The Rise and Fall of Limos
Narrator: It used to be that you saw a limousine and wondered who was inside, maybe a celebrity or a CEO.
Limos used to be cool and chic. Now they’re kind of gaudy and icky. They’re dying out even if the industry itself isn’t. Business Insider’s Emily Stewart tells us how limos went from decades of prestige to a fast fall out of fashion.
Emily Stewart: Limos, for a long time, kind of felt like the height of fancy, like a thing a corporate executive would take around.
Narrator: The first limos were made in the early 1900s, and they weren’t even cars; they were horse-drawn carriages that just had more space. Then in the Roaring Twenties, manufacturers developed the limo into an elongated automobile, and they just kept getting longer. Today, some stretch limos are over 60 feet and easily fit 15 passengers, and they have luxury touches like a full-bar, sofas, and in rare cases, a pool.
As more limos were produced, more folks began renting them out, not just the uber wealthy, but then something changed.
Emily Stewart: It’s important to talk about the 2008 financial crisis and the recession. It was a really bad look in 2008 for a CEO to be popping out of a limo.
Narrator: So they started opting for more subtle ways of transportation. After the CEOs, others followed, celebrities, brides and grooms, prom-goers, and funeral attendees.
Emily Stewart: I mean, you think about the last few years, kind of quiet luxury has been a trend, right? Where people want to have some affluent stuff, they want to have nice things, they want to do nice things, but they don’t want to look like it.
Narrator: But it’s not just a matter of social status. Booking a limo is not exactly easy or cheap.
Emily Stewart: Nowadays with Uber and Lyft, right, you can kind of ride in a nice-ish car, depending, without really having to call ahead, without having to plan ahead. I think that’s something that does freak the industry out. One of the business owners I talked to referred to Uber and Lyft and rideshares as glorified hitchhiking.
Narrator: And there have been safety issues, too. In 2013, a limo fire in California killed five members of a bachelorette party, and in 2018, a stretch limo crash in New York killed 20 people.
Emily Stewart: If you think about how they’re made, they’re literally a car like a Cadillac or a Hummer, and they’re cut in half and then kind of welded back together. And one guy described it to me as like arts and crafts. I don’t really want to be in a car that feels like arts and crafts.
Narrator: Few stretch limos are even being made anymore. And there are many used ones just gathering dust.
Emily Stewart: You can find a lot of limos online, on Craigslist, on Facebook Marketplace.
Narrator: So limos aren’t dead, but the industry has changed significantly in the past decade or two. A transportation company that once had several limos in its 50-vehicle fleet might now only have a couple or none at all. Many companies are even dropping the word limo from their names.
Emily Stewart: The modern-day limo is hiding in plain sight. It’s not the stretch limo that you think of. Most of the time, most of their fleets at this point are just other vehicles.
Narrator: Like SUVs that offer more space or a party bus.
Emily Stewart: So, coming into this, I was kind of like, huh, weird that limos are gone. And by the end, I was kind of like, good. Good that limos are gone. We don’t want them anymore. This to me felt like a little bit of a case where the marketplace got rid of something that we don’t really want around anymore. And again, I don’t want to say that every limo is a death trap or really fearmonger people, but they’re not that comfortable; they’re not that safe. And when you have better options, why not go with those?
