Unpopular opinion: Why fast estate cars are almost pointless
The ‘spork’ of the car world – do-it-all, but two cars each dedicated to their specific job would be better
Nothing gets car people quietly smiling like a fast estate car. There’s something about the combination of high performance and practicality that’s specifically appealing, and I don’t think it’s just a middle-aged dad thing. You see people getting gooey over square-backed cars with guts even though they have no need to go to the tip with a load of leftover cardboard and two severed branches.
It’s why car people seem to get into such a tizz about the BMW M3 Touring and, notwithstanding its greediness around the battery buffet, the latest M5 Touring. Audi’s RS4s and RS6s, various flavours of Merc-AMG wagon, the rare Jaguar XFR-S Sportbrake – these are all cars that over the years have touched a certain nerve, and this nerve was prodded with a cable from the mains recently when a company in Oxfordshire announced it was going to start producing a car that BMW itself never got around to selling, the E46 M3 Touring.
The appeal of fast estates is almost certainly because they seem able to do it all. But I’m going to need a new family car soon and, strangely, I don’t want a powerful estate car at all. Obviously, many of the cars mentioned above are excellent things. But one-size-fits-all isn’t quite the selling point it might seem to be.
I certainly wouldn’t use it as a basis on which to buy swimming trunks. With a car that’s trying to cover multiple bases there’s always going to be a compromise and with fast estates it’s twofold. The performance bit is never going to be quite as good as a proper sports car, or even the saloon variant of the same model, because of the extra bodywork and the big hole in the back. The practicality and useability part is often compromised because of stiffer suspension and rib-squeezing seats.
What really puts me off fast estates, however, is the frustration. They seem like fabulous things when assembled together for magazine group tests, which are mostly conducted by a group of blokes standing on moorland eating petrol- station sandwiches and talking about tread shuffle. They’re an object of lust for people online who don’t actually have any need for one and will probably never buy one. But if you have a requirement for a family car because you really do have a family, and possibly some sort of dog, having a metric shedload of power in a car that can also accommodate big bags and small bicycles isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
You can’t actually use all that performance very often unless you want pukey kids and a bruised Labrador, and in the meantime you’re riding round on stiffer, less comfortable suspension that’s making life slightly worse for everyone and everything in the car. It’s frustrating. Which is why, when the M3 Touring was announced, I couldn’t help thinking for actual everyday life you’d have a nicer time, more of the time, in an M340i wagon.
In fact, and this is probably a terrible thing to admit in evo, I quite like my family cars more boring than that. Not bad to drive, not annoying or badly designed. Just quietly boring. Think of it this way: we might all love to have a friend who does BASE jumps and sometimes messages to say he’s in Stockholm but he can’t remember why. We just wouldn’t want that sort of behaviour from our accountant, or an eye surgeon. Which brings me to the latest Volkswagen Passat estate.
You might not have noticed this one because no one has noticed any Passat since the engineering fever dream of the W8 version from the 2000s, so you might be surprised/ disinterested to hear the Passat is now sold only as an estate, in Europe at least. It has also been made less good-looking than the last generation, as if someone realised things were getting a bit too handsome and it had to be toned down before people got distracted at the local recycling centre.
But when I borrowed a Passat a few months ago I liked it because, boring as this sounds, it had really understood the brief. And the brief was to be a useful, sensible, unannoying car that’s not trying to be sporty because it has another job to do. A job that involves not getting in the way of life, of being useful but unobtrusive, of tracking straight and true down the motorway as I argue with my kids about why they cannot have a milkshake in the car and then argue with my wife about whether or not it’s ‘overdramatic’ to say that if you spill milk in a car you have to ‘write it off and immediately crush it’.
In such circumstances, massive power and a track-ready chassis would be a waste. That’s why I’m not desperate to own a fast estate. They’re the sporks of the car world. Nice idea, but not a patch on two separate things designed to do one job each. And everything’s a lot easier if you just admit that one of those things can be a bit boring.
