In the United States, the primary vehicles used for hearses are large domestic luxury vehicles -- Cadillacs and Lincolns, for example. In Italy, then, it only makes sense that hearses would be made out of large Italian luxury vehicles. And so, it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that there are Maserati Quattroporte hearses.
And yet ... it does come as a surprise. I view the Maserati Quattroporte as a high-performance luxury sedan; a sporty 4-door that's often customized with aftermarket wheels or a loud exhaust. And yet here's a gigantic station-wagon-looking one meant to carry people along to their final resting place. It seems ... inappropriate. In a good way.
The company doing these conversions is called Intercar, and they're based in Modena, Italy -- the birthplace of Ferrari. Amazingly, the hearse conversion brings the Quattroporte to 263.8 inches in length, which is longer than most heavy-duty pickup trucks. Perhaps more importantly, the Quattroporte hearse offers more than 92 inches of length in the coffin area.
The best part of all this is that you, as the funeral director, get some engine choices. You can opt for a Quattroporte with a 4.2-liter V8 that makes 400 horsepower, which seems totally adequate for driving eleven miles per hour in a funeral procession. Or you can go hog-wild and upgrade to a 4.7-liter V8 with 430 horsepower. I'm sure those extra 30 horses make a lot of difference.
Inside the coffin area of the Quattroporte hearse, things seem quite nice, with many windows and lots of high-quality recessed lighting. Perhaps more interesting is the passenger cabin, which looks so untouched that it's likely you could ride around in this thing and have no idea you were in anything other than a standard Quattroporte -- that is, until you looked in back and, ya know, saw the coffin.
