Posted On: Wednesday - September 30th 2026 8:46AM MST
In Topics: Humor Movies Cars Muh Generation
♫, ♩I got a '24 wagon and I call it an SUV, surf city, USA... ♫, ♩
That is, as in surfing the internet on my SUV's instrument panel, not any waves out at the beach.
Station wagons are old Boomer cars. Nobody in the 21st Century wants to be caught dead riding in, much less driving, a station wagon. Yeah, I know, you worked in the summers to pay for college, and you could make enough money on the line at the factory to raise 4 kids and drive them around in your Ford Fury wagon. OK, Boomer.
Hey, Muh Generation has a point. They don't live in an economy like that of America's 1970s, much less '60s. However, gas milage aside with any vehicle built before the late '70s, station wagons were good, practical cars.
Though new station models were still made going into this century - the Ford Taurus (through '07), the Volvos, and the Subarus (you'll get an argument on the latter, as to what it is) - they started getting supplanted by the minivans as early as the mid-1980s. Chrysler/Dodge, coming out of bad times with their K-cars and such had a winner with that famous groundbreaking Dodge Caravan. Lots and lots of minivan models followed since then. They are yet being built, and have long been seen as the mark of a driver with a family and often the ubiquitous MILF, doing her make-up with the rear view mirror at the stop light.
The US Feral Gov't CAFE gas milage standards forced automakers to make more small vehicles than customers wanted, especially after gasoline price came down in the mid-1980s and stayed down for a decade and a half. That is, until they found a loophole. That Suburban on the lot - it's not a car at all - it's a truck. Trucks are not subject to CAFE standards. Sorry, Feral Gov't, based on the frame, etc., these are light "trucks", so we'll make 'em huge and put back in the V-8s.
I can well remember the beginning of the still-ongoing SUV era at the beginning of the '90s - remember Joe Isuzu and his Isuzu Trooper? Those are retro classics now. Years went by, with lots of big SUVs sold, but not all customers were in it for the high ground clearance*, 4WD, and low gas milage. Not everyone felt the need to head up a steep rock face like the drivers in the commercials... some day, when the kids are grown up...
Smaller SUVs were designed, called "Crossovers". (A cross between a car and a big SUV, I suppose.) These vehicles ARE subject to the CAFE laws. The reversal of great gas milage due to modern safety requirements and features is another story, but we get a nice 25 mpg in the city and 32 mpg (low 70mphs) to 34 mpg (near 80 mph) on the highway in our Korea-Crossover.
Then, is there really a good reason for the ceiling height, as has been the big advantage of the minivans over the old station wagons? That's not for everybody, so there are models like the Ford Edge above, which is ... a station wagon, as far as I'm concerned.
BUT, do not tell a young person that. (I know Ford motors marketing people are not that stupid... are they?) "Station wagon? That's some real cringe. Whaddya' talkin' about you deluded Boomer, with your cope? I'm driving a Low-Profile Crossover!"
"How do you sell a station wagon without selling a station wagon?" Overheard at Ford headquarters in Dearbornistan.
From the end of an era:
That'a a scene from the 1983 movie Vacation, the first of a series of 5 National Lampoon movies. Of the two Chicagoland dwelling kids, Rusty and Audrey, the former, Anthony Michael Hall became one of the "Brat Pack" stars in the John Hughes movies a couple of years after this one.
The two young Gen-X'ers here don't seem to think much of station wagons.
* See more on the bit of curmudgeonry in Speed bumps and phone freaks.
Comments: