Race Car Talk

Say “station wagon” to the average American and chances are the first picture that pops into his or her noggin is a big, Disco Age American land schooner wearing green paint and mouldings and veneers made from only the finest plastic trees. With so many of today’s car buyers having spent their formative years in these motorized mastadons, is it any surprise contemporary wagons seem to be such a hard sell over here today? (The shortage of manufacturers willing to take the risk of selling them in this hemisphere makes it a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, but bear with us.) In Europe, however, the honeymoon with the station wagon (or “estate cars” or “kombis,” depending on where you are over there) hasn’t ended. In fact, wagons are so popular in the Old Country that many manufacturers offer high performance versions thereof. But in the mid-‘90s, the species Stationwagonus Wickedfastimus as we know it today didn’t really exist. It took a collaboration between two then-distant (now less so) corporate cousins from the Fatherland to create this category. And the Adam/Eve of the segment they came up with – the Audi RS2 Avant – was a real humdinger. read more

Source: sub5zero.com

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