Der Kaput Variant

Volkswagen of America confirmed the GTI and R versions of the next Golf for the United States not too long ago, but left decisions on the base Golf and the wagon versions - or variants, as the wagons are known in Germany - for later. Well, the decision has been made regarding the Golf Sportwagen (below) and the four-wheel-drive Alltrack version.  The 2019 model year will be the last for both.  VW will continue to make the wagon versions of the current seventh Golf generation through December in Mexico, but that's it.

What's going to take their place?  More SUVs and crossovers, of course! 

Come 2020, for the first time in my life - the Type 3 Squareback wagon was introduced for the 1966 model year at the same time I was born - Volkswagen will not have a station wagon in its U.S. lineup.  And there many not be a wagon version of the Golf for anyone when the eighth generation arrives (though the wagon version of the B-platform Passat sold in Europe continues), so it looks increasingly like a four-door hatchback will be the model's only body style.  The Sportsvan version of the Golf (below), which is not sold in America, is also being discontinued.

A station wagon version of the Golf has been part of Volkswagen's lineup since the third generation, as the picture of the Mark 3 Golf Variant shown below indicates.  Passat wagons had been available in the United States from 1974 to 2010 (first called the Dasher, then called the Quantum), succeeding the old Squareback and Type 4 wagons, while the Golf Variant arrived here with the fourth generation as a Jetta model.  And of course, there was a wagon version of the late eighties/early nineties Fox subcompact.  Many VW fans, by the way, saw the Jetta wagon (which adopted the Golf nameplate here with the current generation) as the spiritual successor to the old Squareback despite the fact that the Jetta wagon had neither a front trunk nor a rear-mounted engine.  More recently, the Golf Alltrack was meant to be a competitor to the Subaru Outback, the midsize four-wheel-drive station wagon that many Subaru customers saw as a a sensible alternative to an SUV.  Alas, VW couldn't convince enough Subaru customers to switch brands and it couldn't convince enough VW customers to consider an Alltrack.  Not that it tried hard enough once the Atlas started rolling off the assembly line in Tennessee. 

To be honest, though, I am not shedding many tears over this news.  I have never needed a station wagon, though I drove the old 1973 Toyota Corona station wagon my family had when I was in college.  (When we gave it up in 1987, it was at a junk yard; we got ten bucks for it.)  And truth be told, no one likes station wagons because they're boring cars.  Sure, there have been sport wagons like the old Audi Avant, but most people who ever owned a wagon ended up with a bulky, unsexy hauler.  The whole ethos of the station wagon and its association with boredom  - especially long, boring rides - were perfectly summed up in the 1983 movie National Lampoon's Vacation, where the Griswold family, hoping to get a sport-wagon model, is forced to settle for a horrid, awkward Wagon Queen Family Truckster (actually a Ford Country Squire until Hollywood auto customizer George Barris got his hands on it), the sort of vehicle that no self-respecting middle-class suburbanite wants to be seen in.  It's also worth noting that once the minivan became popular, wagon versions of sedans became fewer and farther between.  Note that not one car line introduced by Chrysler after the original Dodge Aries, Plymouth Reliant, and second-generation Chrysler LeBaron K-car lines of the early 1980s has included a wagon version, except a wagon version of the original Dodge Charger sedan, the 2005-08 Dodge Magnum, which was a flop.  And GM and Ford have spent less time developing traditional wagons as well in the past few decades, and they're now at the point where they don't offer them anymore.

No, today, people drive sport utility vehicles, because they're so masculine and have a commanding ground clearance.  Or crossovers, because they're so elegant and stylish.  But you know what would end the insufferable SUV/crossover craze in America, aside from a bunch of Iranian imams blocking the Strait of Hormuz (any day now, thanks to their punitive acts against British tankers)?  All someone with a bigger megaphone than I have has to do is say to SUV and crossover owners, "You realize you're driving a pretentious station wagon, right?"

The emperor has no clothes.

Meanwhile, VW could be discontinuing the base Golf hatchback in the U.S., and if it continues to break tradition by pandering to mainstream American tastes, I wouldn't be surprised to see one of its sedans biting the dust.  If Volkswagen becomes just another SUV/crossover brand in this country, I may have to leave America just so I can buy the sort of car I want.  But I won't go to Britain (where station wagons are called estates), now that Boris Johnson is in charge.

Go Further?

The Ford Motor Company has gone batsh--.

Ford just announced that it will no longer make and sell passenger cars in the United States and Canada, except for the Mustang.  Even though the company made a profit in the first quarter of 2018, the profits have mostly come from SUVs and crossovers.  Ford hatchbacks and sedans have lost so much market share in their respective segments that the company has decided to kill off all of them rather than discontinue some of them and replace others.  Ford doesn't want to keep any of these cars as loss leaders while the SUVs and crossovers make money because the profit margins wouldn't be as big.

Ford didn't so much kill these cars as let them wither on the vine.  Once these models went on sale, Ford didn't bother to freshen or improve them.  The Fusion is a competent car but is regarded as somewhat bland, and despite the popularity of the Focus in Europe, it's not as good or as competitive against Japanese makes and the Chevrolet Cruze. The Fiesta (shown above)?  If there's anyone left who buys subcompacts in These States or the Great White North, they're more likely to go to their Honda dealer for a Fit.  My mother's Fit, which I occasionally drive, is dull, but it's extremely versatile and incredibly efficient.  The Fiesta simply couldn't give the same value for money, even though I've been told that the Fiesta ST is a blast to drive.      

If traditional cars had a bigger share of the North American market, Ford might have considered re-investing in its car line, but with cars accounting for less than a third of the vehicles sold in the New World, Ford saw no incentive.  I still say that this is an insane move and one that will come back to bite the company in its proverbial rear end.  Not everyone wants an SUV, a crossover, or a pickup truck.  The only reason SUVs are so popular in the first place is because advertising agencies have suckered impressionable consumers into thinking that they're chic, powerful, and formidable vehicles, fortresses on wheels. They're really pretentious station wagons, supported by crude platforms and notoriously uneconomical when it comes to fuel consumption.  And to respond to the inevitable counterpoint that SUVs are more fuel-efficient these days and come in a variety of sizes - some of them based on traditional car platforms - to cater to customers who may not like a traditional SUV on a light-truck chassis, I would point out that all SUVs and crossovers, no matter their engines and dimensions, have higher ground clearances that offer degraded handling and make them difficult to drive, and many of them are so bulky they're subject to heavy cross winds that are hard to drive through.

And, they're ugly.

I don't want only big ugly wagons to choose from when I have to buy a new car.

And face it, the bigger the SUV, the better in the eyes of SUV customers.  They love the sense of superiority they get from driving at a high perch in such monstrous vehicles, made possible by a loophole in the corporate average fuel economy requirements that exempted light-truck platforms from higher standards, a loophole Detroit exploited after it tried to compete against the Japanese in the traditional-car market segments in the 1980s and demonstrated its inability to do so.  All we need is one big oil crisis - which could happen as soon as John Bolton makes Iran glow in the dark - to kill the SUV market (and Ford) overnight.

Incidentally, that wouldn't be the first time that Ford got screwed by spiking oil prices.  When the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 caused the first big oil crisis, Henry Ford II, who was then chairman of his family's company, refused to follow GM's lead and make smaller cars, ignoring the advice of his company president, a guy named Lee Iaccoca, who would later become CEO of Chrysler and save the company by banking on - you guessed it - smaller cars.  (Iaccoca would later make mistakes that again put the company on the edge of going the way of Studebaker, but that's another story.)  Ford eventually had to catch up with GM and was still trying to do so when the Shah of Iran was overthrown and another oil crisis resulted.       

Fortunately, GM isn't so foolish this time, either.  Mary Barra, GM's current CEO, says her company still recognizes the value of the traditional-car market segment, and she has made it clear that sedans and hatchbacks will still be available even as GM continues to compete aggressively in the SUV/crossover market.  Volkswagen, meanwhile, has recommitted itself to the North American car market with its new Jetta even as it pushes its new Tiguan and Atlas SUVs.  And Toyota has brought a hatchback back to its long-running Corolla lineup in the States.  But I can't help but wonder if GM, Volkswagen and Toyota are merely offering a temporary reprieve for us fans of traditional cars.  Because a fear I voiced awhile ago on this blog seems to be coming true - either we drive around in big ugly wagons or we take the bus.

When America needs a bad idea like that, Ford will put it on wheels.