I did it
It depends upon the speaker in question - some car speakers are quite up to the task. I bought two JL Audio 12" subwoofers and custom built large boxes to give them a sealed Q of approximately 0.8. With single order crossovers, they work very nicely with my NHT monitors that sit atop (in the Aerial 10T style).
Maximum excursion of the woofer cone is crucial for the deeper notes, assuming the self-resonant frequency is low enough to begin with.
I'm an addict of sealed boxes, and I'm willing to sacrifice efficiency of ported boxes in exchange for lower bass extension (slower rolloff) and tighter response.
And Mark is right, if your receiver doesn't have a crossover you'll need to do something to keep the upper bass frequencies from bleeding through like the sound from a tunnel.