The stretch limo is dead

It used to be that you saw a stretch limousine and excitedly wondered who was inside — maybe a corporate executive or a celebrity or some other classy, mysterious type. Now, you see a limo, and you know it's not anyone fancy. Come to think of it … when was the last time you saw a limo at all?

Culturally, limousines have gone from "oooh" to "ick," and they're dying out accordingly.

They've fallen out of favor. Maybe the occasional bachelorette party or a handful of promgoers opt for them, but their options are limited because limo companies have shrunk their fleets of actual stretch limos. For-hire transportation businesses would rather sell them on an SUV or a party bus, where passengers don't have to awkwardly crawl around in their formalwear.

"None of us really own limos anymore. We're in the black-car business. We're in the van business. We're in the bus business. We're in the motor-coach business. We could be in the trolley business," said Joe Reinhardt, the owner and CEO of Carolina Limousine & Coach, which operates out of Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. He's expanding his business' offering to buses and motor coaches and changing its name to CLC Worldwide to get the "limousine" out of it. It still lets him tell the origin story, while avoiding sounding like a "gaudy limousine company."

The limo industry isn't dead; it's just leaving the classic black stretch version of itself behind.

"It's really chauffeured transportation these days," said Brett Barenholtz, the president of the industry trade group National Limousine Association who also runs multiple transportation companies out of Maine and Boston. "The vehicles can change. We're just selling a premium service, and people want a premium service."

In the popular imagination, the limo invokes a certain image — Michael Douglas in "Wall Street," Richard Gere in "Pretty Woman," or throngs of teens piling into one of them before a school dance. None of that is, you know, up to date or modern. The heyday of the limo is firmly in the past.

A constellation of factors contributed to the limo's demise. Consumers have moved on — to a lot of people, a 30-foot-long car seems gauche and tacky, not cool and classic. The industry has moved on, too. A Mercedes-Benz Sprinter (basically a nice, roomy van), an SUV, or a black sedan is much more versatile and, in turn, easier to make money off than an attention-grabbing car you roll out only for special events.

"Nobody rides in a limo anymore," Scott Michael, the CEO of the United Motorcoach Association, said. "They're riding in black cars, town cars. They're still called limo companies, but they don't use limos for the most part."

On the passenger end of things, the 2008 financial crisis was an important factor in the limo's decline, said Robert Alexander, the CEO of RMA Worldwide, a chauffeured-transportation-service company based in Washington, DC. In an environment where the American public was hurting financially and very angry with a lot of CEOs, it wasn't cute to be spotted hopping into an expensive limousine. It's better for high-paid business leaders to travel in a more muted fashion — even if they're still making tons more money than their workers.

"People didn't want to show their wealth," Alexander said. "That was kind of the beginning of the end."

As went CEOs, so went everyone else, eventually — celebrities, brides and grooms, promgoers, funeral attendees. If Gen Z is allowed to take private transportation to a dance these days (which many aren't), they're likelier to opt for a party bus or some other nonlimo option, though a limo may still be on the menu, especially in smaller markets. The rise of "quiet luxury" came to for-hire transportation as people toned down the visibility of their rides.

"The old joke was the only time people were using limos is when you're wed and when you're dead, as in a funeral and then a wedding, after corporations went away," Alexander said. "Prom season used to be a big part of a couple months of revenue, not anymore. Even funerals have changed."

Some horrific, high-profile accidents also spooked some would-be limo bookers. In 2013, a limo fire in California killed five members of a bachelorette party. In 2018, a limo crash in New York killed 20 people.

Prom and wedding seasons still exist, and some parties opt for traditional limos, but not to the same extent they used to. Barenholtz said more weddings use regular buses, the focus being just getting people from the ceremony to the reception. He also noted that some school districts no longer allow students to get to school events in limos or other private transportation. The taxi- and limousine-service industry is expected to bring in about $42.8 billion in revenue in 2024, according to IBISWorld. That number has been on the decline over the past few years because of the pandemic, and it's still recovering as business travel returns.

Many in the industry have been fine to leave the traditional limousine behind. A decade or two ago, a transportation company with 50 vehicles in its fleet would have multiple limos. Now, they may have a couple, because the vehicle is probably already paid off, doesn't have a lot of mileage on it, and sometimes still gets booked. Trade shows and expos for limousines and luxury transportation no longer have many, if any, actual classic stretch limos on their floors.

New stretch limos are also hard to manufacture: Most are created by literally cutting a car in half, which is then extended with steel and fiberglass and tossed all together. It's not exactly the safest approach — the structural integrity in the Franken-vehicles can be suspect. (It's also not the most comfortable for passengers — pumping air conditioning into the altered cars isn't easy and can translate to a sweaty experience.) Given these difficulties, fewer stretch limos are being manufactured. The last Hummer limo, for example, was made in 2010. Cadillac and Lincoln have suspended their safety testing on vehicles altered to be limos.

"It was almost arts and crafts the way that the vehicles were put together," Reinhardt said. "They weren't safe. They were a rough ride. They were tough to maintain."

On the internet, in places like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, you can find plenty of used limos for sale. In the New York area, for example, the prices run the gamut — generally, they're priced between $5,000 and $20,000, but some are in the $40,000 to $50,000 range. Others are supercheap, and one was even advertised for free.

Businesses in the sector have had to do some work to get customers on board with the transition from limo to party bus. As Chris Weiss, the president and publisher of Chauffeur Driven, a trade magazine focused on luxury ground transportation, put it, a "better mousetrap" was built with the Mercedes Sprinter, but that hasn't always been intuitive for consumers. As much as a limo doesn't scream "class" anymore, a van doesn't really, either.

"You get in the vehicle, and you don't have to crouch down; you're not crawling around. It's just more comfortable," Weiss said. "Until the consumer really understood, it was up to these companies to kind of say, 'Hey, well, we don't have limos. We have Sprinters.' And then once they got in them, they were like, 'Oh, yeah, this is much better.'"

As consumers get wise to the more practical — and often more luxurious — options, businesses in the sector are rebranding themselves away from the limo image. So is the entire industry, to some extent.

"Everyone was ABC Limo, XYZ Limo forever, and then they started using the word 'transportation,' and then they started using the word 'worldwide' or 'global,' just kind of pulling the word 'limo' out of their name," Weiss said. "Even a lot of the associations that represent this space have morphed or are planning on morphing their name and getting the word 'limo' out of it." Even the National Limousine Association has considered a rebrand, though it notes people know it more as the NLA anyway.

"It's not a dead business. It's there," Barenholtz said. "Chauffeured transportation has evolved into shuttles and just high-end service."

Reinhardt's Carolina Limousine & Coach is moving more into motor coaches (think, like, a fancy-ish big bus). He's not so worried about the threat of ride-hailing companies, such as Uber and Lyft, to his more traditional business. He described them as "glorified hitchhiking," though he acknowledged they had changed client expectations in terms of things like wait times. Barenholtz conceded that sometimes the ride-hailing outfits could compete, but he compared them to a "box of chocolates," where you never know what you're going to get. Alexander's RMA has a large fleet of vehicles, from sedans to luxury vans to motor coaches. He said they keep a stretch limo around for nostalgia's sake more than anything.

Nostalgia, indeed, is a hell of a drug. Usually, when something from the past is dying out, we have a tendency to feel a little bad about it. It's sad to see trends come and go, especially in an era when everything moves so quickly. I remember my one stretch-limo experience fondly, from my high-school prom.

But the more I reported on this story, the more surprised I was at my sentiment about the limo's downfall, which amounted to … good riddance. Crouching down and scooching around an actual limo is a little miserable. There are plenty of better alternatives out there that the very same companies provide. The safety stuff is scary.

"You can reinforce it as best you can," Weiss said, "but they're just not as safe."

When the marketplace gets rid of something — because businesses stop selling it, because consumers no longer want it, because it just starts to look bad to use it — sometimes it has a point. A CEO gallivanting around in his or her fancy stretch limousine is gross. Taking a more inconspicuous SUV doesn't solve the problem of income inequality, but at least it means the winners in the scenario are less flashy about it. Regular people can also book an SUV to take them to the airport, which will guarantee they get there on time but also have more space for luggage.

"Even your rock stars, if you will, are going to ride in an SUV. It's just what they want. They're easier to get in and out of," Alexander said. "They're safe. They can be fairly nondescript."

Consumers who insist on renting a limo can find one, of course, and they can buy one, too. But if you'd rather take a party bus or an SUV, that's understandable — so would most everybody else.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.