Why don’t we embrace the wagon in Ireland?

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Friday, December 30, 2011

It just might be that Irish motorists are ready to embrace a variant of their cars that has been neglected over the past two or even three decades.

The estate car. The wagon.

Whichever takes your fancy in terms of description.

Or whether you were raised in auto terms on this or on the other side of the Atlantic.

Estate cars used to be the only other option to a saloon when I was growing up. The hatchback hadn't been invented by Renault.

The MPV or Minivan hadn't been thought of by Renault or Chrysler. The SUV was still a concept to be born of the Jeep (well, actually, I'm not THAT old, but the acronym representing sports utility vehicle was still to be uttered).

The estate car had evolved from the quintessentially English 'shooting brake', a mongrel vehicle devised to carry grouse hunters and their weapons, bags, and 'bag' to and from the big grouse estates who depended on their visiting shooters for much of their income.

The concept transported itself to America of the 50s, where the 'wagon' became the family car and most often driven by the Mom in the subsequent decade when that country went 2-car.

It was in the same 60s that saloon models across the size segments in this part of the world began providing estate versions on a mass market basis.

For somebody like me, then in the heating and plumbing business, the Opel Rekord Estate was a godsend. It could carry 10 lengths of gunbarrel pipe, or 20 lengths of copper on the roof racks, with a boiler and half a dozen radiators in the back.

Later when I rejoined the family pub business, the ability of my Vauxhall Viva HB estate to carry 13 cases of spirits from Irish Distillers' depot in Dublin's Bluebell meant a significant discount per case.

(My subsequent HC Viva was less useful, able to carry only 11 cases.)

But three of those first four estate cars which I owned were also so useful as family carryalls. Transporting a yard of Leitrim stone for the fireplace in the house we were building. Lawnmowers when mud was eventually replaced by grass.

Buggies and baby stuff when that inevitability eventually happened (though there was nothing like the amount of equipment which a baby requires these days).

The estate cars of the 60s through the 80s were also used extensively by commercial travellers (now replaced largely by the internet), and service personnel for various industries such as Guinness beer-lines maintenance guys.

And I think that's where the rot set in. For Irish car buyers, even family ones, the estate car became too associated with 'commercial'.

Bluntly, we got snobbish, even before there ever was a Celtic Tiger cub born.

Result? Compared to other countries like Italy, Spain and Germany, sales of the estate format are relatively tiny.

In this last year, for instance, less than 7%of all sales.

I kind of thought that the decline of the SUV might encourage a shift to wagons, which provide just as much carrying space without the fuel glugging and the weight of the 4WD gubbins.

It didn’t happen though. And from a high in 2007 of 7.4%wagon format penetration it fell to 5.85%in 2010 and came up by a further percentage point this year.

It isn’t as if there isn’t really good looking product out there.

I most recently drove the 508 SW from Peugeot, as elegant a wagon as you might wish for (and definitely too well finished to be used for transporting central heating stuff).

Toyota’s Avensis Estate is another smart option, as is Ford’s Mondeo wagon and VW’s capacious Passat version.

At the compact level, the new Ford Focus wagon is a seriously neat and practical variant of that car.

None of the above—and the several others from various other makers—could be described as commercial utility vehicles, they actually make great family cars.

I wonder why we’re still turning them down? Well, maybe 2012 will see a shift of gears here. The reception given to Hyundai’s i40 Tourer has been excellent, for instance.

We’ll see.