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
So no family racecar ?
How did your get 13 bots to instantly up vote you? I just posted this comment. I don’t care about the likes, it’s just that there is something fishy here
Soccer moms buy more than enthusiasts, that’s the only reason the estate won’t exist
Solution: We all become rich mofos and start buying more than soccer moms
I herby declare whoever buys a suv and never go off road will be sentenced to 50 years of building estates building prison.
If you tried to go off road with most SUV’s you would break them, they are just hatchbacks with higher center of gravity, and more weight
Since most SUVs are AWD and not 4WD they’re not meant to go offroad
Not all SUV’s are built for off road. How would you take a FWD Honda Pilot offroading? It would make no sense.
Stupid Usless Vehicle
I’d like to say I disagree. My family rented a BMW X3 and drove it from LA to Seattle, and I actually fall in love with it. It does not look out of place in Beverly Hills, It is easy to maneuver around tight streets of San Francisco, It is a nice milecruncher on the Interstate, It is somewhat fun on twisty US Route 1 by the sea, It did not got bog down when going gets a little rough in Rainier national park and In the end, it holds 4 people and all the luggage nicely. I agree that SUV is not a vehicle that is expert at every field but rather like a compromise, but then again vast majority of consumer don’t need a vehicle that is expert at every field, all they need is a vehicle that can do some of everything, and that’s it. Some SUVs are nicely engineered machine that offers great versatility. Don’t get me wrong, I love nice estates, I am considering a V90 or V90 CC as my next car. I just want to argue that many SUVs, in its own right, is far from useless.
Also, what qualify you as whether you are a car guy or not is not what car you drive but rather whether the car you choose is right for yourself. I drive a Subaru Forester, and I am neither ashamed by this fact that I drive a SUV nor I think I am not a car guy. Because I know this vehicle is suitable for me to go to school and back home with adequate safety and comfort.
Rubbish sorry but SUVs are going to take over!
The sad fact is that most of people who buy cars are not car people at all.
And the real problem is not just that they don’t care about the particular car aspects that we do, e.g. handling and responsiveness. The problem is that they also don’t understand that someone may buy a car based on how good it drives, rather than what sort of status it implies.
Thats part of the reason why, even if I had the money, I probably wouldn’t buy a Ferrari or Lamborghini - for most people it’s a status symbol, rather than a car to enjoy. 99% of people think that if you buy a supercar, you want to show off, rather than enjoy the driving experience. Of course, maybe a lot of people do want to show off, but it also makes real car enthusiasts look like dorks.
And the worst thing is that all these ignorant people are in the majority. Hence, they drive the market more than enthusiasts do. And what they want is cars that make their neighbours jealous, are easy to drive and have a fashionable badge on the bonnet. Thats it.
Thats why there is more and more “premium” SUVs spawning and less cars which care about the driving experience.
The solution is to make public transport better so that most people don’t buy cars - that way the only people who own cars are those who care about driving.
The problem is that SUVs are marketed as off-road capable, even though most of them aren’t. People want the image and the ride height, even if the SUV is a little worse in pretty much every petrolhead measure. But I really want fast estates to remain a thing.
I can’t agree with you more man, SUV’s are the cancer if the automotive world.
I’d rather say non-car people are the cancer of the automotive world
I agree. The estate will always drive better than the SUV. Convinced my dad to sell the E53 X5 (an amazing car, btw) and get an E91 320d (which happens to have the exact same cargo volume).
He was blown away at the test drive. It’s low and RWD, has very precise steering and corners like nothing he’s ever driven. We’re never going back to an SUV, but we may want to get a 5-Series next (The German Shepherd is getting fat).
This article describes everything that’s wrong with the car market today. People nowadays are treating cars like fashion objects, status symbols, etc. This is the reason sporty cars are dying out in favour of these gigantic SUVs.
They’ve always been like that. We’re the minority here.