Ghostbusters! Of course. Like yesterday’s Batmobile, today’s vehicle is a mere replica -of the Ghostbuster’s Ecto-1. This one was spied at a car show at the fairgrounds this past summer. The original Ecto-1 was based on a 1959 Cadillac ambulance/hearse built by a company called Miller-Meteor using a Cadillac Fleetwood Chassis. Regular readers of this blog may recall a feature from a few months ago involving a ’69 Fleetwood that had been converted into a Monster Cadillac via a home-made lift kit. So, now we’re up to two customized Cadillac Fleetwoods on this blog.
In the Ghostbusters movie, Ray buys the old Caddy ambulance/hearse for $4,800 and fixes it up, then outfits it with all the neat Ghostbuster equipment. We have Dan Aykroyd to thank for Ghostbusters in general, but also their sweet ride, the Ecto-1. The whole works was his idea. It is said that originally, Aykroyd intended for the Ecto-1 to be black and feature black-light accents. After it was determined that the black Ecto-1 would not show up well in the scenes in which it would be featured due to the night-time setting, a new design direction was set that included a primarily white color scheme. The Ecto-1 design and build was handled by a guy named Steven Dane, though, George Barris did make a replica after the fact, so again, he can say he built an Ecto-1, just not THE Ecto-1.
What are the specs on the 1959 Cadillac Miller Meteor hearse/ambulance? Under its hood sits a 390 cu in V8 with 325 HP and 430 lb-ft of torque. It has a top speed of 120 MPH (though I’d be surprised to see anybody actually testing that figure in such a rig), and weighs in at 6,000 lbs. -and that’s before you add stuff like proton packs and P.K.E. Meters.
An original 1959 Miller-Meteor Cadillac hearse came with an MSRP of around $10,500 on up to around $12,000. I found one for sale online that was in pristine condition, though not dressed up to look like the Ecto-1 for $125,000. You could buy a Batmobile (replica) for that kind of money! I’m sure prices on these hearses are a little higher than they would be if there had never been an Ecto-1, but I’m sure one could find an example that’s not so perfect for considerably less money. An online search found that the original Ecto-1 was offered for sale a few years back for the sum of $150,000, which doesn’t seem too bad considering that the guy who bought the original Batmobile paid $4.6 million for it. To bring it back again to George Barris from yesterday’s post, a replica of the Ecto-1 built by Barris sold to an auto museum in Florida in 2003 for $55,000.
But, what about the Ecto-1A? You know, the one from Ghostbusters 2? Yes, there was a 2nd movie car, and this one has a pretty interesting story. Just recently, a group of Ghostbusters fans discovered that the Ecto-1A was sitting abandoned and decaying in the back of some studio lot. They’re trying to get the studio to sell it to them for scrap value so they can restore it to its full glory. I say, if that studio doesn’t have any definite plans to fix it up themselves, they should sell it before it falls further into disrepair. So, there you have it. The Ecto-1 (replica); a hearse outfitted to handle haunting here for us all to oogle in plenty of time for Halloween!
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