The plight of the station wagon in the United States is both well-known and very amusing. Whereas in Europe the station wagon remains popular in the face of the crossover (occasionally blurring the line between it and hatchbacks), the wildly successful crossover segment on the US only serves to highlight that the only way a wagon can succeed on USDM island is to be called literally anything else than Wagon…except that’s not really the case anymore.
For the longest time, I thought that the demise of the wagon was because of psychological trauma, decades of kids being strapped to the back of the family Pontiac Safari and being forced to spend a lot of their holidays just cutting across a continent to place where they didn’t knew anyone to spend a week or so making nice with them. And then they’d had to do the entire thing again on the way back. But the Minivan destroyed the Station Wagon market so long ago that that can’t realistically be the case anymore. If anything, today’s potential station wagon buyer must be traumatized by having to spend hours on the airport and deal with airport security. When their eyes close the phrase “Randomly Selected for Additional Screening” should appear alongside images of people wearing flannel pajamas where they really shouldn’t. A far cry from sticky vinyl seating and ennui-caused horror.
So my working theory is that, at best, what’s happened now is that those collective traumas have been passed down across the generations. Buyers these days dislike station wagons because there’s something somewhere in the collective consciousness that’s telling them that they should. They’re not entirely sure *why* this is, but it is. Leaving enthusiasts with a problem to which the only solution would be to buy wagons. Except they can’t because of some random insignificance that’s different for every one of them and that they would only “put up with” by buying used.
Still, some of the more well-heeled enthusiasts will actually buy new wagons. At least enough of them for a couple of German manufacturers to bring their most unhinged family haulers to these shores at vast expense. Mercedes will happily sell you their E63 AMG wagon. it’s 600 horsepower engine and drift mode allowing your kids to be carsick in a new and very amusing way. Not to be left behind Audi will sell you an RS6 offering about the same power from an engine with the same number of cylinders, turbos and displacement for about the same price. Then, of course, there’s the Panamera and Taycan Sport Turismo. However many people in the US want station wagons, they are apparently loaded and want them really loud, really fast, and spare some of the practicality if it means that it can worry almost any sports car at the lights. Maybe this is the way the wagon market heals. Just in time for skateboards to make it feasible to make any design you want and just plop it atop of several tons of batteries.
A week ago some overexcited people made it so that everyone thought that the Audi RS4 was going to make it stateside. This was quickly rebuked…maybe give it a decade or so, wait for people to get angry at the rich twit that left them and their Mustang on the dust with a car that was carrying a very large “Baby on board” sticker over quad exhausts.
