Lifelong BMW fan gets fitting headstone at death

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Filed under: Etc., BMW



Are you a fanboy? It's fine, you can admit it. While the term often carries a negative connotation, being a fan of one particular brand isn't really anything to be ashamed of, and we all have our built-in biases and preferences anyway. So strong was Steve Marsh's love of BMW automobiles that his family decided it would only be proper to bury him under one when he died at the young age of 51 years old.

Marsh, somewhat ironically an engineer at Ford, apparently had a particular fondness for the BMW M3 convertible. Nothing wrong with that, we say. And so wife and two children contracted a mason to help them design a headstone in the shape of that very automobile. No big deal, right? Wrong. This particular headstone happens to be life-size and was chiseled out of a single block of granite.

So large is the M3-shaped stone that it cost a whopping £50,000 (over $75,000 U.S.) and had to be shipped in from China. Total weight comes in at one ton, which meant it took a crane and 20 operators to lower the stone in position in its final resting place at the Manor Park Cemetery in East London.

A tad offbeat, for sure... though not nearly as much as the Puerto Rican who was embalmed atop his Honda CBR motorcycle. As you might expect, the massive hewn BMW headstone is raised the ire of some locals. Local resident Rene Dryden commented:

You have to admit it's totally different to everything else around it. It's definitely not my taste. I think some people will say it's tacky and it could end up as a target to be vandalised. It could open the floodgates for anything to be built in a cemetery. When I walked past it the other day, though, I have to admit it did make me smile.

Honestly, it's not really our taste either. We'd have gone with a hardtop for all those rainy London days.

[Source: Daily Mail]Lifelong BMW fan gets fitting headstone at death originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 06 May 2010 13:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.



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