SUVs Could Be The Death Of The Cool Estate Car, And It's All Wrong
A good estate car is a wonderful thing. It can carry lots of your stuff, swallow furniture or take your mates on an epic road trip. An estate car has character, especially when you put an interesting engine in it.
This week Alfa Romeo told Car magazine that plans to build an estate version of the Giulia have been scrapped, in favour of the cash cow that is the Stelvio. The firm’s manufacturing chief, Alfredo Altavilla, claims that the Slevio SUV, which caters for one of the fastest-growing market sectors in the automotive industry, will drive just as well as a Giulia estate.
He’s wrong.
Porsche can’t make a Macan or Cayenne, as good as they are for their size, drive quite as well as its lower and lighter cars. Audi can’t make the Q7 drive as well as the RS 6 Avant. Try an E60 M5 Touring against an X5 M and there’s no contest. It’s the same story for Mercedes-AMG between the GLE 63 and the E 63 estate.
The estate always drives better than the SUV. The laws of physics are insurmountable. But that’s not my only beef with SUVs. Show me a pretty one; a truly, honest-to-goodness pretty one. Sometimes car makers can make them look butch, quirky, expensive, aggressive or even limply unthreatening, but I don’t know of one single SUV of any size that’s anywhere near as good to look at as a well-designed estate.
This gorgeous render from X-Tomi Design shows what might have been if Alfa had developed the Giulia wagon. Gaze at the goddess of perfection and then take a look back at the Stelvio. Hmmm.
The point here is that estate cars are just better than SUVs. They often have bigger boots, they look better and they drive better, and yet I’m sitting here watching SUV sales figures go through the roof while estates are quietly forgotten. For the love of [insert deity here], it makes me want to tear out my own eyes.
Anyone who thinks as I do is being proved sickeningly wrong by the numbers. Maybe we’re all out of touch with what people want, but that’s not true at all. People want taller cars because they imply size, and size implies prestige. People want prestige. There’s also the issue that a lot of people are incompetent behind the wheel and have to be as high up as possible to make it easier for themselves.
You may have gathered that the SUV takeover grinds my gears. It’s not that they’re bad cars; it’s just that their ever-growing presence is depriving future me – and future you – of the chance to own what would have been glorious V6-powered Italian wagons. And that’s just the most recent one. How many other desirable estate ideas have been indirectly squashed by SUVs?
Time will tell whether there’s any hope for cool estates, but the outlook is bleak.
Comments
City offroaders are lame, mkay!
But what if the stelvio makes so much money they do diside to build the estate🙏😕
I wish there was an international law which stated that all SUVs have to be off road capable. That would put the Jaguar F-Pace and Alfa Stelvio out of production, and their place in their manufacturer line up replaced by estates.
Alfa Romeo is doing off road testing with their stelvio here in portugal though, a friend of mine works near where they test the vehicle and in multiple ocasions has seen the 2 Stelvios that are beeing tested full of mud up to the windows.
but if they were out of production, they probably won’t make enough profit to build estates. we all know what happened to SAAB
Don’t you feel like you’re wasting something while driving SUV, which is used 1:1 like estate? There’s no + of having suv over estate for me.
wait till you have to load kids into it or deal with shittastic roads where ground clearance becomes an issue
And by tank, I of course mean volvo wagon
Jeremy Clarkson said this about SUVs: “They’re like nuclear weapons. If someone has one, than everyone else must have one for their own safety.” Disregarding the whole fuel economy, size, handling, responsiveness and weight issues. But, despite all that, I might just have to get a Forester XT. Not because I want to, but because it seems the world wants me to.
Totally agree, I think for the vast majority of people the station wagon (as they’re known here in Aus) is the best kind of car - plenty of room, can tow stuff, but little dynamic or efficiency compromise.
It’s when stuff like this happens that it really gets me though. I’ve just about made my peace with the rise of SUVs by thinking of them as a tax on the stupid - I figure it takes Nissan almost no effort at all to make a new Juke or Qashqai, and that can fund the next GT-R or Z. But when cool cars are canned because of them that just makes my blood boil.
Let’s be fair though, even if Alfa made a Gulia estate, it would be a sales disaster in today’s world of trending performance cars.
Because pretty much nobody buys a fast estate anymore brand new, SUVs make money. Hence why they’re trending with sub-humans. Fast estates are rare for a reason, they don’t make as much money as fast SUVs.
I will stick to my lada 2105 thank you
That’s not even a Lada tho
Cool, tbh I find it boring not cool
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