America is the spiritual home of the SUV. The truck is king. But the car they usurped – the traditional station wagon – still has a loyal and passionate following... if you know where to look
WORDS OLLIE KEW PHOTOGRAPHY WEBB BLAND
IN THE 1910s, THE WAS A PLUCKY NEWCOMER ‘AUTOMOBILE’ to the transport scene. If you wanted to go anywhere reasonably far away within Britain or the US, you used a train. To get the bourgeoisie and their luggage from their country retreat to the railway station, companies adapted a rudimentary car chassis with boxier bodies bolted on top.
Logically, the British called these workhorses ‘estate cars’. The Americans termed theirs ‘depot hacks’, but that morphed into ‘station wagons’. And that is how – not for the last time – two nations divided by a common language came up with completely different names for the same thing. You say tom-A-to, we say estate. And they’re trousers, not pants.
For most of the following century, the estate car did its duty. Part tool, part family pet, it obediently carried you, your beloved, your offspring and anything they required from A to B and back. Boots grew and shrunk. Doors and seats were added, or taken away. But the versatile brilliance of the wagon – the Swiss army knife of motoring – never diminished. Not here, anyway.
In America, where the SUV gold rush began, the wagon has been under siege since the early Nineties. Once, every single manufacturer from AMC to Oldsmobile, Plymouth and Pontiac made a wagon. Nowadays, none of those brands even exist. And do you know how many estate models are offered by the combined might of Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, Dodge and Lincoln today, in 2023? None. Not a single one. The station wagon has hit the buffers.
If you’re a long-roof enthusiast in the USA, you’re downright eccentric. Even the soccer mom jibes have ceased, moving on to deride Volvo XC90s and the rejuvenated Chrysler minivan. To thirst for the wagons that we take for granted in Europe, you’re just a weirdo.
I like oddball car subcultures, where diehards swim against the tide of indifference. And hearing that Audi intended to launch a faster evolution of the RS6 Avant in San Francisco, I hatched a plan to welcome a handful of the West Coast’s most obsessive wagonistas to a safe space. This turned out to be a backstreet parking lot just north of Oakland, widely known to locals as the car break-in capital of America. But not to me. Whoops.
This idea that had been brewing since the current RS6 was revealed in the autumn of 2019. Audi binned the form book and announ
