People in the United States Like Station Wagons Whether They Know it or Not

The roads these days are awash with more gray, silver, black and white crossovers and SUVs than I can count. Crossovers are outselling many regular cars these days because people like the extra space for all their stuff, and because they think they’re safer because they’re bigger.

As we know from standardized safety testing by the NHTSA and IIHS, bigger does not always mean safer.  

Take the Jeep Grand Cherokee from around 2012 for example. While the NHTSA and IIHS both give the Jeep good safety ratings, the Toyota Prius of the same year gets even better ratings in virtually every category. Besides the fact that driving a bigger vehicle isn’t always safer for you, driving a bigger vehicle certainly makes the roads less safe for everyone else.

A three-ton Chevrolet Suburban will probably do more damage barreling into the side of a Toyota Camry than another Toyota Camry would. Large SUVs, minivans and crossovers are also much harder for other drivers to see around than regular cars that are lower and less bulky. The extra height of those tall vehicles means many car drivers are blinded by the headlights pointed directly at their side mirrors while they wait for the light to turn green at an intersection.

A test designed to simulate avoiding obstacles that suddenly cross your path conducted by Swedish automotive magazine Teknikens Värld showed that the Jeep is likely to either roll over completely or blow out one of its front tires. Neither of these results is safe for anyone riding in or around the car who are presumably trying to avoid a crash.

Even the name of these vehicles is an oxymoron. “Sports Utility Vehicle.” There’s nothing sporty about these vehicles. Not even the drivers are sporty. The only sporting thing these vehicles will ever do is carry around a bunch of smelly high school sports bags, which could easily be carried around in a minivan or hearse, which also means those last two vehicles are sporty if we are willing to accept SUVs as sporty vehicles.

Why, oh why, do Americans think station wagons are unstylish? They are the true sports utility vehicle of all time. Station wagons can almost carry all of Angelina Jolie’s kids to the race track with a set of R-compound tires on the roof rack, spend an entire day making real sports cars cry for their mommy’s and then pick up the groceries on the way home.

Station wagons are the answers to all of your prayers; you just have to stop thinking they’re ugly and unstylish. What’s more stylish than setting a trend? Set the trend of driving a station wagon. You can’t get a cool rear-facing third-row set in a crossover, but you can in several Volvo and Audi station wagons that are still pretty modern. You also won’t look like an old person anymore because old people have just started driving crossovers, which are basically just tall, ugly station wagons anyways.

The first crossovers people could buy were basically just taller hatchback versions of car bodies. The Honda CR-V used almost the exact same running gear as some Honda cars. The whole reason they took off was that drivers liked the high seating position combined with the easy and smooth drivability of a passenger car. You basically get the worst of both worlds in the end.

Crossovers don’t drive as smoothly as passenger cars because they get tossed around in crosswinds and roll in corners because of their height. They get significantly worse gas mileage compared to their more conventional car counterparts because of their weight and worse aerodynamics. Crossovers are also not any safer in an accident and they certainly aren’t going to help you avoid an accident any better than a regular car would because crossovers almost always handle worse.  

Wagons are dying in the United States, and it is a sad sight. With all-wheel drive, most station wagons have just as much off-road or snow capability as any crossover on the market, meaning there is literally no point to buying a crossover unless you like owning a boring, ugly vehicle and making our roads that much duller.  

There are even fewer options for a long roof rocket on the new car market with the loss of the Buick Regal TourX and Volkswagen Golf Alltrack, but the non-gendered monarch of station wagons is hitting US shores in 2020.

Audi has decided to finally bring the RS6 Avant to the United States, making it the first RS wagon Audi has offered here. While it is going to be nearly unobtainable due to the low volume and high price-tag, those gnarly 21-inch wheels inside the menacing fender flares will hopefully light the wagon world in the US on fire when drivers unleash the twin-turbo V8 under the hood.

Even if you don’t want to buy one of these amazing cars for yourself, you could be a dear friend to yours truly and take the depreciation hit so I can buy it in a few years because I am a poor college student. I’ve been dreaming of parking one next to my own UrS6 Avant, but that one was a little more within my college student budget since it was a whopping $8.