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"The more popular, dangerous girls will sometimes be kissed in the parked limousines of unsuspecting dowagers." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," Flappers and Philosophers, 1920
Limousines have always carried a dual sense of entitlement and impropriety, their tinted windows making people stop and wonder who's in the backseat and what exactly they're doing. Today, the limo industry serves 1.38 billion customers annually. "You may not have grown up in a mansion," says Robert J. Thompson, director of the Bleir Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, "but if you're just a little bit lucky, chances are you've ridden at least once in a limo by the time you turn twenty."
If he's correct, it's because of two major evolutions in the use and design of the limousine. The first evolution saw limos go from privately owned marks of wealth to "a rentable and portable luxury." The second is a dramatic change in limo design over the course of the twentieth century — today, any larger-than-average, chauffeur-driven vehicle is usually referred to as a limousine.
That wasn't always the case. In the early 1900s, a limousine was any car with a closed compartment, sheltering its passengers while its driver remained on the outside, exposed to the elements. In fact, the word "limousine" is an adaptation of Limosin, a stormy pastoral region of France where shepherds used to wear elaborate weather-protection garments.
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| 1911 Buick Model 41. The first limousines were defined as any vehicle with an enclosed passenger compartment. At a time when car ownership was a status symbol in and of itself, there was no need to "stretch" the limo. |
The design of the earliest enclosed automobiles was modeled after the sedan chairs used in pre-Revolutionary France. In another nod to old-world elegance, many of the words associated with driving (chassis, chauffeur, automobile) were consciously adapted from the French, explains David Blanke, author of Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of American Car Culture. Closed cars like England's Rolls Royce and Germany's Mercedes-Benz were imported to America at the then-astronomical price of $5,000. Add the fact that at the turn of the century, only 8,000 vehicles were registered in the entire United States, and you have the ultimate status symbol for the chauffeured elite.
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| Magazine ad for a 1927 Lincoln. By the '20s, with millions of cars taking to the roads, the wealthy demanded a longer chassis to differentiate themselves. |
But in 1908, Henry Ford's modestly priced Model T brought car ownership to the masses — by 1920, there were over nine million vehicles on the road. So fancier manufacturers like Pierce-Arrow, Cadillac and Duesenberg began looking for ways to make their cars stand apart.
What they came up with was the stretch limo, a design that created the enduring notion that long equals luxury. The new stretch limos, with their intimidating, boxy grills and curvilinear bodies, reflected the glamour of both the Hollywood star system and Chicago's gangster culture. "American designers weren't selling to European aristocracy, they were appealing to American wealth," says Blanke. "So they created designs that represented technology, sophistication, and modernity, sort of like how the iPhone differentiates itself from other mobile phones today."
Now, anyone rich enough to have a driver wanted some distance between themselves and that driver. And because the first stretch limos were used by big-band leaders like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman to transport their large orchestras from gig to gig, the design quickly acquired a hip veneer. Suddenly, every Roaring Twenties socialite wanted to be seen in a stretch.
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| 1940 Cadillac limousine, one of only twenty produced. New bawdier curves and aggressive accents made limos of the '30s and '40s the car of choice for both movie stars and gangsters. |
Furthermore, points out David Courtwright, professor of history at the University of North Florida, "The association of size with prestige antedates the limousine by many hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, for example, the size of the coach was a mark of social status. Private, elaborately furnished railroad cars in the nineteenth century were essentially limousines rolling on tracks."
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