1994 Cadillac Fleetwood Superior Crown Sovereign Hearse

What isn't tedious is the 1994 Superior Crown Sovereign Cadillac hearse, a name that, like the car, is so immense it has stretch marks. This vehicle is as painstak­ingly custom-built as anything George Barris ever concocted and a lot classier. Sure, Cadillac made the hood, front fend­ers, drivetrain, and dashboard. But every other piece, from the A-pillars to the 31-inch stretch in the wheelbase to the immense side doors to the high-mounted brake light in the rearmost loading door, is custom-fabricated of metal, glass, and sheet-molding compound. All of this is performed in a 135,000-square-foot fac­tory in the dankest recesses of Lima, Ohio, by S&S Superior, a company that has been building hearses for 71 years.

The hearse tested here fetches not only the freshly deceased but also $69,858 per copy. From the moment it arrived in Ohio (having been shipped from Cadillac's plant in Arlington, Texas), it required seven weeks of labor by 196 persons before it achieved a condition sufficiently stately to conduct the big-buck business of funerals.

Oddly enough, from behind the hearse's wheel, your first impression is that the two-seat cockpit, like the cabin of a pickup truck, is cozy and compact (apart from offering such amazing headroom that a six-foot-five driver can still wear a fedora and not rub the headliner). The notion of coziness is dispelled the first time you round a curve and the hearse's inside rear wheel soundly slams a curb, then inflicts canyon-size ruts some two feet into your neighbor's freshly seeded fescue. The side-view mirrors reflect the immense, cue-stick-straight flanks but divulge no clue as to the location of the hearse's tail. There exists no three-quarter vision, either, because of the 18-inch dead panel (their term, not ours) behind the B-pillars. And the view through the backlight is largely obscured by dour velvet drapes.

The first time I backed the Crown Sovereign hearse into my garage, I crushed a 50-gallon Rubbermaid garbage tub, and the foremost four feet of this Cadillac was still protruding defiantly onto my driveway. Thus, the next time you observe a funeral director backing a hearse precisely into position for a drop-off (with God knows how many already-unhappy onlookers sulkily scrutinizing his every move), give him a small salute.

The upside to all of this difficulty in maneuvering is that those with whom you share the road afford a hearse special cour­tesy. They make holes in traffic, let you merge, allow you to exit driveways and side streets. They avert their eyes. You could drive a hearse naked and not be noticed, at least until burial proceedings were approximately 30 minutes underway.

S&S Superior's president is Don Cuz­zocrea, a softspoken 49-year-old man whose office is adorned with photos of Johnny Rutherford, George Bush, Johnny Unitas, and a helmet once worn by friend Al Unser Jr. As he walks through his plant, he greets all 196 employees by name.

Cuzzocrea wasn't sure he wanted C/D to test one of his hearses, given the vehi­cle's mission in life, never mind its sym­bolic mission in the afterlife. As it turned out, he needn't have worried.

Well, mostly. Parts of the test didn't surprise us. If you want to see something akin to Mike Tyson in a Kathy Smith aerobics video, for instance, you should observe a 5489-pound hearse, standing almost six feet tall, hurtling around a skid­pad. It doesn't so much circulate the skid­pad as fill it. Still, this hearse, pushing its front Michelin MX4s like a mammoth white bulldozer, achieved 0.70 g of grip, the same adhesion achieved by a standard-­length Fleetwood Brougham we tested last year. From 70 mph, this behemoth stops in 213 feet, which places it dead even with a Mazda MPV and a Dodge Caravan. And gliding majestically at 70 mph, the hearse generates the same hushed interior thrum as a Bentley Turbo R. This seems stately and appropriate.

But most surprising for a vehicle the size of Belgium is its accelerative prowe