Next-Generation Wagons Not Your Father’s Vista Cruiser
The post-Thanksgiving traffic rolling along Park Avenue includes the usual mix of Yellow Cabs, limousines, increasingly ubiquitous sport-utility vehicles and--station wagons.
They are not ordinary station wagons, mind you. They’re not Ford Motor Co.’s Escort or Taurus models, or General Motors Corp.’s Saturns, whose diminishing sales numbers seem to herald the imminent end of the American station wagon as we knew it.
No. These are wagons for the rich--prestige wheels costing as much as $51,000 in the case of that 2000 Mercedes-Benz E320 all-wheel-drive model moving toward the MetLife building. There are also a variety of spiffy wagons from Volvo Cars, now owned by Ford. And there is a good sampling of hybrids--models such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Lexus RX 300 and Subaru’s Forester and Legacy Outback--which are station wagons masquerading as sport-utility vehicles.
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It is not so much that the station wagon has returned. There has been a wagon of some sort on sale in America since 1923, when the first production model, William Durant’s Star Station Wagon, was introduced in this country.
But station wagons have been reborn in perception. No longer are they viewed solely as suburban family haulers, or automotive wedding rings, as was the case with models such as the 1961 Chevrolet Impala Nomad and the 1966 Ford Ranch Wagon. (Though in typical Southern California fashion, local customizers realized the potential of “family” wagons long ago, as the earlier two-door Bel Air Nomad was much coveted by surfers and was often hot-rodded.)
Today’s models are seen as desirable alterna-mobiles--more hip than the soccer-mom minivans, more sensible than off-road sport-utility vehicles that seldom leave urban pavement, more practical and accommodating than sedans or two-seat sports coupes.
And though families still constitute the main buyers for wagons, the high-end models have a special appeal. They signal wealth, which is inherently seductive, and they radiate a sense of adventure and independence that has little to do with family life, auto analysts and salespeople say.
For example, look at Don Beyer Volvo in Falls Church, Va., one of the biggest Volvo dealers on the East Coast.
The Volvo V70 Cross Country wagon, which starts at $36,100, has been a hot seller there, and it has been attracting some atypical station wagon buyers, salesman Kam Shamloo said.
“We’re seeing some young people, single people, who say they want it because they just like the way it looks,” Shamloo said. “They don’t want something as big as a sport-utility vehicle, and they certainly don’t want a minivan. They say they haul a lot of stuff and that they want something that can do the job, but they want it to look interesting.”
Indeed, the Cross Country, introduced in 1997, was designed as a crossover wagon--intended to serve traditional family needs as well as the needs of young singles with a penchant for extreme sports.
The Cross Country has muscular side cladding, higher ground clearance and an overall more aggressive appearance than standard wagons. Even its marketing has a different pitch. For the Cross Country, Volvo has eschewed homey family scenes in favor of a station wagon rocketing along unimproved roads, with mountain bikes anchored to a roof rack. The idea, Volvo’s marketers say, is that the Cross Country takes you to what is, for a wagon, “previously unexplored territory.”
Volvo’s approach, along with Subaru’s introduction of the SUV-like Forester and Outback wagons, has inspired imitators--as well as rekindled confusion over what is and what isn’t a station wagon.
Take the Lexus RX 300, which is built on the platform of another member of the Toyota family, the Camry sedan, and the 2000 BMW X5, which its German maker, Bayerische Motoren Werke, prefers to call a “sport-activity vehicle.” Both have all-wheel drive and some modest version of all-roads (on- and off-road) capability. But both are more car-like and wagon-like than they are like trucks, which constitute the platforms for true SUVs.
Executives at Stationwagon.com (https://www.stationwagon.com), regarded as the single most authoritative source of information on station wagons, have been wrestling with this, and they have decided, for the moment, to put many of the new-generation wagons into the “crossover vehicle” category. For example, although many buyers, and Subaru marketers, see the Subaru Forester as a station wagon that looks like an SUV, Stationwagon.com executives classify it as a crossover.
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Purists regard a true station wagon as a descendant of what were called “depot hacks,” or taxicabs specifically assigned to train stations to carry passengers and their luggage to and fro. American station wagons of the 1950s and ‘60s, such as the 1957 Ford Country Squire and the 1967 Oldsmobile Custom Vista Cruiser, were built around the concept.
They were full-size, rear-wheel-drive vehicles with super-large cargo bays and enough seating for seven people. But the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s, and subsequent U.S. regulations requiring better automotive fuel economy, put an end to the rolling leviathans. They were replaced by smaller models such as the Ford Escort and American Motors Corp.’s Hornet Sportabout.
The Escort lasted much longer in the market than the Hornet, but neither did much to hold U.S. consumers’ interest in wagons. Minivans--wagon surrogates--successfully entered the picture in 1984. They were followed by booming sales of sport-utility models. From a market penetration of 16% of all new cars sold in the United States in the mid-’60s, wagon sales plummeted, reaching a low of 2% of sales today.
Auto industry executives, such as Saturn President Cynthia Trudell, expect a wagon turnaround.
“I believe strongly that there will be a resurgence in wagons,” Trudell told reporters in New York earlier this year. But few people, at the moment, expect sales to reach the heights of the 1960s.
Instead, Trudell and others believe that wagons will form a lucrative niche in a rapidly fragmenting U.S. auto market, which is moving toward providing specific kinds of cars and trucks, or imaginative hybrids thereof, to match a wide range of consumer taste and affordability.
But there is a ringer in this theory about the limited appeal of wagons. It is DaimlerChrysler’s 2000 PT Cruiser, to be released early next year. A 1940s-style vehicle based on a Chrysler-Dodge Neon sedan platform, the PT Cruiser is a station wagon that mimics an SUV and a minivan while retaining the hipness of a hot rod.
DaimlerChrysler says the PT Cruiser will start at an affordable price, somewhere under $20,000. The company’s dealers already have tens of thousands of orders and are putting people on waiting lists. Will it help boost the popularity of wagons?
It all depends on what you call a wagon, say the people at Stationwagon.com, who, for the moment, are placing the PT Cruiser on their crossover vehicle list.
