Ford Deluxe Flower Car 1940 images

Long before muscle cars ruled the streets, coachbuilders were taking mainstream Fords and turning them into something stranger — like this 1940 Ford Deluxe flower car, built to carry funeral flowers on a stretched chassis powered by Ford’s humble 239 cubic inch flathead V8. Independent shops such as Eureka Manufacturing built these conversions in tiny numbers, which makes a surviving example this complete a genuine rarity for collectors who look beyond the usual muscle car playbook.

1940 Ford Deluxe Flower Car 239 CID V8 3-Speed Manual

MCF thanks Gateway Classic Cars for the images displayed here.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Funeral coachbuilders in 1940 had a problem: hearses were somber, sedans were forgettable, and neither one gave grieving families a dignified way to carry flowers to the gravesite. The solution was the flower car — a stretched, open-backed conversion built in numbers so small that most people who love classic Detroit iron have never seen one in person, let alone this 1940 Ford Deluxe wearing its original 239 cubic inch flathead V8. What kind of coachbuilder takes a mainstream Ford sedan and turns it into rolling funeral-parade equipment? The story behind cars like this one is stranger, and rarer, than it looks.

A Coachbuilt Conversion, Not a Factory Option

Ford never sold flower cars off the showroom floor. Independent coachbuilders — outfits like Eureka Manufacturing Company of Illinois — took Deluxe-series Fords and stretched them into flower cars or dual-purpose hearses, often built in extremely small numbers, sometimes as one-offs commissioned by specific funeral homes that couldn’t afford a Cadillac- or Packard-based rig. A tonneau cover let the vehicle double as a modest hearse when a family’s budget or wishes didn’t call for a full load of flowers.

The Flathead V8 That Made It Move

Under that stretched body sits Ford’s humble 239 cubic inch flathead V8 paired with a 3-speed manual — the same mainstream powertrain buyers got in any Deluxe sedan that year, chosen for reliability during long, slow funeral processions rather than outright speed. It’s a reminder that not every piece of interesting Detroit history was built to go fast.

A Small, Devoted Corner of the Collector World

Professional cars like flower cars, hearses, and ambulances have their own small but devoted collector following, and surviving examples this complete are genuinely scarce — most were used hard in daily service and scrapped long before anyone thought to preserve them.

1940: The Year Ford Got Serious About Style

1940 marked a genuine styling leap for Ford’s Deluxe line, with sealed-beam headlights new across the industry that year and a wider, more integrated grille than the outgoing 1939 cars. Ford’s design team gave the Deluxe platform a lower, more horizontal look that this flower car conversion inherited wholesale before the coachbuilder went to work on the rear half. Underneath the ceremonial bodywork, this is still fundamentally a mainstream 1940 Ford chassis and drivetrain, which is exactly why coachbuilders liked working with it — reliable, widely serviced, and cheap enough that a funeral home didn’t need Cadillac money to field a dignified fleet vehicle.

Flathead V8: Ford’s Great Democratizer

The flathead V8 under this car’s hood traces back to 1932, when Ford became the first manufacturer to put V8 power within reach of ordinary buyers rather than reserving it for luxury makes. By 1940 the design had been refined for nearly a decade, and its low-end torque characteristics — adequate rather than explosive — suited exactly the kind of slow, deliberate procession driving a flower car was built for. It’s a different engineering story than the high-revving small-blocks that would define muscle cars two decades later, but the flathead’s role in putting V8 power into everyday American hands is arguably more historically significant.

Flower Car, Hearse, or Both?

Professional cars occupied several distinct roles in a funeral home’s fleet: full hearses carried the casket, flower cars carried floral arrangements in an open or tonneau-covered rear deck, and combination cars could flip between the two roles depending on the day’s need. A dedicated flower car like this one usually signaled a funeral home that could afford a specialized fleet rather than making one vehicle do everything — a small but telling detail about the business side of mid-century American funeral service.

Why So Few Survived the Decades

Professional cars lived hard, utilitarian lives — driven in all weather, exposed to the elements during outdoor services, and typically retired the moment a funeral home upgraded its fleet rather than kept as a sentimental keepsake. Most were scrapped, converted for other commercial use, or simply left to rot once they’d outlived their usefulness, which is why complete survivors from small-batch coachbuilders are scarce today regardless of the base chassis they were built on.

Restoring a Car Nobody Kept Records On

Restoring a coachbuilt flower car presents challenges a standard Deluxe sedan restoration never faces — there’s often no factory parts book to reference for the stretched rear bodywork, and small coachbuilders rarely left behind the kind of detailed production records that Ford itself kept. Owners typically end up hand-fabricating trim pieces or adapting parts from other professional-car restorations, making every completed flower car project something of a one-off engineering puzzle even when the donor chassis is common.

A Second Life in Parades and Private Collections

Surviving flower cars rarely return to funeral service today — instead they tend to end up in vintage parade fleets, film and television production use, or the collections of enthusiasts specifically drawn to professional vehicles rather than mainstream muscle. That niche appeal keeps demand modest but steady, and a well-preserved, running example like this one tends to hold real interest precisely because there’s so little competition from other buyers chasing the same car.

The Broader 1940 Ford Legacy

Even divorced from its funeral-industry role, a 1940 Ford Deluxe sits in a genuinely significant model year — the last full civilian model year before Ford’s production shifted toward the war effort, and one of the more visually distinctive prewar Fords thanks to that year’s styling refresh. Collectors of mainstream 1940 Fords and collectors of professional cars rarely overlap much, which makes a car like this one a rare crossover piece appealing to both audiences at once.

A Car Built to Be Seen, Not Raced

Unlike the muscle cars that get most of the attention on a site like this, a flower car was never built to impress at a stoplight — its entire purpose was dignified, unhurried presence, moving at walking pace or just above it during a procession. That’s a fundamentally different design brief than anything Detroit was building for speed, and it’s worth remembering that not every interesting piece of automotive history was built to go fast.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Republished by Blog Post Promoter