. goods and services are purchased utilitarian or without consideration and the substance is largely overt or appeals to a simple motif (live/laugh/love, bless this mess, animatronic wall bass.) They know exactly what they like.

SamoyedFurFluff• 3 years ago

I would disagree that the upper class are not swayed by identity markers like gender. There is plenty of sway happening in the upper class, specifically on assessing peers and concerning class pooling (especially among the upper class nonwhite in a majority white country). There’s also plenty of appearances for gender markers— fatness is low class.

doubleg72• 3 years ago

You hit the nail on the head.

xeromal4• 3 years ago

I think I generally agree with your sentiment but how are mega yatchs explained? They're not a practical choice because there's more rooms and resources on it then is humanly possible to consume either with friends or by yourself. They are only available to the mega mega rich. What drives a mega wealthy person to choose a yacht

incone1232• 3 years ago

I don't think of every PhD barista as upper class at all. Holding a doctorate is at the upper end of academic attainment. Someone without even an undergraduate degree but who inherited wealth is not going to see that barista as their social peer.

kenjackson• 3 years ago

This seems very inconsistent with my experience. I tend to find most people are the same, it really just is a matter of how much money you have to get what you want and what impresses your peer group.

thechao• 3 years ago

Which set of studies did you use for this summary of the condition of 8 billion people? I know a broad swathe of people across the whole wealth spectrum, and none of them fit your thesis.

I guess some say "anecdata" others say "anecdata"?

whitemary2• 3 years ago

What do you think class is?

Class is determined by one's role in society.

Working people are working class, and Donald Trump is not one of them.

Owning people are "owning class" also called "bourgeoise" and Donald Trump is one of them.

"Lower class" and "upper class" are nonsense Americanisms.

corbulo• 3 years ago

"Trump is <thing I look down upon>" but you inadvertently put a guy who was born into wealth in the same economic category as people who were born poor. Under what semantic regime is this possible? Lol

jamal-kumar• 3 years ago

I've managed to convince limo drivers at the airport to match uber's rate plus 20$ a few times. Pretty fun but I think it's an indication of how they're probably not getting a lot of business

wolverine876• 3 years ago

Is there any way a stretch limo is more comfortable than an SUV or a minivan? I always suspected that the limo was an artifact of the days when everyone drove sedans.

Doesn't the President of the United States still ride in a stretch limousine? What about other heads of state?

antognini• 3 years ago

The presidential limo was designed to resemble a Cadillac Escalade:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_state_car_(United...

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Wow, that is sort of flabbergasting, including the history of the thing. To think that the car has been armored and protected like a tank for so long, yet all it took for JFK was an open convertible top.

listenallyall• 3 years ago

more comfortable than an SUV

A limousine's seats aren't all facing forward, making it easy to have a party or conversation among many people. The seats tend to be more like couches, which can accommodate some horizontal activities.

donohoe• 3 years ago

Stretched limos are tacky. That is the reason. As soon as they were rented by regular folk for special occasions, that became apparent. The facade was broken, and that was the end of that. It is that simple.

electroly• 3 years ago

Did they become tacky because regular folk started renting them?

jraines• 3 years ago

One time I had to take a ride in a stretch limo for a long ride to an airport because it was the only thing the car service had on short notice. I know they’re not meant for highway travel, but it was easily the worst ride I’ve ever experienced; it’s good that I don’t get seasick.

ileight2• 3 years ago

Have to add this channel’s video, entertaining and informative: https://youtu.be/pjL3kjFKjIY

The long demise of the stretch limousine

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