It used to be that for quite a few folks, the only time they would ride in a Cadillac was in an ambulance and for their funeral. I think I’d feel a bit cheated if this showed to take me to the hospital. At least Rambler wasn’t selling a Hearsler.
The ’62 version is even classier.
Where’s the Studelance?
Here’s the Studelance. The “Parkview Ambulet”.
At least the guy in the photo with the ’62 is wearing a bowtie! A Chevy guy at the ad agency must have sneaked that in. The ’62 has whitewalls too!
Look at the handy dandy convenient luggage rack on top! Useful for hanging IV drips and blood transfusions on the way! These must have sold themselves!
Seems like AMC could have made use of their split front seat option, to open a longer space for the stretcher. Or turned the right front seat backwards for the attendant.
Let’s just be glad they never tried to make a Grembulance. “Okay, sir; we can only fit 1/3rd of you inside the vehicle. Would you like it to be the top or bottom third? There’ll be plenty of fresh air for the other part, at least.”
They really should have made a Hearsler. When Chrysler bought AMC they wouldn’t have even needed to change the name.
Thanks for this introduction to the surreal side of vintage health care delivery!
I can almost hear the Blues Brothers singing about an affair to remember in the back of a Rambulance. 🙂
oh… and I wonder if FCA, I mean, Stellantis, has been thinking about bringing back the RAMbulance…?
Good one!
These are tiny little cars to be carrying stretchers….
The Stude still has the split middle seats upright or so it appears…..
-Nate
Yikes! That had to be cramped and barely adequate for the purpose. At least with Cadillac they didn’t have a standard station wagon they could just plop a siren on and call it good. You got a custom car, most importantly with a raised roof, and of course much wider.
Keep in mind they weren’t practicing much of any medicine in those ambulances, which were essentially just delivery wagons to get patients to hospital. Not like today’s ambulances, which are mobile field hospitals staffed by emergency medical technicians a whole lot more trained, competent, and able than ambulance drivers of the 1960s.
There was a reason why they were called “meat wagons’.
The phrase “For many types of emergency uses” indicates that Rambler marketed these as a combination patrol vehicle and ambulance — so not quite a dedicated ambulance.
According to ads, the Rambulance had a swinging rear door for loading/unloading, and a split bench seat — that way it could carry either one stretcher with an attendant sitting besides the stretcher, or two stretchers
I wish that they had sold this as a hearse. I can see the ad now: “The neighbors will never know that you left an estate of $20,000.000.00 when they cart you to the graveyard in a Rambler.”
The ’61 Classic was available with an optional 250 ci V8. For ’62, the V8 option in the Classic was dropped.
If you wanted a V8 in ’62, you had to order the Ambassador which had the larger 327 ci V8.
Being locally built, AMCs were popular state & local government buys in Wisconsin. We saw plenty of Ambassador cop cars and fire chief station wagons. I just can’t recall ever seeing an Ambassador Rambulance model.
If it ever was available, the larger engine should have had pretty good performance as the ’62 Ambassador was downsized to Classic dimensions.
Adding emergency equipment weight, I don’t think a Classic with a 6 would have made a very good performing Rambulance.
The Rambulance almost sounds dystopian; like something out of Judge Dredd. “Jaywalking? Sentence: Rambulance. Then Iso-Cubes once you recover.”
“ Wow, he’s a tall one. Get out the bungee cords, this is going to be a tailgate down delivery.” “What?” “Just wrap his eyes, he’ll never know.”
LOL, very good!
There was a time when America had thousands of large factories with many different pieces of dangerous equipment, and much of this machinery didn’t have much in the way of safety equipment.
Labor unions at these factories often required the factory operators to have an on-site ambulance, because local ambulance services often took too long to arrive at the factory, and then find the injured man. In many cases, there was no local ambulance service within range of the factory.
The factory, in trying to keep costs down, basically had 3 options: A new expensive GM car with custom coachwork, a used version, or something like the Rambulance or Studebaker Ambulette.
Ads like these could be found in many magazines and publications aimed at the manufacturing sectors. And let’s remember there were far more Rambler dealerships than Cadillac dealers. Chances were that a factory was in a smaller city or town, and the Rambler dealer was easier to use for quick service and repairs of their ambulance, as it was probably the only one in the facility.
For example; Back about 100 years ago, in Frederick County, Maryland, was founded a large paper factory making mostly 80# poster board. The factory was closed about 1965, but nothing was disposed of. Inside a special building was a 1920s American LaFrance fire engine pumper, and a 1962 Ford Station wagon fitted out as an ambulance. It was purchased from the local Ford dealer [now long gone]. I found the place in the 1980s, and by then the entire facility was left to rot. Scrappers and vandals had attacked the fire engine and ambulance, and not long after, the roof caved in on the vehicles.
Around 2003 to 2005, my father-in-law and I went to a closed factory north of where he lived. Two vehicles were being auctioned.
The first was a 1950s Ford fire truck. It had something like 2,000 miles on it.
The other was a 1966 Ford Country Sedan turned ambulance. It was really high mileage at like 5,200.
Both started and ran great. My father-in-law bid on both but was not successful in obtaining either.
I worked in a large saw mill years ago that kept a car on site for such emergencies. The nearest hospital was far enough away that you’d bleed out before they got you there, but they gave it their best effort.
In the late ’70’s I worked at a large aircraft plant that had its own on-site medical clinic and Cadillac ambulance.
It’s too bad Dodge did not respond with the AmbuLancer. 🙂
As I remember, the Studebaker ambulance was a huge worldwide seller.
AmbuLancer FTW! No such thing, but in Australia there were Valiant ambulances. Here’s an S-model (1962 qua 1962), repurposed as a plumber’s van. An image search turns up smaller, grainier, black-and-white images of more of these in ambulance livery.
I remember that style of ambulance body, but never saw one on a Valiant before.
Rambler/AMC offered a stretched (but only forward of the A pillar) version called the Ambi-Lance
These seemed to exist in a few forms round Australia. This one in the state of Queensland.
The ones based on the Lark were marketed as the Lambulance, largely to rural areas, and the Wagonaire-based ones for crash-prone city occupants as the Wambulance.
Unlike either overweight version, I’ll stop here.
Much later the illegitimate child of Studie and Rambler (AM General) made lots of Humbulances for the military.
Maybe these sold in areas of the United States where a large percentage of the population (i.e. religious beliefs, etc.) frown on extravagance in any form. That’s all I could come up with.
according to what I’ve seen only around a 100 of the 62s came from Kenosha.
In March 1977, Lancia briefly entered the Italian market with their new Gamma, but the Gambulance nomenclature proved all too prophetic.
The ’61 was our family car back in the day…my Dad traded his ’56 Plymouth Plaza with manual transmission and flathead 6 in Compton, Ca, for one of these. One reason was my Mother, who really is only comfortable with an Automatic (she learned on a semi-automatic Chrysler but never has been comfortable with anything but an automatic, and my Dad didn’t know her yet when he bought the ’56 new right after he graduated from college)…she only stopped driving last year. The other reason…my sister and I and all of our baby paraphernalia which fit in a wagon better…it was the start of a string of family wagons which only ended when his ’78 Caprice Classic wagon got totalled in 1984.
We drove back from California to Pennsylvania in 1961 in it; my Dad had driven out to California from back east in 1959 whereas my Mother, Sister and I flew out in a prop plane, but by ’61 we were toddlers and old enough to deal with the long trip. Not sure why, but my Dad only had it through 1963 when he bought yet another Rambler Wagon, maybe something happened to it during the trip back east, but I can no longer ask my Dad…one of the questions I never got around to asking him, he passed away 6 years ago today, and my Mother wouldn’t remember (or maybe never knew) why.
I think the Rambler had a crank up rear window; at some point we got an electric one but that might not have been until Dad bought the ’65 Olds F85 wagon.
When I saw my first station wagon ambulance at a car show I couldn’t believe how rudimentary and cramped it was. Many a sore back I thought for those poor EMT’s attending patients. The neighbor across the street was an old time EMT that retired before the modern F450/550 custom purpose built trucks came into use. Don’t know why I never asked him about his back. Mostly because he was a motormouth that always cut me off in conversation. He was a driver and shared many stories on how he and his fellow drivers kept unofficial time records for the long hauls and bragged about them among themselves.