Just to get one gag out of the way first: No, landaus have nothing to do with Los Angeles-born guitarist Michael Landau — if you’ve heard of him. But Landau’s last name does reveal the country of origin for landaus: Germany. In fact, Merriam-Webster tells us that a landau was a type of carriage developed in the region of Bavaria, Germany, and first showed up in 1743. Specifically, a landau was a horse-drawn vehicle where the driver sat outside in the front, passengers inside, and which had two opposing halves of a roof that folded individually and separately toward the front or back. Basically, we’re saying it’s a split-roofed convertible. But because those inside could sit on one of two rows of benches — one facing backward and one facing forward — there were two collapsible roof bits that tilted toward either seating area.
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These carriages were used for quite some time. CARE Funeral says that such carriages necessitated a hinge mechanism attached to the outside of the carriage. Some wealthy folks didn’t like the unattractive appearance of these mechanisms, and voila: The functional hinge became a functional-and-elegant landau bar, i.e., a bar on a landau. Sometime before World War II, the United States — late to the landau party — wanted to class up its hearses. Someone stuck a landau on a motorized hearse, and the traditional stands to this day.
