Originally published at: All you need to know about 1983's Wagon Queen Family Truckster | Boing Boing
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The Truckster was a pitch perfect satire of what a certain demographic of people drove at the time. Our family had the ‘77 lime-green-and-woody Ford LTD.
The pictures don’t do the size of this car justice- it was huge. My mom hated parking the damn thing and always drove small cars after that. Never again, she swore.
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The 1969-72-ish Ford Country Squire was super popular with parents in my hood, or someone at the local Ford dealer ordered a bunch in green and blew them out cheap.
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Mom drove a '69 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser with wood panels, the little hump window and the rear seat that faced backwards. Seat belts??? Ha Ha Ha!!
It was totaled in an accident when a kid slammed into her at a stoplight at 60+ mph. The front end was crumpled into the car in front while the rear tailgate barely had a dent in it.
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Yep.
We had a 1975 Country Squire. Ours was forest green - with matching vinyl seats - with woody sides.
My parents bought it before we moved back to CA from a short stint in FLA (thank god for that). I have a feeling my dad was sad about selling his white '69 Cutlass before we came home.
Must have been, because he bought another one - in green - after we got settled.
He had that for quite a while, I took my drivers test in the early 80’s in it.
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Yeah, I took a driver’s test in a 1980 Caprice Classic Estate Wagon. Twice.
That thing was a monster.
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For some reasons, old wagons make me think of this album…
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Station wagons disappeared in the 1980s because of fuel economy regulations rather than changing consumer tastes as the video implies. Wagons count as passenger cars whereas minivans and SUVs count as “light trucks” which don’t have meet the tougher mileage standards. Early minivans and SUVs (like the Plymouth Voyager and Jeep Cherokee) even had the same ugly faux-wood panelling as the Wagon Queen.
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Man, we grew up on station wagons. We had this really nice green Buick (I can’t remember the year… wanna say like an 82 or something), until I goofed up driving. Stupid rookie error where I pulled into the right lane of a two lane road, when someone who was in the left lane, changed lanes into the right lane as I was pulling out. Dumb dumb dumb. Wait until both lanes are clear. 
After that we had a 78 88 Olds wagon with faux wood paneling for awhile. I liked that car, it was a beast (which is what I named it after the X-Men’s Beast). It had a window that could roll down in the back remotely, and I joked that if the zombies come, we could mount a machine gun in the back. It also had this secret panel in the back for smuggling, like the Millennium Falcon.
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It’s really unfortunate that wagons are not that popular in the US.
They are in Europe (they call them “estate” cars) and all the big manufactures make them.
Some are sold in the US, with Volvo being the most common. Audi started selling the RS6 in the US, but that’s a ridiculously expensive vehicle. Mercedes and BMW all have wagon variants of their sedan models for the most part - just not here much if at all. I think you can get an E series wagon, but you have to special order it or something. VW stopped selling their wagons AND the regular Golf here. Though you can buy a GTI or GolfR - which are pretty much just small wagons.
Having a hatch rather than a trunk is awesome.
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… Heh. I remember burning a finger on the exhaust pipe on the one our family had when I was a wee kitten. (and IIRC, mother said the thing was in the shop more often than it was on the road- it had to have been made either during a UAW strike, just before/after a strike, or on Monday/Friday. 
) I don’t remember what color it was, but it wasn’t green.
We did have a two-tone green '79 Impala that ultimately ended up as a literal rust bucket that needed more work than it’s scrap value.
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Both can be true and it’s always more complicated than one thing.
People like SUVs because of the high driving position. People like Minivans because of the sliding doors for loading sporting gear and that you can still haul a 4x8 sheet in them. Tastes and laws changed.
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They eventually even wised up and added sliding doors to both sides of the vehicle.
I dimly recall riding in the rear-facing back seat of a station wagon, but I can’t remember if it belonged to our family or a friend’s. Our family was definitely more of a mini-van and SUV family.
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That took a lot of engineering, which is why it didn’t happen for a while. Having a hole that big on both sides weakens the structure considerably and they couldn’t pass crash tests. Also sliding doors are really sensitive to misalignment of the tracks so you have to make sure the structure can’t flex at all or the doors will stop working over time. Eventually they figured all that engineering out though.
For the same reasons, when they added rear suicide doors to king cab trucks, for a few years it was only on one side.
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There are times, like this past June when we loaded three adults and all our kink gear into my Ford Focus for a week long event, that I’d really like to have a station wagon. I don’t care for SUVs at all, so the replacement vehicles just aren’t an option for me. (A crossover might be nice, however.)
My mom had a Ford Pinto station wagon, made after Ford started installing proper gas tank protection. I actually kind of miss that one and have fond memories of laying in the back of it with a friend as we were returning home from some day trip or another. I didn’t realize until much later that we were cuddling, but I think I know the source of the nostalgia!
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