A wagon by any name

March 25, 2009

Americans of a certain age have memories, fond or not, of being crammed with their siblings into an un-air-conditioned station wagon and heading off for long summer vacations to see the U.S.A. at 60 m.p.h. Hearing that, a lot of modern youngsters might ask: What's a station wagon?

At one time, wagons commanded 17 percent of the U.S. market. Today, they total only 1 percent. But the one-time symbol of postwar domesticity, so maligned in recent years, is making a comeback, no doubt because it offers the same practical advantages it always did.

Forbes magazine reports that there are 17 new wagons on the market, including luxury versions made by Mercedes and BMW. Cadillac is offering its first one ever, with a spokesman calling it "the right car at the right time and the right size." In the current downturn, sales have held up better for wagons than for other vehicle types.

Really, though, the station wagon isn't making a comeback, because it never went away. It just went incognito. The common belief is that it fell victim to the sport-utility vehicle in the 1980s. Ha! The SUV is nothing but a station wagon with a complex -- a wagon for people who wouldn't be caught dead admitting to driving a wagon.

The American Heritage dictionary defines a station wagon as "an automobile having an extended interior with a third seat or luggage platform and a tailgate." That definition, of course, fits an SUV as well. The characteristic shape and function -- i.e., extra space for passengers or cargo or both -- are the same in each case.

Of course there is a difference that SUV drivers regard as profound, namely that their vehicles are trucks, not cars, and can handle rugged terrain -- even though most of them never encounter anything more formidable than a speed bump at the mall.

But these days, many SUVs are mounted on car platforms and are not really designed for off-roading. The Subaru Legacy wagon and the Subaru Outback SUV are almost indistinguishable to the naked eye. The latest trend in autos, the crossover, is also just another grandchild of the traditional wagon.

As with the old Ford Country Squire, you can cram a lot of kids and luggage and vacation gear into an SUV or a crossover. But here's the crucial fact: Viewed from the middle back seat as your family cruises through miles and miles of cornfields, they all look the same.