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 pre.