Excuse me, I mean a Touring model
By Brendan Moore
12.26.2008
The prevailing wisdom is that station wagons are a terrible market segment in the US market. People want minivans, SUVs and crossovers, not station wagons.
First, the minivan displaced wagons in driveways across America, then, when the minivan became identified as a housewife’s vehicle, it was replaced by the SUV. And now we have the crossover. Each one of those station wagon replacements took away some percentage of the station wagon’s former constituency, and now, there just aren’t a lot of station wagon fans left.
Some import manufacturers sell wagons, but in small numbers, to a core “wagon” population, and those are the exception rather than the rule. Station wagon models have gone away completely at Ford, Chrysler, GM, Honda, Toyota, Nissan in the last 15 years.
This, despite the fact that a lot of SUVs and almost all crossovers look like, well, a tall station wagon.
And then, of course, you have vehicles like the Pontiac Vibe/Toyota Matrix twins, the Honda Element and the Dodge Caliber that are really big hatchbacks (kinda like wagons).
But the difference, according to a tremendous amount of consumer research done over the years, is that those vehicles do not have the “station wagon” label, which has lately become the kiss of death in the North American market.
