Richard and Margie Sievert love their 1986 Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon, but not for its looks. The wood paneling is passe and rust spots are beginning to show on the driver’s door.
Yet with more than 175,000 miles on the odometer, the wagon has proved its mettle as a workhorse.
It takes Richard 20 miles to work every day, pulls the family trailer on vacation and, with rear seats collapsed, hauls Richard’s oversized remote-controlled airplanes or his duck hunting gear.
Yet in the next few months, the Sieverts will join hundreds of thousands of families as former owners of station wagons.
“We will miss it terribly,” Margie said. “It’s like an old friend. You can use it for anything.”
The Sieverts would have bought another station wagon, but they don’t like the style of any they’ve seen. And their ’93 Explorer sport-utility performs the wagon’s functions almost as well.
A lot of carmakers have discontinued station wagons as Americans have moved on to mini-vans and sport-utilities, even more specialized and utilitarian vehicles than wagons.
Wagons’ popularity peaked in 1961, when 14 out of every 100 cars sold were station wagons. Now it’s fewer than five in 100.
Who drives station wagons more than a generation after their heyday? Mostly people who want more cargo space than a trunk but who think mini-vans and sport-utilities are too big and truck-like.
Those die-hards bought more than 419,000 wagons last year.
“I don’t see how they’re going to lose much more,” says Ray Windecker, a former numbers cruncher for Ford, Studebaker and Mercedes-Benz who now runs American Autodatum, a Livonia, Mich., automotive information service. “I’ve never decided they were dead.”
But the station wagon graveyard gets more residents each year.
General Motors Corp. will drop the behemoth Chevrolet Caprice and Buick Roadmaster after the 1996 model year.
Chrysler built its last station wagon in 1988, a Plymouth Horizon America. (Its Eagle dealers do sell a version of the Mitsubishi Expo wagon).
Japanese carmakers Honda and Toyota build their Accord and Camry station wagons in the U.S., but they sell more as exports than they do to American families.
Upscale European carmakers dabble in station wagons to round out lineups devoid of mini-vans. Wagons such as the Volvo 850 and Mercedes E320 are expertly crafted, but their high sticker prices limit who can afford them.
GM has five wagon offerings among its six car divisions-for now. The departure of the Caprice and Roadmaster likely will be followed by the Oldsmobile Ciera, a model so old that “the guy who designed that has been retired for 15 years,” said Leo Jerome, an Olds dealer in Warren, Mich. The fate of the equally ancient Buick Century wagon is unknown.
The Chevy Cavalier wagon, No. 9 among wagon sellers in 1994, was discontinued with the arrival of the redesigned Cavalier for ’95, and there are no plans for a wagon in the new version.
That leaves Saturn’s SW model, the No. 4 wagon seller last year with 17,754 units, as GM’s sole entry of any significant volume. But it accounted for just 6 percent of Saturn sales. And some dealers questioned Saturn’s decision early on to offer a wagon instead of a convertible.
At least in part by default, Ford has the lion’s share of what remains of station wagon sales, a seriously profitable piece of business with demographics to die for.
Ford’s Escort and Taurus and sister Mercury Tracer and Sable wagons accounted for 52.8 percent of wagon registrations in 1994. The four ranked first, second, fifth and seventh in sales last year, according to R.L. Polk, a transportation marketing firm that tracks vehicle registrations.
“We’ve been in there by design,” Ford Division general marketing manager Steve Lyons said. “We were fortunate to uncover some secrets about the wagon business, and one is that it’s not going away.”
It’s a commonly held belief that mini-vans struck a critical blow to station wagons in the 1980s. They did, but only after hatchback sedans drew first blood in the 1970s.
Station wagon buyers come mainly from two groups of people-young families with pre-teenage children, and empty nesters, couples whose children have moved out but whose lifestyles demand more room than the typical trunk provides.
It’s to these groups that Ford is catering. The compact Escort wagon, available for around $13,000, topped all wagons last year with 128,777 sales, or 30.7 percent of the wagon market.
It was followed by Taurus at 61,083. Ford expects the redesigned Taurus out this fall will win even more buyers. It and the Mercury Sable wagon follow the rounded look of the new sedans.
“Really, the toughest challenge was doing a wagon that looks better than today’s, because today’s is still the best-looking wagon in the market
Taurus wagon buyers have more education and more money-an average household income of $73,000-than buyers of the sedans, the best-selling car in America.
Though Taurus caters to the urbane professional, Japanese carmaker Subaru is going for the outdoorsy type, to whom all-wheel-drive is important. Subaru wants the customer who might not be able to afford a four-wheel-drive utility but wants the function of one.
The Indiana-built all-wheel-drive Legacy was the third best-selling station wagon last year with more than 31,639. The 1996 Legacy Outback, due in showrooms in August, will have more ground clearance than the Legacy wagon.
“They won’t look like station wagons,” Subaru President George Muller said. “It will begin to become more sport-utility-like in appearance and the package we provide.”
