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.