#Wagons

It's wagon time again with this 2008 Volkswagen Passat VR6.

Despite having fallen out of favor with the average American decades ago, due to the rise of the minivan, station wagons have remained coveted by U.S. automotive enthusiasts. In most cases, they’re practical enough to serve as a household’s primary vehicle and don’t need to sacrifice desirable driving dynamics like you would on a crossover to make that happen.

Sadly, we don’t get that many options in North America. But, after much speculation, BMW has seen fit to ship the M5 Touring our way for the 2025 model year.

The last time we saw a Detroit station wagon in this series was nearly a year ago, when we admired a Chevy Vega Kammback. How about properly imposing American wagons with rear-wheel-drive and V8 engines? Would you believe our most recent one was an LTD Country Squire in 2016?

Today we have a 2004 Saab 9-5 Arc Estate. Translated that means Swedish wagon.

When it comes to junkyard cars with impressively high final odometer numbers, Toyotas, Hondas, Volvos and Mercedes-Benzes seem to be the most likely to have driven better than 400,000 miles during their lives. How about Subaru? Well, today's Junkyard Find is the highest-mile discarded Fuji Heavy Industries product I've ever found.

Volvo sold brick-shaped rear-wheel-drive station wagons in North America beginning in 1968 with the 145 and continuing through the final V90s three decades later. The 700 Series wagons showed up just about in the middle of that era, but tend to be overshadowed by their 245 predecessors today. Today we'll honor the 740 longroof by admiring one that drove past the 400k-mile mark during its career.

Once again, our UCOTD is a wagon. What can we say, we love wagons. In this case, it's a 1994 Mercedes-Benz E320 wagon.

Today we bring you some wagon goodness -- a 2004 Volkswagen Passat GLS wagon.

Wagons hold a strange place in the American car market. Auto journalists and car nerds gravitate to them like moths to a flame, but the general car-buying public seems like it couldn’t care less. That said, a small number of high-performance wagons enter the country every year, including the Mercedes-AMG E63 S Wagon and Audi RS6 Avant. Americans are about to get one more hot longroof, this time from BMW, as the automaker recently announced that it would bring the incredibly impressive M5 Touring wagon stateside for the 2025 model year.

Despite having been quoted as confirming the BMW M5 Touring for North America, Domagoj Dukec has just recanted. Earlier statements from the brand’s design head stipulating that our market would have access to both the sedan and wagon versions of the M5 have been taken back — leaving everyone following the story more than a little perplexed.

Because Volvo sold the 200 Series cars here from the 1975 through 1993 model years and so many owners loved those sensible bricks so deeply, plenty are only now showing up in the self-service car graveyards I frequent. What about the 200's predecessor, the 140?

General Motors built more than two million Chevy Vegas, and they were everywhere on the roads of North America through about the second half of the 1980s. The Vega has been a junkyard rarity for decades now, but I just found six early Vegas all within a couple of rows of one another in a Denver self-service yard. Today, we'll look at the only wagon of that group.

Station wagons were falling out of favor in a hurry with American car shoppers as the 1990s progressed, especially after the 1991 Ford Explorer and 1993 Jeep Grand Cherokee hit showrooms and put the hammer down on the truckification of our roads. Mitsubishi didn't seem to worry about such trends, though, and a longroof version of the Diamante luxury sedan appeared here for the 1993 model year. Here's one of those extremely rare wagons, found in a Northern California car graveyard a couple of months back.

Until the 1984 model year, every new Corolla sold in the United States used a rear-wheel-drive configuration. Today's Junkyard Find is an AE72 Corolla station wagon, from the final model year of its generation sold here, found in a car graveyard in John Steinbeck's hometown.

Toyota sold new Camry station wagons in North America from the 1987 through 1996 model years. I've found a couple of examples of the first-year longroof Camry during my junkyard travels, but the final-year cars remained elusive… until I spotted this one in a Silicon Valley car graveyard in April.