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
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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.
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