Jerry Garcia died more than 20 years ago, but Grateful Dead-themed stickers will be showing up on junkyard vehicles as long as junkyards exist.

In this series so far, we’ve seen several Steal Your Face-ized junkyard inmates, including this ’68 GMC pickup, this Ford Probe that no doubt had Kansas Highway Patrol sniff-dogs straining against the Colorado border in their eagerness to make an easy bust, and this stereotype-reinforcing ’83 VW Vanagon.

Now we’ve got this Malaise Era Olds wagon from the first year of the GM G-body. (Read More…)

Car companies should know better than to send detailed drawings of unreleased cars to Chinese toymakers. 

Because they don’t, here is the new Volvo V90 wagon in toy-car form. The wagon, which appeared on CarNewsChina, appears to take several cues from our newly favorite Swedish car, the XC90.

The wagon sports headlights from the XC90 as well as the front fascia from Alex Dykes’ favorite new car.

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Two out of four ain’t bad, I guess.

The perfect vehicle, as proclaimed by auto journalists and web commenters alike, is a brown diesel manual wagon. Here, however, the rally-legend Subaru turbo flat-four is a better choice for a hot daddymobile than a nasty oilburner. The low-key blue paint won’t turn heads at the PTA, but will be near invisible to over-zealous traffic enforcement.

The Subaru Legacy 2.5GT wagon, in other words, is an Impreza WRX STI for grownups.

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1993 wasn’t a great year for the station wagon in the American marketplace; the final Volvo 245 came out that year, minivans and SUVs were kicking hell out of wagon sales as families decided that each child required a thousand pounds and/or 150 cubic feet of gear for any trip, and nobody seemed aware that wagon versions of everything from the Sable to the Camry were available for sale.

It’s easy to forget that the not-so-hot-selling Diamante had an even slower-selling wagon version back then, but I was reminded by the sight of this one in a Northern California wrecking yard. (Read More…)

The internet hivemind is a funny thing. Considering nearly everyone on the earth has an easy way to broadcast their opinions worldwide, one would think there would be a wide variety in those opinions. Often, though, through groupthink or whatever, a solid consensus emerges as an overwhelming favorite.

See bacon. Or cat videos. Or Bernie Sanders (I promise, that is the last political statement I’ll make on these pages).

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Volvo will bring its smaller, compact-sized V40 wagon, its related crossover and long-wheelbase, Chinese-built S60 sedan to America, Autoblog is reporting.

The newest generation of the Volkswagen Golf-sized V40 wagon is being built with the U.S. in mind, Volvo senior vice president Alan Visser told media in the Netherlands. The earliest it could reach the United States would be 2017.

Visser also said the XC40, a compact crossover based on the V40 Cross Country, would make its way to the States shortly after the V40.

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Audi will release a sedan version of its uber-A4 sometime next year, Autocar is reporting.

Audi has already confirmed that the RS4 would be released as a wagon because “that is what people expect from the RS4,” head of Audi’s Quattro Heinz Hollerweger told Car and Driver this month.

That’s on top of speculation that the RS4 could come to the States and China as a Sportback, similar to the RS7 already on sale. And, of course, we could always get the RS5 like we did last time.

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The crown mother of Audi’s sport compacts may have life in the U.S. after all, Car and Driver is reporting.

According to Audi boss Heinz Hollerweger, the RS4 will sport a boosted six-cylinder engine instead of a naturally aspirated eight, and will pack more than 420 horsepower under the hood.

Hollerweger told Car and Driver that the RS4 would likely launch as a wagon in Europe, but if it came stateside that may change — or not. “The U.S. is changing, and there is more demand there (for wagons), so maybe that will change,” Hollerweger said.

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Since we had some rusty Junkyard Finds recently and I just spent a couple of days driving around San Francisco looking at ocean-salt horror-story cars, let’s continue with the Toyota Rust theme and check out this frighteningly oxidized San Francisco Cressida. (Read More…)

This, my friends, is the Golf SportWagen TDI (Sportwagon in Canada) currently taking residence in my driveway this week. It’s a brilliant little car, even if it isn’t manual, brown, or all-wheel drive.

Even though it’s wonderfully good – the DSG is sharp and smooth, the ride is firm yet svelte, and the torque, oh the torque! – I still wouldn’t buy one.

This past week, I’ve been inundated with different versions of a similar question: are there any modern vehicles I’d actually buy? This is opening up Pandora’s Box and finding a can of worms inside.

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The latest sales numbers from April are a tale of two cars: one with a bodystyle we praise and another sporting a shape we denounce without impunity – the VW Golf SportWagen and Porsche Macan.

The long-roof Golf took nine days on average to find a buyer. The Macan is at 11 days.

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Volvo may not have invented the wagon but no company has as much dedication to the practical cargo hauler as the Swedish brand. With the new V60 Cross Country they have expanded to six wagons world-wide (V40, V40 Cross Country, V60, V60 Cross Country, V70 and XC70). Wagon fans sad that Volvo isn’t bringing their smaller boxes to the USA may be relieved to know the V60 Cross Country is not replacing the V60. This means that for the first time in a long time, we have access to three Swedish wagons on our shores.

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The Saab 96 (and its station-wagon sibling, the 95) is one of those iconic cars that just about everybody claims to love, but few are willing to rescue. Most of the 96s in the country passed through the junkyard gates and into the recycled-metal continuum a couple of decades back, with only the nicest examples deemed worthy of saving, but a few have hung on in side yards and cornfields long enough to show up in wrecking yards now. We saw this ’68 sedan in California last year, and now there’s this ’68 wagon in Denver. (Read More…)

The traditional full-size Detroit station wagon was in trouble by the end of the 1980s, thanks to the rise of the minivan. Increasingly car-like SUVs would kick the other leg out from under big rear-drive wagon sales during the 1990s, and so this great big GM B-platform wagon is one of the last of its type. Look, it’s even a woodie! (Read More…)

So, let me be clear: I have a very good, brand new car. I have no real need for a second car, no place to park a second car and no desire to take on a project. But god damn it, I want this.

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